The body corporate certificate: what a Queensland unit buyer is told

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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 person buying a house in Queensland buys land and a building. A person buying a unit or townhouse buys a lot and, with it, a share in an organisation: the body corporate that owns the common property, insures the building, raises levies and makes rules. The seller of the lot can describe the kitchen. The seller often knows much less about the organisation's finances, and has no power to produce its records alone.

The law's answer is a document the seller does not write. Since 1 August 2025, a seller of a lot in a community titles scheme has had to give the buyer a body corporate certificate before the buyer signs the contract. The body corporate prepares it, on a prescribed form, for a regulated fee and within a regulated time. This guide follows that one document from the request to the buyer's signature: who must issue it, what it has to say, how far each side may rely on it, and what the remedies are when it is missing or mistaken. It covers the rules for existing lots in Queensland and is general information only.

Body Corporate and Community Management Act 1997, section 205, as described by the Queensland Law Society; Queensland Government body corporate fees page, updated 1 July 2026.

Where the certificate sits in seller disclosure

Queensland's seller disclosure scheme, created by the Property Law Act 2023, requires a seller to give the buyer two things before the buyer signs: a disclosure statement on Form 2, and a bundle of prescribed certificates. For a house, the bundle is things like a title search and a survey plan. For a lot in a community titles scheme, the Queensland Law Society's published guidance for practitioners says the prescribed certificates include a body corporate certificate and the community management statement.

The certificate replaced an older document. Before August 2025, a seller of a unit gave the buyer a disclosure statement under section 206 of the Body Corporate and Community Management Act 1997, which the seller signed and which was commonly assembled from information bought from the body corporate. The Law Society's guidance says the new framework replaced those statements with prescribed forms and certificates. The change moved the job of stating the facts from the seller, who was repeating them, to the body corporate, which holds them.

Off-the-plan sales are a separate world. The Law Society's guidance says seller disclosure does not apply to proposed lots, meaning units sold before the scheme is registered, which stay under the disclosure rules written for them in other legislation. Everything in this guide concerns a lot that already exists.

Three forms for three kinds of scheme

The certificate is not a letter in whatever shape the body corporate manager prefers. It is a prescribed form. Form 33 is the body corporate certificate used for most community titles schemes. Form 34 is the version for specified two-lot schemes, the simplest kind of body corporate, typically a duplex. A small number of older developments sit under the Building Units and Group Titles Act 1980 and use that Act's own form.

A prescribed form matters to a buyer because it makes certificates comparable. Every Form 33 asks the same questions in the same order, so a buyer weighing two apartments in different buildings can lay the certificates side by side. It matters to the body corporate because the form defines the task: what must be answered, and therefore what need not be.

Who asks, who answers, how fast

The seller, or the agent or solicitor acting for the seller, makes the request to the body corporate. In most schemes that means the body corporate manager; in a self-managed scheme, the secretary.

The body corporate then works to a statutory clock. Under section 205 of the Act as amended, the Law Society's guidance says, the body corporate must provide the certificate within five business days after receiving the request and the fee. For a seller in a hurry there is a faster lane. The regulation that set the fees also created a priority service under which the certificate is to be given within 24 hours, for an additional fee that is refunded if the deadline is missed.

The order of work follows from the clock. A unit cannot lawfully be put under contract until the certificate is in the buyer's hands, so a seller who waits for an offer before ordering it is asking the buyer to wait up to a week. That is the practical case for ordering the certificate when the property is listed, not when a buyer appears.

What the fee is, and the argument about it

The fee is fixed by regulation and expressed in fee units, which the Government indexes each July. The Body Corporate and Community Management (Body Corporate Certificate Fees) and Other Legislation Amendment Regulation 2025, made on 19 June 2025, set the standard fee at 76.75 fee units, a repeat request for the same lot within three months at 65.24 fee units, and the priority service at a further 27.35 fee units. Proctor, the Law Society's journal, reported the opening dollar amounts at the fee unit value of $1.096 that applied from 1 July 2025.

A seller who wants the certificate within a day therefore pays $117.95 at current rates, the standard $86.95 plus the $31 priority fee. The Queensland Government's fees page adds two points of principle. No GST applies. And no additional costs may be charged on top of the prescribed fee, such as an administration charge.

That second point is the source of a live disagreement. The explanatory notes to the 2025 regulation record that most of the sector told the Government the cost of preparing the new certificate would be broadly comparable to the cost of the documents it replaced. Not everyone found that to be so. A petition tabled in the Queensland Parliament on 9 December 2025, with 69 signatures, said the new certificate requires substantially more detailed work, that management firms cannot recover the extra cost from the seller because the fee is capped, and that the difference is passed to all owners through their levies. It asked that the whole cost fall on the selling owner. The Parliament's record shows the Attorney-General responded on 19 December 2025. The fee structure in force today is the indexed version of the original.

What the certificate must show

The explanatory notes to the fees regulation describe the certificate's content in three groups: general information about owning a lot in a scheme, the financial obligations attached to the lot, and details specific to the lot being sold. The Queensland Government's guidance for buyers, and summaries published by body corporate managers such as Bright and Duggan, fill in the headings.

The levy section carries the most immediate consequence. The Government's guidance warns that a new owner may be liable for contributions the previous owner left unpaid. A certificate that shows arrears lets the two conveyancers deal with them at settlement, so the debt is cleared from the seller's proceeds and does not pass with the keys.

The documents that travel with it

The certificate is one of several scheme documents in the bundle. The community management statement is the scheme's founding document, registered with the titles office. It contains the by-laws in force and the schedules that fix each lot's share of costs and of voting. It is a prescribed certificate in its own right under the disclosure scheme, so a certificate without the statement is an incomplete bundle.

By-laws deserve a note of their own. Bright and Duggan's advice to bodies corporate when the new forms arrived was to make sure the registered by-laws were actually on file, and it observed that some schemes are still operating on community management statements that have not been updated in 25 years or more. A buyer reading the by-laws is reading the registered version. If the committee has been applying a newer set of house rules that were never registered, the registered document is the one the disclosure rests on.

A swimming pool adds a third document. The Law Society's guidance says that where there is a regulated pool, including a shared pool on common property, either a pool safety certificate or a notice that there is no certificate must be given before the buyer signs.

When the body corporate cannot produce one

Not every scheme has a manager with tidy files. The disclosure rules allow a seller to give an explanatory statement in place of the certificate, but only in defined circumstances. The Law Society's guidance sets out two.

The first is that the body corporate does not have the records: they are missing, destroyed or in such disarray that a certificate cannot be prepared. The second concerns schemes with no functioning committee. It applies where there is no committee, and each of several conditions is also met: the scheme is not a specified two-lot scheme, the original owner's control period has ended, the first annual general meeting has been held, no committee was chosen, and no body corporate manager is engaged.

For a seller this means there is no shortcut around a slow body corporate. The certificate has to arrive before a buyer can sign, and the remedy for delay lies with the body corporate, not in the contract.

How far each side can rely on it

Because the seller hands over a document someone else wrote, the law has to say who answers for its contents. Two provisions do that work.

The first is in the body corporate legislation. The Law Society's guidance says a seller may rely on the certificate as conclusive evidence of the matters stated in it, and that the protection is found in section 205(7) of the Act. The guidance adds a practical point for buyers: the protection belongs to the person who obtained the certificate, so a buyer who wants the same footing against the body corporate should obtain a certificate in the buyer's own name before settlement. This is also when the figures matter most, since levies are adjusted between the parties at settlement on the strength of what the body corporate says is owing.

The second is in the Property Law Act 2023. Section 106 is headed "No other remedy if prescribed certificate contains inaccurate information given by body corporate or other entity". Its effect, as the heading indicates, is to confine what a buyer may claim from a seller when the error originated with the body that issued the certificate and not with the seller. A buyer's position in that case is governed by the Act's own remedy, described next, and the detail is a matter for legal advice in any real dispute.

If the certificate is missing or wrong

The disclosure scheme has one remedy and it is a strong one. The Queensland Government's guidance says a buyer may terminate the contract at any time before settlement if the disclosure documents were not given, or were inaccurate or incomplete. Parties cannot agree to waive this: section 98 of the Act prohibits contracting out.

The two cases are treated differently. If a prescribed certificate was not given before the buyer signed, the Law Society's guidance says the buyer may terminate under section 104(2) and no test of materiality applies. A unit sold without a body corporate certificate, or without the community management statement, falls there. If the documents were given but contain an error, the right is narrower. The inaccuracy must concern a material matter, the buyer must not have known the true position, and the buyer must be able to say they would not have signed had they known.

On termination the seller must repay what the buyer has paid under the contract, which is the subject of section 105. The right ends at settlement. A buyer who discovers after becoming the owner that the levy figures were wrong is no longer within the disclosure scheme's remedy.

What the certificate does not replace

The certificate reports amounts and facts as at its date. It does not explain them. It will show a sinking fund balance without saying whether a major repair is being discussed, and it will list by-laws without recording how the committee enforces them. It also ages. A certificate ordered when a unit was listed may be months old when a buyer appears, which is one reason the fee schedule includes a cheaper repeat request within three months.

Two other tools fill the gap. Anyone with a proper interest, a prospective buyer included, may ask to inspect the body corporate's records, and the Queensland Government's guidance says the body corporate must give access within seven days of a written request and the fee: $39.75 for a person who is not an owner, and 75 cents a page for copies, at the rates in force from 1 July 2026. The body corporate may withhold defamatory material and documents covered by legal professional privilege.

The standard contract adds a way to act on what the records show. Proctor's notes on the first-edition residential contract describe a body corporate records inspection condition in the reference schedule. If the parties fill in a date, the buyer must make reasonable efforts to inspect by then, and may terminate only if materially prejudiced by what is found, a test Proctor says mirrors section 206 of the Act. Left blank, the condition does not apply.

The certificate is the body corporate speaking in its own name, on a form the law wrote, before the buyer has committed to anything.

Read with the community management statement beside it, the certificate tells a buyer what the lot costs to hold, what rules come with it and what the scheme owns and owes. What it cannot tell is how the building is being looked after, and for that the records remain open to anyone prepared to ask.

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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