ACCC accepts REA undertaking: agencies need not list every property

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Kooky

Builder of Shaka, the payment router that pays every agent their commission on closing date.

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The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has accepted a court-enforceable undertaking from REA Group under which the owner of realestate.com.au will not require or incentivise real estate agencies to list all or most of their properties on the site. The regulator announced the outcome in a media release dated 14 September 2026, and REA told the ASX the same day.

The commitment runs for three years, the ACCC says. The regulator's release records that REA acknowledged the ACCC's concerns that its conduct may have breached competition law; it does not record an admission that it did, and the company's own statement, as carried by the industry title Elite Agent, stresses that no legal proceedings were issued and no wrongdoing was found. For Queensland sellers and landlords the change is indirect but real: the agent they appoint is no longer bound, by the agency's contract with the country's largest portal, to place every listing there or to buy a set level of advertising for most of them.

Term from the ACCC media release of 14 September 2026. The 25 per cent and 24 month terms are as reported the same day by Elite Agent and Online Marketplaces and are not in the release.

What the ACCC was looking at

The investigation concerned the wording of REA's contracts with agencies, not the prices on its rate card. The ACCC's release puts the concern under section 45 of the Competition and Consumer Act, the provision dealing with anticompetitive agreements, and says the regulator had heard from many real estate agents about what REA's contracts required of them. REA's announcement to the ASX refers back to an earlier one it made on 27 May 2025.

Two kinds of clause were at issue, the release says: clauses requiring an agency to list all of its properties on realestate.com.au, and clauses requiring or incentivising listings with premium features. The trade press adds dates the release does not give. Online Marketplaces reports that standard contracts issued between 2013 and 2025 carried the first kind, and Elite Agent describes most REA contracts as having required every property for sale or lease to be listed there.

The second kind sat in sponsorship agreements, the commercial deals under which an agency or a network receives benefits from the portal. Since at least 2019, those agreements required the agency to list its properties at higher advertising tiers, Online Marketplaces reports. Agencies bound by these terms could still advertise on other sites as well.

That last point explains the theory of harm. Nothing stopped an agency from also listing on a rival portal. But an agency already committed to placing every property on one site, and most of them at a premium tier, has less reason and less of its client's budget left to try another. The ACCC's stated concern was that the terms limited customers' choices and hindered the effectiveness of competitors.

What REA has agreed to change

The ACCC's release states the core of it in two parts: REA will not require or incentivise agencies to list all or most of their properties on realestate.com.au, and it will give agents greater flexibility in how their vendor and landlord clients list. REA's ASX announcement describes the same two things, the second as more room for agents to downgrade listings to lower tiers. The release says the full text is published on the ACCC's website. The finer terms below come from the trade press and are attributed accordingly.

• Sponsorship agreements will no longer oblige an agency to list or upgrade the majority of its properties at a specified tier.
• Agencies will be able to downgrade at least 25 per cent of their eligible listings to lower tiers, Elite Agent and Online Marketplaces report.
• REA will set up a competition law compliance program.
• REA will re-engage with the ACCC after 24 months so that progress can be reviewed.

Mediaweek summarised the outcome as REA dropping its contract restrictions on realestate.com.au.

ACCC chair Gina Cass-Gottlieb welcomed the result. "REA's undertaking resolves this issue in a timely manner and addresses our concerns," she said in the release, which also calls the outcome a win for competition in the real estate listing market.

The ACCC and REA both describe the undertaking as court-enforceable, meaning the regulator can ask a court to enforce it if it is not honoured. Neither the release nor the ASX announcement names the section of the Act it was given under, and neither gives the date from which the three years run. The detail of how "eligible listings" is defined, and how existing contracts are treated as opposed to new ones, is in the document itself.

REA's position

REA has not accepted that its contracts were unlawful. The furthest the ACCC's release goes is that the company acknowledged the regulator's concerns that the conduct may have been a breach.

"We're pleased to have reached a resolution with the ACCC," the company said in the statement carried by Elite Agent, which also stressed that the regulator had not issued legal proceedings and that there had been no finding of legal wrongdoing.

That is consistent with what an undertaking is. A regulator that has concerns and a company that has not conceded them can end the matter by agreement, with the company promising particular conduct for a fixed period and a court able to hold it to the promise. The alternative is litigation, in which the regulator would have to prove its case. An undertaking delivers the change in conduct sooner, and leaves the legal question unanswered.

Why contract terms matter in a two-portal market

The size of the company gives the terms their weight. The ACCC's release describes realestate.com.au as Australia's largest online residential real estate listing portal. In full-year results lodged with the ASX on 6 August 2026, REA reported an average of 146.4 million monthly visits to the site, which it said was 104.5 million more than its nearest competitor. Residential revenue in Australia was $1,290 million for the year to 30 June 2026.

Those results also showed how the business has grown. National listings of homes for sale were flat over the year while the revenue earned per listing rose 13 per cent, helped by a 7 per cent average price rise on the top Premiere+ tier and by what sellers chose to buy. A clause committing an agency to place most of its listings at a higher tier bears directly on that second driver.

The nearest competitor is Domain. The two portals are separately in dispute in the Federal Court, where Domain has filed a claim over REA's marketing statements about buyers and REA has cross-claimed over Domain's, the Australian Associated Press reported on 2 July 2026. The undertaking does not touch that case, which is a private action between competitors and not a regulatory matter.

For a second portal, or a new entrant, the practical barrier has always been supply. Buyers go where the listings are, and a site cannot attract buyers without stock. Terms that kept every listing on the incumbent did not block a rival from receiving the same listing, but they made it unlikely that a rival could offer stock the incumbent did not have, and they fixed a large share of each marketing budget before a competitor could bid for it.

What changes for Queensland sellers and landlords

A seller in Queensland does not have a contract with a portal. The seller appoints an agent, and the appointment form sets out the marketing the seller authorises and will pay for. The portal listing, and the tier it is bought at, is one line in that budget, chosen on the agent's recommendation.

Until now that recommendation was made inside the limits of the agency's own agreement with REA. Where the agreement required all listings on the site, and a sponsorship deal required most at a given tier, the agent's room to suggest something different was narrow, whatever the property.

Under the undertaking, REA cannot require or incentivise an agency to list all or most of its properties, and on the trade press account agencies gain the right to move at least a quarter of eligible listings to a lower tier. Elite Agent's reading is that agents can now discuss different portals and different fees with their clients without a mandatory platform restriction sitting behind the conversation.

The regulator made the same point to the public. In the release, Ms Cass-Gottlieb encouraged vendors and landlords to discuss the available listing options with their agents.

Landlords are included because the ACCC's release speaks of vendor and landlord clients alike, and Elite Agent describes the earlier contracts as covering properties for lease as well as for sale. The same question of where a listing appears now has more than one permitted answer for a rental as for a sale.

Whether choices actually change is a separate matter. An agent may still judge that the largest audience is worth the dearest listing for a given home, and many sellers will agree. The undertaking removes an obligation. It does not create a preference.

What happens over the three years

The terms set two markers, one from the regulator and one from the trade press. The ACCC gives the term as three years. Its release does not state the day the three years begin, so an exact end date cannot be taken from it; if the term runs from acceptance it would reach into September 2029, but that is an inference and the published undertaking is the place to confirm it. The second marker, reported by Elite Agent and Online Marketplaces, is that REA goes back to the ACCC after 24 months for a review of how the changes have worked.

In between, the compliance program is REA's responsibility. The reports do not describe it in detail. Ms Cass-Gottlieb also used the release to say the ACCC will keep giving priority to investigations of this kind of contract.

Three things will show whether the change has practical effect. One is whether agencies use the freedom to downgrade a share of listings, which would appear over time in REA's reported yield. Another is whether rival portals begin to win listings that are not also on realestate.com.au. The last is how agency groups renegotiate sponsorship arrangements now that tier commitments for the majority of listings are off the table.

REA's next set of results will be the first to cover a period under the new terms.

Kooky, from Shaka

Kooky edits Queensland Estate and builds Shaka, the payment router he made for Queensland property professionals. One payment comes in, and every agent, agency and party in the deal receives their signed share on closing date.

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