Buying a Queensland home from interstate or overseas: what differs

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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 large share of the people buying homes in Queensland do not live here when they sign. Real Estate Business reported in July that the state gained 16,528 people through interstate migration in 2025, citing the Real Estate Institute of Queensland's chief executive, and that the Sunshine Coast alone attracted 8.8 per cent of the country's net internal migration in the year to March 2026, according to the Regional Australia Institute. Many of those households bought before they moved. Others are Queenslanders working abroad, or overseas buyers of new apartments.

Buying from a distance is routine, and almost all of it can now be done without setting foot in the state. But a buyer who learned how property is bought in Sydney, Melbourne or Auckland will find that Queensland does several things its own way, and a buyer who is a foreign person under federal law faces restrictions that changed in 2025 and were extended this year. This guide covers both: first the steps that differ for anyone buying remotely, then the rules that apply only to foreign buyers.

Queensland Government buying advice; Australian Taxation Office; REIQ figure reported by Real Estate Business, 21 July 2026.

Three kinds of distant buyer

The rules depend on who is buying, so it helps to sort buyers into three groups at the outset.

The first is Australians living in another state or territory. Legally they are in the same position as a buyer in the next suburb. What differs for them is practical: they are working with an unfamiliar contract, an unfamiliar set of deadlines and a property they may have seen once, or never.

The second is Australian citizens living overseas. They are not caught by the foreign investment restrictions on housing, so the same Queensland rules apply to them as to any local. Their difficulties are distance, time zones, proving identity from abroad and, often, finance, since lenders treat income earned overseas with more caution.

The third is foreign persons: people who are neither citizens nor permanent residents, including temporary visa holders who live in Australia, and foreign-owned companies. For this group, federal law decides what may be bought before any Queensland step begins. The later sections of this guide deal with them.

A couple buying together can straddle two groups, for instance a citizen and a partner on a temporary visa. That situation has its own treatment under the federal rules and needs specific advice before a contract is signed.

What is Queensland's own

Property law in Australia is state law. The forms, the timetable and even the profession that handles the paperwork change at the border. The points below are the ones that most often catch interstate buyers.

Two of these deserve a little more explanation.

The disclosure statement is a recent arrival. Under the Property Law Act 2023, a seller must give the buyer a statement in the approved form before the buyer signs. It sets out title details and encumbrances, zoning, environmental and heritage listings, whether there is a pool, certain notices and, for a unit, body corporate information. For a remote buyer it is a welcome early source of facts. The Queensland Government's summary is equally clear that the seller does not have to disclose the structural condition of the building, past flooding, asbestos or earlier development approvals. Those remain the buyer's own inquiries.

The second is who does the legal work. In Queensland, conveyancing is carried out by solicitors and the law firms that employ conveyancing staff, and the Queensland Government's buying advice refers buyers to appointing a solicitor. An interstate buyer's regular conveyancer at home is unlikely to be able to act, so a Queensland firm has to be engaged, ideally before any contract arrives.

Seeing the property without being there

The first real risk of a distant purchase is buying something that looks different in person. Photographs do not show the slope of the block, the noise from the road, the unit block being built next door or the damp under the house.

The Queensland Government's advice lists the inspections a buyer should consider before the purchase is final: a building inspection, a pest inspection and, where they exist, inspections of the swimming pool and the solar system. For a buyer who cannot attend, these reports carry more weight than they would for a local. It is reasonable to ask the inspector for a phone or video call to go through the findings, since a written report cannot convey how serious a defect looks on site.

Three other sources fill gaps that an inspection does not.

Public maps cover the land. Council flood maps, planning scheme zoning and overlays, and the State's mapping tools can all be read from anywhere. They answer questions about flooding, what can be built nearby and whether a major road or rail corridor is planned.

A buyer's agent is an option the Government's own advice mentions. A licensed buyer's agent can inspect, report and negotiate on a buyer's behalf for a fee. Whether that is worth the cost is a personal judgement. For a buyer with no trusted person in Queensland, it is one way to have someone physically stand in the house.

The contract can be made to depend on the reports. A private sale contract can be signed subject to satisfactory building and pest inspections and to finance approval, with dates set for each. A remote buyer generally needs those dates to be realistic, allowing for the time it takes to book an inspector in a town they do not know and to have a lender value a property in another state.

For a unit or townhouse there is a further layer. The body corporate's records, its levies, its sinking fund and any disputes or defects, are not visible from photographs or from the title. A search of those records is ordered through the conveyancer and is the nearest thing to an inspection of the building's finances.

Signing, and the cooling-off clock

Contracts for Queensland homes are commonly signed electronically, so a buyer in Perth or Singapore can sign on a phone within minutes of an offer being accepted. The speed is convenient, and it is the reason to have a solicitor lined up beforehand: once both parties have signed, the timetable in the contract begins to run.

A buyer under a private sale contract has, in the Queensland Government's words, 5 business days to change their mind. This cooling-off period does not apply to a property bought at auction. The conditions for finance and inspections, if the contract contains them, run on their own dates in parallel.

This is a small point that causes real problems. A buyer in Melbourne who sends a notice at ten to five on a summer afternoon is on time. A buyer who assumes a Queensland regional show holiday is an ordinary working day, or who counts their own state's holiday as a day off in Queensland, can miscount a deadline by a day. A buyer overseas has to convert both the hour and the date. The dates that matter should be written down in Queensland time on the day the contract is signed, with the solicitor confirming them.

Insurance belongs in this first week too. The Queensland Government advises that buyers typically arrange insurance from the contract date. A remote buyer cannot leave it for moving day.

Proving who you are from a distance

Before a solicitor can act and before a lender will advance money, each must be satisfied that the buyer is who they claim to be. This verification of identity is a standard requirement of electronic conveyancing, and it normally involves a face-to-face check of original documents.

For an interstate buyer the check can be done locally: the Queensland solicitor arranges for it to be carried out near where the buyer lives, by an approved agent. For a buyer overseas it takes more planning, because the options are narrower and may involve an appointment at an Australian diplomatic mission or an approved provider in that country. It is one of the first things to raise with the solicitor, since it can take longer than every other step combined.

Buyers should expect to be asked for identity documents more than once. Since 1 July 2026 federal anti-money laundering law has applied to real estate agents and to the lawyers and conveyancers who handle property transactions, and those businesses must carry out their own customer checks. The agent selling the home, the buyer's solicitor and the buyer's lender may each ask separately, and each may ask where the purchase money comes from. This is a legal obligation on the business, not a sign of suspicion.

Paying the deposit and settling online

The deposit is usually payable to the agent's or a solicitor's trust account soon after the contract is signed, by electronic transfer. From overseas, an international transfer can take several days and banks may hold large payments for checks, so the timing in the contract needs to allow for it.

Because the payment is large and made at a distance, account details should be confirmed by a phone call to a number the buyer already knows to be genuine, never from an email alone. Payment redirection fraud targets property deposits precisely because the parties are often not in the same room.

Settlement itself no longer requires anyone to be present. Titles Queensland's eConveyancing material records that since 20 February 2023 transfers, mortgages and releases of mortgage must be lodged electronically where a solicitor or financial institution is involved, through one of two approved networks, PEXA and Sympli. On the day, the buyer's solicitor, the seller's solicitor and the lenders complete the exchange of money and the lodgement of documents in a shared online workspace. The buyer's part is to have cleared funds with the solicitor or lender beforehand.

What a distant buyer loses is the customary final look at the property. A pre-settlement inspection, to see that the home is in the condition it was in at contract and that the agreed inclusions are still there, can be delegated to a buyer's agent, a friend or the building inspector.

Foreign persons: what can be bought

For buyers who are foreign persons under federal law, a prior question applies: is the purchase allowed at all? The Australian Taxation Office administers the rules for residential property.

The main restriction is a temporary ban on buying established dwellings. The ATO states that from 1 April 2025 to 30 June 2029, foreign persons are banned from purchasing established dwellings, with limited exceptions. The ban was first set for two years. In the 2026-27 federal Budget it was extended by two years and three months, to its current end date.

The ban reaches further than many expect. It covers temporary residents, including those who want a home to live in while they are here. The ATO says temporary residents may still seek approval for vacant land or a new dwelling.

What foreign persons can still apply to buy falls into a few categories, according to the ATO. New or near-new dwellings are permitted, meaning dwellings on residential land that have not been occupied for more than 12 months in total. Off-the-plan purchases are permitted. Vacant residential land is permitted. And an established dwelling may be bought for redevelopment, where the project adds to the housing stock. A narrow exception also exists for foreign companies housing workers from Pacific island countries and Timor-Leste.

In practice this means an overseas buyer looking at Queensland is looking at new apartments, house-and-land packages and building blocks, not at the established houses that make up most listings.

Approval, conditions and enforcement

Permission has to be in place before the purchase. A foreign person applies to the ATO for approval and pays an application fee, and approvals come with conditions. The ATO's guidance for foreign investors also covers a vacancy fee for dwellings left unoccupied and a register of foreign ownership on which acquisitions must be recorded.

The condition that matters most for buyers of land is the obligation to build. Real Estate Business reported on 1 October 2026 that the ATO had obtained a Federal Court civil penalty of $508,000 against a foreign investor who failed to build a home on vacant land within the four years required by the approval. The ATO had also frozen the land to prevent its sale during the proceedings and pursued unpaid vacancy fees on another property, the report said.

ATO Assistant Commissioner Jennifer Moltisanti was quoted on the purpose of the action: "These obligations will be enforced even where the investor is offshore or disengaged."

The case was not isolated. The same report notes that in 2024-25 the ATO forced the remediation of 217 breaches of the foreign investment rules, including the disposal of 111 residential properties. For an overseas buyer, the message is that approval is the beginning of a set of duties that continue for years after settlement, and that distance does not suspend them.

Taxes that treat distant buyers differently

Tax is covered in detail elsewhere in this magazine, but three points belong on a distant buyer's checklist because they affect the money needed at settlement.

Queensland charges additional transfer duty when the buyer is a foreign person, on top of the ordinary duty, and applies a land tax surcharge to foreign owners. The definitions used by the State are not identical to the federal ones, so a buyer can be exempt from one regime and caught by the other.

Duty concessions for a home generally depend on the buyer moving in and living there. An interstate buyer who intends to rent the property out for a year before relocating should check how that affects the concession before relying on it in a budget.

And every buyer, local or not, has a federal obligation connected to the seller's tax status. Where a seller cannot produce a clearance certificate from the ATO, the buyer is required to withhold part of the price and pay it to the tax office. The buyer's solicitor handles this as a standard step, but it explains why the certificate is requested from sellers who have plainly lived in Australia all their lives.

Putting the steps in order

For a remote purchase the sequence matters more than usual, because several steps take longer from a distance and some cannot be done once the contract is signed.

Most of what goes wrong in distant purchases traces back to an early step done late: identity checks begun after the contract, a deposit sent from overseas with two days to spare, an inspection booked for the last afternoon of the condition period. The Queensland system itself is well suited to remote buyers. Disclosure comes before signing, signatures and settlement are electronic, and the registers and maps are public. The work is in knowing which clocks have started, and whose time they are keeping.

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.

About Kooky and Shaka →