AI-drafted condition reports: what Queensland tenancy law still asks

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Kooky

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

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A condition report is the least glamorous document in a Queensland tenancy and one of the most consequential. It is written room by room at the start, written again at the end, and the difference between the two versions is what a bond claim is argued over. For a property manager with a full rent roll it is also slow work: walk the house, look at every wall and fitting, write a line for each.

That makes it an obvious candidate for drafting software. Some of it proposes a sentence from a photograph. Some of it turns a manager's spoken remarks into typed comments. This guide does not review those products. It sets out what the Residential Tenancies Authority (RTA) says the law requires of an entry condition report, an exit condition report and a routine inspection, how the RTA describes photos and video as evidence, and what follows when part of the wording was proposed by a machine. The short answer is that the forms, the deadlines and the signatures do not change, and neither does the person who answers for them.

Periods as stated on the RTA's entry condition report and exit condition report pages, read for this guide.

Two forms and the months between them

In a general tenancy the entry document is the Entry condition report, Form 1a, and the exit document is the Exit condition report, Form 14a. The RTA publishes separate versions for other kinds of renting: Form 1b for moveable dwellings and sites, and Form R1 for rooming accommodation. This guide stays with general tenancies, which is where most houses and units sit.

The two forms are designed to be read side by side. The RTA explains that the exit report is compared with the entry report to decide whether the property is in the same condition as when the tenant moved in, apart from fair wear and tear. Everything that happens to the wording at the start therefore matters twice: once when the tenant reads it in the first week, and again, possibly years later, when somebody lays the two reports next to each other.

Between them sit the routine inspections, which have their own rules on frequency and notice. They are not part of the condition report, but they produce a third stream of notes and photographs about the same rooms. A manager who uses drafting software for one of these documents is likely to be offered it for the others, which is a good reason to look at them together.

Entry: the manager or owner writes Form 1a first

The RTA's wording on the entry report is direct. The property manager or owner must prepare the report, sign it and give a copy to the tenant at the start of the tenancy, and the RTA adds that it is an offence not to do so. The order matters. The lessor's side goes first and commits itself in writing before the tenant has said anything.

Three duties are packed into that sentence, and none of them is about how the words were produced. To prepare the report is to produce a description of the premises. To sign it is to adopt that description. To give the tenant a copy at the start is to do both in time for the tenant's own inspection. A sentence proposed by software becomes the manager's sentence at the moment of signature, exactly as a sentence typed by an assistant or copied from the previous tenancy's report does.

The RTA's form page adds two practical points. Photographs and video can support what is written on the form, and extra pages should be added if there is not enough room. The word to notice is "support". On the RTA's description the written form is the report, and images stand behind it. A folder of several hundred photographs without a completed form is not what the page describes.

The tenant's seven days

Once the tenant has the report, a clock starts. According to the RTA, the tenant must return the signed and completed report within 7 days after the later of two days: the day they occupied the premises, or the day they were given a copy of the report. A tenant who receives the form at key handover but does not move in until the following week therefore counts from the day of moving in.

Those seven days are the tenant's chance to disagree in writing. The RTA says that a tenant who disagrees with the condition of the premises as described should talk to the property manager or owner. It also states the consequence of silence: if the tenant does not complete and return the report, that means they agree with the manager's or owner's description of the property. The RTA notes as well that failing to complete the report is an offence.

The third deadline belongs to the lessor's side again. The property manager or owner must send a copy of the signed and completed report back to the tenant within 14 days, so that both sides hold the same final version.

The silence rule is the one that gives machine-drafted wording its weight. If a proposed sentence says a wall is unmarked when it is not, and the tenant does not catch it within the period, the RTA's description is that the tenant has agreed with it. The error then sits in the record in the lessor's favour at the start and, as the exit comparison shows, can turn against whoever relies on it later.

Exit: Form 14a begins with the tenant

At the other end of the tenancy the roles reverse, and this is the detail most often missed in talk about automation. On the RTA's account, the tenant removes their belongings, cleans the property thoroughly, completes an Exit condition report and submits it to the property manager or owner when returning the keys. The first description of the property at exit is the tenant's.

The manager's part comes second. The RTA says the property manager or owner reviews the tenant's notes at the vacate inspection, makes any additional comments and signs. A completed copy of the report must then be sent to the tenant at their new address within three business days.

Two further statements on the same page set the standard and the paper trail. The tenant is to return the property in the same condition it was in at the start of the tenancy, less fair wear and tear. And the property manager or owner must keep a copy of the signed report for at least one year after the tenancy ends.

Software on the manager's side therefore works on the review, not on the report from a blank page. The RTA's sequence assumes that the manager reads what the tenant wrote and responds to it. A tool that generates a fresh room-by-room description at the vacate inspection may be a useful note-taking aid, but the task the RTA describes is narrower: look at the tenant's notes, add comments where the manager sees something different, and sign.

Routine inspections: once every three months, seven days' notice

Routine inspections have two rules that the RTA states in plain numbers. In a general tenancy they cannot be carried out more than once every 3 months, unless the tenant agrees in writing. And the tenant must be given a minimum of 7 days' notice of the entry, using an Entry notice, Form 9.

The RTA also describes how the time of entry may be expressed. It can be a specific time, or the manager or owner can give a two-hour window, and the RTA's own example is entry between 9 and 11am. Rooming accommodation runs on different figures: a minimum of 48 hours' notice for entry to residents' rooms, given on Form R9, while entry to common areas can happen at any reasonable time.

The purpose is stated just as briefly. Inspections, the RTA says, are carried out to ensure the property is well cared for by the tenant and to check whether there are any repair, maintenance or health and safety issues. That purpose is narrower than a condition report's. A routine inspection looks for care and for problems; it is not a second entry report.

One point from the reading for this guide belongs here. The RTA page on routine inspections sets out frequency, notice and purpose. It does not set out a numbered form for the record a manager writes after a routine inspection, in the way Form 1a and Form 14a exist for entry and exit. On that reading, the note an agency writes after a routine inspection is the agency's own document, with no official layout to hold it to, so the agency's own standards carry the weight.

Automation does not shorten any of these periods. A report that can be drafted in minutes does not make a second inspection in the same three months lawful, and an entry notice produced by a scheduling system is still a Form 9 that must reach the tenant at least seven days ahead.

Photos and video as evidence in a bond dispute

The RTA ties the condition report to dispute resolution in one sentence: the report, and any photos or video, can be used as evidence by the Queensland Civil and Administrative Tribunal (QCAT) if there is a dispute. On the exit side it goes a step further and recommends taking photos as further evidence.

There is also a duty to share. The RTA states that not providing supporting evidence to a tenant or resident when a claim or dispute is made against a bond is an offence. The practical meaning for an agency is that whatever stands behind a claim, including the reports and the images, has to be something that can be handed over, in a form the other side can read.

That changes how a drafted report should be thought about. Each sentence in it is a statement that may be put in front of a tribunal next to the photograph it was drawn from, and next to the tenant's own photographs of the same room. Where the sentence and the image disagree, the manager who signed the report is the person asked to explain the difference.

Where drafting software enters the process

Two kinds of tool are discussed in this part of the trade. Photo-to-text drafting means that a comment is proposed from an image of the room. Voice-to-text drafting means that the manager speaks while walking through and the words appear as typed comments. Those are descriptions of what the tools are offered to do. The research for this guide did not find an established press report or a Real Estate Institute of Queensland article that tests how accurately any such product performs on a Queensland rental, so nothing is claimed here about how well they work, and no product is named.

What can be said with confidence is where they touch the legal process. Neither kind of tool appears in the RTA's description of any step. The RTA speaks of a property manager or owner who prepares, signs, gives, reviews, comments and sends, and of a tenant who completes, signs, returns and submits. Every verb has a person attached to it.

The two kinds of tool also sit differently against that description. With voice-to-text, the observation is the manager's own: a person stood in the room, looked and spoke. The software's job is transcription, and the risk is a misheard word. With photo-to-text, the proposed observation comes from the image. The person who took the photograph may not be the person who signs, and a photograph records only what was in the frame, under the light and from the angle at which it was taken.

The RTA pages read for this guide do not address drafting software at all. They neither prohibit it nor approve it. That silence leaves the ordinary position in place: the report is the document of the person who signs it.

What Queensland's courts say about machine-written text

A Queensland publication does speak to the reliability of generated text, and it reaches the tribunal where bond disputes are heard. The guidelines on generative artificial intelligence issued by Queensland's courts for people who are not lawyers, revised on 15 September 2025, name QCAT among the courts and tribunals they apply to.

The guidelines explain that tools built on large language models work by predicting the most probable next word, and that what they produce is the most likely combination of words. They add that such tools have no intrinsic understanding of what their output means and no conception of truth, and that they can get facts wrong. On summaries, they say that any such use needs to be carefully reviewed to make sure the result carries the same meaning as the original.

Two of the guidelines' instructions translate directly to a rental file. The first is about responsibility: a person is responsible for ensuring that all information they rely on or provide to the court or tribunal is accurate, and must check anything obtained from a chatbot before using it in proceedings. The second is about what goes in: private or confidential information is not to be entered into a generative AI chatbot, because some tools retain what is typed and the material could be repeated to other users.

The guidelines were written about chatbots and court documents, not about inspection software, and it would stretch them to say they regulate a condition report. Their relevance is narrower and still useful. If a condition report drafted with software is later relied on at QCAT, the tribunal's published position is that accuracy is the responsibility of the person relying on it.

An illustration: one bedroom, two descriptions

The following example is illustrative. The tenancy, the dates and the wording are invented to show how the periods and the checks fit together, and it describes no real product or dispute.

A tenant is given a signed Form 1a at key handover on Friday 3 July 2026 and moves in on Monday 6 July. The later of those two days is 6 July, so the seven days run from then and end on Monday 13 July. The tenant returns the report on Friday 10 July, and the manager sends back a copy of the completed version the following Wednesday, 15 July, well inside the 14 days.

The entry report for the second bedroom was drafted from two photographs taken from the doorway. The proposed comment read "Carpet clean, no marks. Walls freshly painted." The manager signed it without returning to the room. In the first week the tenant, kneeling to plug in a lamp, finds a faded stain on the carpet under the window, hidden in the photographs by the angle and the afternoon glare, and writes it on the form.

In this version of events the system worked, because the tenant used the seven days. Had the tenant returned nothing, the unchecked sentence would have stood as the agreed description, and the stain would have surfaced at the vacate inspection as an apparent change. The manager would then be relying on a sentence that the manager's own entry photographs, looked at closely, might not bear out.

Checks before a drafted report is signed

None of the following is prescribed by the RTA. They are the checks that follow from what the RTA does prescribe: a person who prepares and signs, a tenant who has seven days, and evidence that must be capable of being handed over.

1. Read every proposed line in the room it describes, or against the manager's own notes from that room, before signing.
2. Treat a comment proposed from a photograph as a description of the photograph until someone has confirmed it against the room.
3. Record defects in specific terms, with their position, so the entry and exit versions can be compared line by line.
4. Keep each photograph with the line it supports, dated, so that the image and the sentence can be produced together.
5. At exit, begin from the tenant's Form 14a, as the RTA's sequence requires, and add comments to it.
6. Keep the signed exit report for at least one year after the tenancy ends, the minimum the RTA states, in a form that survives a change of software.

For tenants the same logic runs the other way. The entry report deserves a careful reading in the first week whoever or whatever wrote it, and the RTA's recommendation to take photographs applies to both sides. A tenant's dated images of a room are evidence in the same sense as the manager's.

What the published rules leave open

Several questions that practitioners ask have no answer in the pages read for this guide. The RTA's material does not say whether a report should disclose that software proposed its wording. It does not set a standard for the quality or number of photographs. It does not deal with where an agency's software stores images of the inside of a tenant's home, a matter that belongs to privacy law and to the agency's own arrangements with its supplier.

Those gaps are a reason for care in what is claimed on either side. An agency cannot point to an RTA approval of its drafting method, because none was found. A tenant cannot point to an RTA rule against machine-drafted wording, because none was found either. What both can point to is the short list of duties, the 7 days, the 14 days, the three business days and the one year, and the plain statement that the report and its images can be used as evidence.

Faster drafting changes how long a report takes to write. It changes nothing about who signed it or what it has to prove.

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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