From agency software to the portal: how a property listing travels

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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 home for sale in Queensland usually appears in several places within minutes of each other: on the agency's own website, on one or more national property portals, and sometimes on smaller sites that serve a region or a niche. The seller sees the same photographs, the same headline and the same price wording everywhere. Nobody at the agency typed it more than once.

That small fact explains a good deal about how property advertising works. The listing a buyer scrolls past on a phone is a copy. The original sits in the agency's software, and what the law says about the advertisement, the money spent on it and the claims made in it attaches mostly to the agency that holds the original and to the seller who appointed it.

This guide follows one listing from the appointment form to the portal page. It covers how the record is sent, what Queensland's trust account legislation says about money collected for advertising and the written account a seller is owed, who measures the audiences that portals quote, and what the Australian Consumer Law says about the content of an advertisement. It recommends no portal and no software. It gives no portal price list: none was read in a dated public source, so none appears.

Sources: Ipsos iris methodology questions and answers (undated); Agents Financial Administration Act 2014 (Qld), section 23.

One record, many copies

An agency's listing begins as a record in its own system, usually the customer relationship management software the office runs every day. The record holds the address, the property type, the numbers of bedrooms and bathrooms, the description, the photographs and floor plan, the price wording, the inspection times and the names of the agents handling the sale.

A portal does not write any of that. It receives it. The public help documentation of Rex, one supplier of agency software, describes the arrangement from the software's side: the agency chooses, listing by listing, where the record will be published, and the software then sends it to each chosen destination. In that documentation the choice is called a publication setting, and it is said to give the agency control over where a listing is available, including the ability to add a listing to a channel, remove it from one, or release it to different channels at different times.

Two consequences follow from the design. The first is that the agency's record is the master copy: a correction made on the portal's side would be overwritten the next time the agency's software sent its version. The second is that the same wording reaches every destination, so an error in the record is an error everywhere at once.

The feed: how the record is sent

The copy travels as structured data, not as a web page. Each destination publishes a format it will accept, and the agency's software translates its record into that format.

The Rex documentation names the formats its product supports natively: REAXML, the formats of two state real estate institutes (REIV and REIWA), a format for Domain, and one for realestate.co.nz. It also says the product can send custom uploads to other endpoints, and that its list of supported portals keeps growing. The names matter less than the pattern they show. There is no single national pipe through which all listings flow. There is a small family of formats, each tied to a destination or a group of destinations, and software that speaks several of them.

Timing is the other half of the mechanism. According to the same documentation, an upload to a supported portal happens immediately following any change to a listing. There is no nightly batch in that description: a new photograph, a changed inspection time or a new price line is sent when it is saved.

Checks before a listing goes out

A feed can be refused. A destination that expects a postcode, a property type or a price field in a particular shape will reject a record that does not have it. Agency software therefore tends to check the record before sending it. The Rex documentation describes this as validation before publication: uploads are restricted to listings that are valid, and where a listing is not, the software shows what it calls corrective actions.

It is worth being clear about what such a check is. It tests whether the record is complete and correctly formed for the destination. It does not test whether the description is true. A listing can pass every technical check and still describe a third bedroom that is a study, or a view that a neighbouring building has since blocked. Accuracy is a matter for the people who write the record, and, as later sections set out, for the law.

The same documentation describes staged release, in which an agency sends a listing to one channel before another. That is a commercial choice made inside the agency's software. For a seller, it means the order in which an advertisement appears on different sites is not an accident of technology: it is a setting somebody selected.

The appointment behind every listing

In Queensland the record in the software rests on a paper trail that starts earlier. A seller appoints an agent in writing on the approved form, which the Office of Fair Trading refers to as Form 6, the Property Occupations Act 2014 appointment.

The Office of Fair Trading's guidance on property advertising, on a page last updated on 1 July 2026, ties the advertisement back to that form. It says the price wording in an advertisement must be consistent with the seller's instructions as recorded on Form 6, and that agents are responsible for making sure sellers understand the law and complete the form accurately.

For the journey of a listing, the point is one of sequence and evidence. The form is where the seller's instructions are written down. The software record is built from those instructions. The portal page is a copy of the record. If a question is later asked about why an advertisement said what it said, the answer is traced backwards along that chain, from the portal to the agency's record to the signed form.

Advertising money and Queensland trust rules

Portal advertising costs money, and in a sale that money often passes through the agency. This guide does not state what any portal charges or how a portal structures its fees to agencies, because no dated public source giving those terms was read for it. What can be stated from the legislation is how Queensland treats money an agent receives and spends in the course of a transaction.

The Agents Financial Administration Act 2014 is the State law on agents' trust accounts. Section 16, as read on the Queensland legislation website, requires an amount received for a transaction to be paid into the agent's general trust account, or invested as the Act allows, before the end of the first business day after it is received. The maximum penalty stated is 200 penalty units or 2 years imprisonment.

Section 21 then fixes the money in place: an amount paid to a trust account must be kept there until it is paid out under the Act, and it may be paid out only in a way the Act permits.

Section 22 deals with the agent's own fee and with expenses. An agent may draw an amount from the trust account for a transaction fee or a transaction expense only if it is drawn against the transaction fund for that transaction and the agent is authorised to draw it. For an expense, the authority arises when the expense becomes payable. For the fee, the order is set out: once the transaction is finalised, the agent first pays the person entitled the balance of the fund, less the fee and any outstanding expense, and only then draws the fee.

Whether a particular payment for advertising is an amount received for a transaction within section 16 depends on the arrangement between the seller and the agency, and on when and how the payment is made. The general rule is nonetheless plain: where a seller's money for a sale is held by the agent, it sits in a trust account, each expense is drawn from that seller's own fund, and the agent's fee comes last.

The written account a seller is owed

The same Act gives the seller a document at the end. Under section 23, an agent must account to a client who appoints the agent for all amounts received for a transaction. The account must be in writing. It must state the amounts received and how they were paid out.

It must also state something that bears directly on advertising. Section 23(2) requires the account to give the source and the amount of any rebate, discount, commission or benefit the agent received in relation to expenses incurred or referrals made. If an agency receives a rebate or other benefit from a supplier in connection with an expense charged to the seller, the section as read requires the written account to show where it came from and how much it was.

The timing has two limbs. If the client asks for the account in writing, the agent must give it within 14 days after receiving the request. If the client has not asked, the agent must give it within 42 days after the transaction is finalised. The balance of the money follows the same two periods under section 22(5): 14 days after a written request, otherwise 42 days after the transaction is finalised.

A smaller right sits in the Agents Financial Administration Regulation 2014. An agent who receives trust money must complete a trust account receipt, and under section 10 of the regulation the receipt must be given promptly to the person if it is requested. The receipt states, among other things, the amount, the date, how the money was received and a brief description of the matter.

Who counts a portal's audience

Portals describe themselves in numbers: people reached in a month, visits, time spent. Agents repeat those numbers to sellers when recommending where to advertise. It helps to know that there are two different kinds of count behind them.

The first kind is a site's own analytics. A portal's servers record every page requested and every app session opened. Those logs count devices and visits very precisely, but a person who looks at listings on a work computer, a phone and a tablet is three devices in a log.

The second kind is independent audience measurement, which tries to count people. In Australia the system endorsed for that purpose by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) Australia is Ipsos iris. The methodology questions and answers published by Ipsos, which are undated and were written around the system's introduction, give the background. IAB Australia began a competitive tender in early 2021. Sixteen measurement organisations expressed interest, three were shortlisted, and Ipsos was appointed for a three-year term.

The method is a hybrid. On one side is a panel: approximately 4,000 people who have agreed to have their use of approximately 8,000 devices recorded passively by a meter. Ipsos describes it as a single-source panel, meaning the same person is followed across their devices, and it includes people aged 14 and over. The devices covered are smartphones, desktops, laptops, tablets and connected televisions, the last through a partnership with OzTAM. On the other side is what Ipsos calls site-centric census measurement: tags placed by media owners on their own sites and apps, which report total traffic.

The panel says who the people are and how their devices overlap. The tags say how much activity there was in total. Combining the two is what allows the system to state a number of people, with the same person counted once.

Reading an audience figure

Ipsos reports on audiences across 25 content categories, and a new audience database is released every month. According to the same document, the monthly dataset is available 15 working days after the end of the month, so a figure quoted in a listing presentation describes a month that ended at least three weeks earlier.

The system produces several different measures, and they answer different questions.

Three cautions follow from the way the numbers are made.

A national audience is not a local one. A monthly figure for a whole site covers every visitor in Australia, for every purpose. It includes renters, people checking what a neighbour's house sold for and people browsing without any intention to move. The measurement document lists location among the profile characteristics, so narrower cuts exist, but a headline number is rarely one of them.

Two sites' audiences overlap. A core function of the system, in Ipsos's words, is to remove duplication of audience across panels and sources. The same logic applies between sites: many people use more than one portal, so two audience figures cannot simply be added together to find the total number of people reached.

Series do not always join up. Ipsos describes its system as a trend break from the measurement that preceded it and advises users not to reconcile or compare the old and new datasets. A chart that runs across the change of system is comparing two different instruments.

An audience figure, in short, measures attention to a site. It is not a count of buyers for a particular home, and it is not a count of enquiries. The numbers that describe a single listing, such as how many times it was viewed or saved, come from the portal's own logs and are reported to the agency through the portal's own tools. They are the first kind of count described above, not the second.

What a listing may claim

The content of the record is governed by consumer law wherever the copy ends up. The Office of Fair Trading's advertising guidance states the central rule in one line: licensed property agents must not engage in misleading or deceptive conduct when advertising a property for sale. It places that conduct under the Australian Consumer Law.

The same page sets out the maximum penalties under that law. For an individual the figure is up to $2.5 million for each breach. For a corporation the maximum is whichever is greatest of three measures: a fixed sum, three times the value of the benefit obtained, or 30 per cent of turnover during the period of the breach.

On price, the guidance deals with one common form of wording. An "offers over" figure must represent the minimum amount the seller is willing to accept, and it must match what is recorded on the appointment form. Advertising a figure the agent knows the seller will not accept is described on the page as false advertising, also termed bait advertising. The page illustrates the point with a pair of examples: a form recording $450,000 with an advertisement inviting offers over $450,000 is consistent, while a form recording $500,000 with an advertisement inviting offers over $475,000 is misleading.

The rule against misleading conduct is not limited to price. It is a rule about the overall impression an advertisement creates, which is why the feed described earlier matters. Photographs, the description, the stated land size, the suburb name and the list of features all travel in the same record, and all are part of the advertisement on every site that displays it. A technical check by software does not answer the legal question, and the fact that a portal displayed the listing does not move the responsibility that the Office of Fair Trading's guidance places on the licensed agent.

Where the responsibility sits

Following one listing from start to finish shows where each duty falls.

The seller gives instructions and signs the appointment. The guidance from the Office of Fair Trading says agents must make sure sellers understand the law when the form is completed, which means the seller is entitled to an explanation of what the price wording will be allowed to say.

The agency writes the record, chooses the destinations and sends the feed. It holds the master copy, so it is also the place where a correction has to be made. Where it holds the seller's money for the transaction, the trust account legislation governs when that money may be drawn and requires a written account, including any rebate or benefit connected with an expense.

The software checks the form of the record and delivers it. Its documentation describes validation, formats and timing, not truth.

The portal displays the copy and reports on its own traffic. An independent system, endorsed by IAB Australia, measures the audiences of sites across the market on a monthly cycle.

The page a buyer sees is the last link in a chain that begins with a signed form, and each link has a different keeper.

What stays outside this guide

Several things a seller may want to know are not here, and the reasons differ.

Portal prices are absent because they were not found in a dated public source. A seller who is quoted a figure for advertising can ask what it covers and can ask for it in writing; the quote, not a magazine, is the evidence of what was offered.

The contracts between portals and agencies are commercial documents between those two parties, and their terms are not described here for the same reason.

The detailed Queensland rules on how a price may be represented, for auctions and for private treaty sales, are a subject of their own and are touched on above only through the single example in the Office of Fair Trading's guidance.

Finally, the provisions of the Property Occupations Act 2014 that govern the appointment form itself, including how fees and expenses are authorised on it, are outside the scope of this guide. What is stated above about money comes from the Agents Financial Administration Act 2014 and its regulation, which deal with what happens to funds once an agent holds them. The general rules described are not a statement of any seller's own position, which depends on the form that seller signed.

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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