Why you won't see a price guide on a Queensland auction.

If you've spent any time looking at homes on the Sunshine Coast, you've probably hit the same wall more than once. You find a property you like, it's heading to auction, and where the price should be there's either nothing at all or a vague bracket the website has applied. You ask the agent. The agent won't tell you. It feels evasive.

It isn't. In Queensland, it's the law.

I get asked about this constantly — by buyers who assume the agent is playing games, and by sellers who don't realise the rules they'll be working under once they choose auction. So here's the plain version of how it actually works, and how to read a no-price campaign without losing your mind.

When a residential property in Queensland is offered for sale by auction, the agent and the auctioneer are not permitted to disclose a price guide. That includes the reserve, and it includes any figure they privately think would be enough to buy the place. This sits in the Property Occupations Act 2014 (sections 214 and 216), and it isn't a soft guideline — the maximum penalty attached to it runs to hundreds of penalty units. An agent who quietly slips you a number is breaking the law, not doing you a favour.

So when a Sunshine Coast agent tells you they can't give you a price, they're being accurate, not cagey.

Here's the part that confuses people most. You'll often still see a property sorted into a price band on realestate.com.au or Domain — say, the $1m–$1.2m bracket — even on an auction listing with no stated price.

That bracket is a website function, not a steer from the agent. The portals need every listing to live somewhere in their search filters, so a property going to auction gets slotted into a range for the site to work. Under the Queensland regulations, the listing has to carry a note making exactly that point clear: the property is going to auction (or is being sold without a price), no price guide can be provided, and any bracket you see is the website's own filtering rather than a signal of value.

In other words, don't anchor to it. I've watched buyers talk themselves out of a home because the portal filed it in a band that turned out to have nothing to do with where it sold — and watched others assume a band was a ceiling when it wasn't.

If you've bought or sold interstate, this will feel foreign. In New South Wales and Victoria, agents are generally expected to publish a price guide for auctions, and there are rules about keeping that guide honest. Queensland took the opposite path: rather than regulate the accuracy of a guide, it removed the guide altogether for auction campaigns.

You can argue the merits either way. The intention is to stop the old practice of quoting an artificially low number to draw a crowd, then watching the property sell well above it — "underquoting," as it's known down south. Queensland's answer is simply that no one gets a number, so no one gets misled by one. The trade-off is the uncertainty you feel as a buyer staring at a listing with no figure on it.

The absence of a guide doesn't mean the absence of information. It means you have to do the work the guide would otherwise have done for you.

If you choose to take your Sunshine Coast home to auction, understand what you're signing up for: a campaign that markets the property hard while staying silent on price. That works beautifully for some homes — distinctive properties, tightly held streets, anything where genuine competition is likely and you want the market to set the number rather than you. It works less well where the likely buyer pool is narrow or where a clear asking price would do a better job of drawing the right person in.

You won't get a price guide on a Queensland auction because the law doesn't allow one. The bracket on the listing is the website talking, not the agent. And the way through — as a buyer or a seller — is to lean on evidence you can actually verify: comparable sales, campaign signals, and a number you've decided on for yourself.

If you're weighing up a property that's heading to auction, or trying to work out whether auction is the right path for your own home, we're always happy to look at the comparable sales and walk through the realistic picture with you. No pressure. Just perspective.