AI suburb forecasts and growth scores: what an agent may pass on

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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 seller sits at the kitchen table with an agent's appraisal folder. Somewhere after the photographs of recent sales comes a suburb report, with a "growth score" out of a hundred and a line predicting where the local median will be in three years. A buyer scrolling through listings on the other side of town sees the same kind of page attached to an investment unit, with a projected capital gain printed in bold.

Neither page was written by a person who walked the street. Both were generated by software, and both do something that Queensland property law treats with great care: they put a number on price. The difference from an ordinary appraisal is the direction the number faces. A list of comparable sales looks backwards, at contracts that were signed. A suburb forecast looks forwards, at sales that have not happened.

This guide is about what happens when that forward-looking number enters a Queensland property dealing. It sets out what a machine-generated forecast or score is as a document, what the Office of Fair Trading says an agent selling by auction must hand a seller before price is discussed, why the auction rules leave very little room for a predicted figure, what the consumer law asks of anyone who makes a claim about the future, what the Queensland Government says about property promoters who sell on promised growth, and how far two published forecasts for Brisbane sat from each other in 2026. It names no product and makes no forecast of its own.

Comparative market analysis requirements as stated on the Office of Fair Trading page "Auctioning a property", last updated 1 July 2026.

What a suburb forecast actually is

Strip away the layout and a machine-made suburb report makes one of three kinds of statement. The first is a description of the past: how many homes sold, at what median, over what period. The second is a ranking or score, a single figure that places the suburb above or below others on some scale of expected performance. The third is a prediction in dollars or per cent: the median in a given year, or the growth expected between now and then.

Only the first kind can be checked today against a record. The other two are opinions about a future market, however many sale records were used to form them. That is true whether the opinion comes from an economist, an agent with thirty years in the suburb or a statistical model, and it matters for everything that follows, because both Queensland's property rules and the national consumer law draw their lines around what is said, to whom and on what basis. Neither asks first whether a human or a program produced it.

A forecast is also a different thing from the online estimate of what one home would fetch today. That estimate has its own guide in this magazine's proptech pages. It answers the question "what is this property worth now?" and can be tested, within weeks, against an actual sale. A suburb forecast answers "what will homes here be worth later?" and cannot be tested until later arrives. The first is a measurement with an error margin. The second is a prediction.

The evidence Queensland asks for on price

Queensland does not leave price talk between an agent and a seller to instinct. The Office of Fair Trading's page on auctioning a property, last updated on 1 July 2026, sets out what must happen before a reserve price is recommended. The auctioneer may recommend a reserve only after giving the seller a comparative market analysis, and the seller must have that document before deciding the figure.

The page defines the analysis tightly. It compares the property with at least three others that are of similar standard or condition, that sold within 5 kilometres of it, and that sold in the last 6 months. Where three such sales cannot be found, the auctioneer must give the seller written advice about the market and explain in writing how the value was arrived at.

The law's chosen evidence for a conversation about price is the completed transaction, and the fallback, when completed transactions are scarce, is a written explanation of method that the seller can read and question.

A growth score sits outside that definition on each count. It is not a sale. It describes a suburb, and often a whole postcode, where the analysis must describe homes of similar standard. It looks ahead where the analysis looks back six months at most. A suburb report may be attached to an appraisal as background, but on the rules as the Office of Fair Trading states them it does not stand in for the comparative market analysis, and three sold properties still have to be on the page.

How an asking price is then chosen for a private treaty sale, and what the appointment form records, is the subject of a separate guide in the selling pages and is not repeated here.

Where a forecast fits in an appraisal

For the seller, the practical question is how much weight the forward-looking page deserves next to the backward-looking one. The two answer different questions. Comparable sales say what buyers paid last month for homes like this one. A forecast says what a model expects buyers to pay in future for homes in general across the suburb.

The gap between those two matters most when the forecast is optimistic and the recent sales are not. Nothing in the Office of Fair Trading's description of the comparative market analysis invites a projected figure into it.

The same page gives the seller a second protection where the sale is by auction. The auctioneer must ask whether the seller has set a reserve. If the seller chooses not to set one, the auctioneer must advise in writing that the seller will be obliged to accept the highest bid. The page puts the penalty for failing to do so at $34,540. A reserve is the seller's own decision, made with the comparable sales in hand, and a suburb forecast does not alter who makes it.

For an agent, the useful discipline is to label each page for what it is: sales as evidence, a score as somebody's model, a projected median as a prediction with assumptions behind it.

Auctions: no price guide, and no estimate

According to the Office of Fair Trading, an auctioneer must not publish a price guide to potential bidders. The page gives the reasoning: a guide can influence the eventual sale price, whether that is intended or not, and it can mislead consumers if the final price turns out significantly higher. The page also says the auctioneer must not identify the reserve or give an estimate of the property's value.

Two narrow openings exist. A comparative market analysis may be shared with a bidder, but only if the seller agrees in writing. And a price or price range may be given to an electronic listing provider solely so that the website can sort its results, on condition that the listing carries a set statement: "This property is being sold by auction or without a price and therefore a price guide cannot be provided." The listing provider, for its part, must not disclose the bracket.

Read against those rules, a report that tells a bidder what a particular auction property is predicted to sell for is an estimate of value by another name. A report that speaks only about the suburb is one step removed, but the closer its figures come to implying a price for the home being auctioned, the nearer it moves to the same line. The buyer who wants numbers before an auction is pointed by the rules towards the sales themselves: either the seller consents in writing to the analysis being shared, or the buyer assembles recent sales independently.

A forecast is a claim about the future

Outside the auction rules, the law that governs what an agent tells a buyer about growth is the Australian Consumer Law. The Office of Fair Trading's property advertising page, last updated on 1 July 2026, puts the starting point in one line: licensed property agents cannot engage in misleading or deceptive conduct when advertising property for sale.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission's page on false or misleading claims, last modified on 28 June 2026, explains what that standard means in general terms. Claims must be true, accurate and based on reasonable grounds, and a business must be able to prove any claim it advertises. On predictions specifically, the commission says a business that makes a claim about the future must have reasonable grounds for it at the time the claim is made.

That last phrase carries the weight. The test is not whether the suburb in fact grows. It is whether, on the day the words were spoken or printed, there was a proper basis for them. A forecast that happens to come true does not show the grounds were sound, and one that misses does not show they were absent. What can be examined afterwards is what the person relying on the forecast knew about how it was made.

Several other points on the commission's page bear directly on a suburb report used in a sale.

Intention is irrelevant. The page states that it makes no difference whether a business intends to mislead. An agent who repeats a growth figure in good faith is in the same position, as far as the conduct goes, as one who knew it was weak.

The overall impression counts. The commission says the general impression created must be accurate and that fine print must not conflict with the main message. A bold projected gain at the top of a page, with a line of small type at the foot saying the figures are indicative only, is the pattern that passage describes.

Silence can mislead. The page says a failure to disclose information can be misleading where relevant details are left out. A forecast shown without its date, without the area it covers or without the type of dwelling it was built on leaves out the details a buyer would need to weigh it.

Vague enthusiasm is treated differently. Wildly exaggerated and vague claims are generally not considered misleading, the commission says. "A suburb with a bright future" is talk. A line such as "forecast to grow 8 per cent a year", to take an invented example, is a specific claim, and specific claims are the ones that need grounds.

Whose grounds are they?

The commission's requirement that a business be able to prove its claims raises an awkward question for anyone forwarding a machine-made report: whose proof is it?

A person who writes a forecast knows what went into it. A person who downloads one and attaches it to a listing may know only the result. The comparative market analysis offers a useful contrast. When three sales cannot be found, the Office of Fair Trading requires the auctioneer to explain in writing how the value was reached. The method has to be put into words. A score that arrives without any account of its method cannot be put into words by the person passing it on.

The table below sets side by side what each kind of statement rests on and what the published rules say about it.

The practical line that follows from the commission's wording is between presenting a forecast as someone else's opinion, with its source, date and scope stated, and adopting it as the agent's own statement about what the property or the suburb will do. The first tells the buyer a model exists and what it says. The second is the agent's claim, and the agent's grounds are what would be asked for.

Advertising: when a number becomes bait

The property advertising page deals mainly with the price a home is offered at, and its logic carries over to any number used to draw a buyer in.

The Office of Fair Trading says that where a property is advertised with an "offers over" figure, that figure should be the minimum amount the seller is willing to accept. Advertising a figure the agent knows the seller will not accept is false advertising, and the regulator gives the practice its usual name: giving buyers a false impression about the price a seller will accept is bait advertising. The seller's price comes from the appointment form, the Form 6 under the Property Occupations Act 2014, and the page says it is the agent's responsibility to make sure the seller is aware of the law.

A forecast in a listing does not state what the seller will accept, so it is not bait advertising in that sense. It can, though, do similar work: a projected gain printed beside a price is there to make the price look modest. That is why the consumer law standard applies to it as it does to every other claim in the advertisement. The same page sets out what is at stake under the Australian Consumer Law. For a corporation the maximum penalty is the greatest of $100 million, three times the value of the benefit obtained, or 30 per cent of annual turnover. For an individual it is up to $2.5 million for each breach.

Growth promises and property spruikers

The buyer most exposed to forecasts is the investor, and here the Queensland Government has published its own warning. Its page on property spruikers and investment seminars, last updated on 31 January 2025, describes spruikers as people who give advice and tips on making money by investing in property, or who promote properties for sale in a particular development or area.

The page lists the signs it wants buyers to notice. They include rushing people into decisions or contracts, avoiding questions, playing down the risks of volatile markets such as tourist or mining-dependent areas, understating costs, and claiming government approval without evidence. It warns about promoters who offer only interstate or off-the-plan properties, which are hard for a buyer to inspect or verify, and about success stories that reflect one person's timing and conditions more than a result anyone can count on. It also draws attention to commissions or inducements a promoter may receive from developers, brokers, conveyancers, advisers or lenders.

The government's page does not discuss software, and this guide does not suggest that suburb reports are a spruiker's tool by nature. The point is narrower. The warning signs the page describes are about pressure, omission and undisclosed interest, and a polished forecast cures none of them.

The page's advice is to obtain independent financial and legal advice before entering any contract, especially where the equity in an existing home is at risk, and to take concerns to the Office of Fair Trading with as much information as possible.

The national regulator's consumer site, Moneysmart, frames the investment itself in conditional terms. Its property investment page says a buyer may make money through rent, through an increase in the property's value, or both, and sets against that the ongoing costs, the vacancies and the loan repayments. The word doing the work is "may". The regulator's own description of property investment contains no promised rate of growth.

How far apart two forecasts can sit

The strongest argument for treating a suburb forecast with care does not come from the law. It comes from the forecasts.

On 12 March 2026 the trade publication Australian Property Update reported the housing outlooks of two major banks side by side, under a headline saying the big banks had diverged. According to that report, Commonwealth Bank expected Brisbane home prices to rise 12 per cent over 2026. Westpac expected 7 per cent.

For Brisbane the gap between the two was 5 percentage points, with one bank expecting about 1.7 times the growth the other did. The disagreement did not even run one way: the bank that was more optimistic about Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide was the less optimistic about Sydney and Melbourne. The publication attributed the split to judgment. Commonwealth Bank put more weight on tight supply continuing to push prices, while Westpac held that affordability would become, in words the report quotes, "a more binding limit on growth".

Both of those forecasts were for a whole capital city over a single year. A suburb report attempts something harder: a smaller area, with fewer sales to learn from, often over a longer horizon. If two banks could look at Brisbane and differ by 5 percentage points for the year ahead, a single score for one suburb three years out deserves to be read as one view among several possible views.

It is also worth knowing which measure a forecast is aimed at. Price indexes are built in different ways and can report different movements for the same city in the same month, as this magazine's guide to home price indexes explains. A forecast of "the median" and a forecast of "the index" are predictions of two different things.

Reading a forecast before relying on it

A buyer or seller handed a suburb report does not need to understand the mathematics. Three questions, each drawn from the rules above, do most of the work.

The first question tests scope. A figure for a postcode says little about one street, and a figure for houses says little about a unit in a large complex. The second tests grounds, the word the consumer law itself uses: a forecast made a year ago stood on a market that has since moved, and one that cannot be explained cannot easily be defended by the person presenting it. The third brings the conversation back to the evidence Queensland's rules were written around.

A comparable sale is a fact about last month. A growth score is an opinion about next year. Queensland's price rules are built on the first, and the consumer law asks what stands behind the second.

How any one case would be treated depends on its facts: what was said, in what setting and with what qualifications. A solicitor can advise on a particular dealing.

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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