Agency records in Queensland: what to keep, how long, in what form

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Kooky

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

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Most of what a Queensland property agency produces in a day is a record of something: an appointment to sell, a receipt for a deposit, an entry in a trust ledger, a condition report with forty photographs. Nearly all of it is now created on a screen and stored on a server the agency has never seen. The law that says how long each item must be kept, and in what form, was largely written when a "computer disk" was something held in the hand.

The question matters at three moments. When an agency changes software, it has to know which old files must stay readable. When an auditor or an inspector asks for a document from four years ago, it has to be found. And when a storage bill grows or a privacy review suggests deleting old files, somebody has to know the earliest date on which deletion is lawful.

This guide sets out the retention and form rules found in three Queensland instruments: the Property Occupations Regulation 2014, the Agents Financial Administration Regulation 2014 and the Residential Tenancies and Rooming Accommodation Act 2008. Every period below was read in the text published on the Queensland legislation website. Where a regime has its own record rules that were not read for this guide, it is named near the end without a figure. The guide describes general rules, not the position of any particular agency.

Sources: Property Occupations Regulation 2014, sections 15 and 16; Agents Financial Administration Regulation 2014, sections 26 and 27; Residential Tenancies and Rooming Accommodation Act 2008, section 63.

Three instruments, one filing system

An agency does not keep three sets of files, but it answers to three sets of rules, and each is addressed to a slightly different person.

The Property Occupations Regulation 2014 speaks to the principal licensee. Its Part 4 is headed "Keeping documents" and contains two sections: one on how long and how carefully documents are kept, and one on keeping them in electronic form. Part 3 of the same regulation contains the record book an auctioneer must keep for real property.

The Agents Financial Administration Regulation 2014 speaks to the principal agent in the specific setting of a trust account. Its Part 2 is headed "Administration of trust accounts". It lists the trust records that must exist, says how they must be kept, and repeats, in almost the same words as the licensing regulation, a retention period and a set of conditions for electronic storage.

The Residential Tenancies and Rooming Accommodation Act 2008 speaks to the lessor or the lessor's agent. A property manager is the agent in that phrase. The Act sets its own, shorter periods for the documents that frame a tenancy: the agreement and the two condition reports.

The versions of the two regulations read for this guide are the reprints shown on the legislation website as current from 1 July 2022. The version of the tenancy Act is the one shown as current at 17 August 2026.

The general rule for licensees: five years, kept properly

Section 15 of the Property Occupations Regulation is the broadest rule. A principal licensee must keep each document the licensee is required to keep in a secure, orderly and accessible way, for at least 5 years. The maximum penalty stated for the section is 10 penalty units.

The section does three things at once, and each word carries a separate duty.

Secure is about loss and interference. A document that can be altered by anyone in the office, or that sits on a single laptop, is kept, but not securely.

Orderly is about structure. The duty is not met by a folder of ten thousand scanned pages with machine-generated names. The files have to be arranged so that a particular document belongs somewhere.

Accessible is about retrieval. A record that exists only in a file format the agency's current software cannot open, or in an account whose password left with a former employee, is not accessible in any practical sense. The regulation does not define the three words, so their everyday meaning is the starting point, and the paragraphs above are a reading of that meaning, not a ruling.

The section sets a floor. "At least 5 years" is a minimum, and nothing in it tells a licensee to destroy a document on the first day of the sixth year. It also works by reference: it attaches to documents that the licensee is required to keep, and the list of those documents is spread through the Property Occupations Act and the regulation. The retention rule does not create the list; it says what happens to everything on it.

Auction books: what has to be written down

The clearest example of a record the licensing regulation itself creates is the auctioneer's contract book. Section 11 requires an auctioneer to keep an auction contract book at the auctioneer's registered office. For each property placed for auction, the book records:

• the date the property was placed with the auctioneer, a description of the lot and details of any improvements;
• the name and address of the owner or of the person who placed the property;
• the reserve price, any special conditions, and the date, time and place of the auction.

After the auction, the entry is completed with the date of sale, a description of what was sold, the purchase price and the buyer's details. If the property did not sell, the highest bid is recorded instead.

Section 11 carries a maximum penalty of 10 penalty units for each subsection. And section 14 answers the form question directly: an auctioneer may keep the auction contract book in hard copy or in electronic form. The book is a set of required entries, not a bound volume.

Trust account records: the list and the audit test

Money held on trust has the most detailed rules. Section 3 of the Agents Financial Administration Regulation lists what a principal agent must keep for a trust account:

1. a register of trust account receipt forms;
2. consecutively numbered trust account receipt forms, in duplicate;
3. trust account deposit forms, in duplicate;
4. a trust account cash book;
5. a trust account ledger;
6. a trust account journal, with its pages or entries consecutively numbered;
7. full and accurate accounts of amounts paid or received for a sale or transaction.

The numbering and duplication requirements are the point of the list. A consecutively numbered series shows a gap if a receipt is removed. A duplicate shows what the original said. A register of the receipt forms themselves shows how many were issued to the office in the first place. Each device makes a missing or altered entry visible, whether the series is printed on paper or generated by software.

Section 3 then adds a test that applies to the whole set: the records must be kept in a way that can be properly audited. That is a functional standard, not a format. A system that produces correct balances but cannot show an auditor how each balance was reached does not meet it. The maximum penalty for a breach of either part of the section is 10 penalty units.

The retention period is in section 26: a principal agent must keep each document the agent is required to keep under the Act for at least 5 years, again with a maximum penalty of 10 penalty units. The period matches the one in the licensing regulation, which means a sales file and the trust entries that go with it reach their minimum age together.

Keeping records on a computer: the backup rules

Both regulations allow documents to be kept electronically, and both attach conditions. Section 16 of the Property Occupations Regulation and section 27 of the Agents Financial Administration Regulation say nearly the same three things.

Capacity. The computer system must have enough capacity and backup capability to record the information that has to be kept.

Frequency. The system must be backed up at least once a month.

Location. The disk or other electronic device that holds the backed-up information must be kept somewhere else, in a place unaffected by magnetic interference or anything else that may adversely affect the stored information.

The two regulations describe "somewhere else" in slightly different terms. Under the licensing regulation, the backup is stored away from the licensee's registered office. Under the trust regulation, the location must not be the principal agent's principal place of business or the principal agent's business address. The idea is the same: a fire, flood or theft at the office should not take the records and their only copy together. Each section carries a maximum penalty of 10 penalty units.

The wording shows its age. It speaks of "a computer disk or other electronic device" and of magnetic interference, the vocabulary of an office with a server in a cupboard and a box of backup tapes. The text does not mention hosted software or data centres. It does not need to in order to apply: the three conditions are about outcomes, and an agency using a hosted system still has to be able to say that capacity is sufficient, that a backup is taken at least monthly, and that the backup sits somewhere other than the office. What the text does not settle is how an agency proves those things when the backups are run by a supplier. The regulations as read place the duty on the principal licensee or principal agent, not on the software company.

Monthly is a minimum. A system that backs up every night satisfies a rule that asks for once a month.

The monthly routine for computer-kept trust records

The trust regulation goes further than backups. Section 4 adds duties that only make sense for records held in a computer system, and they pull part of the record back onto paper.

The month-end duty is in section 4(4): within 5 business days after the end of the month, the agent must make a hard copy of specified information, which includes the trust ledger account balances and the reconciliations. The deletion duty is in section 4(5): before a ledger account is deleted from the system, a hard copy of it must be made and kept. Both carry a maximum penalty of 10 penalty units.

These two subsections are the firmest "paper" rules in the material read for this guide. They mean that a trust accounting system cannot be entirely paperless in the sense the regulation uses: at each month end there is a hard copy of where every ledger stood and how the account reconciled, and a closed ledger leaves a hard copy behind it. Those hard copies are themselves documents the agent is required to keep, so the 5-year minimum in section 26 applies to them.

Tenancy documents: the one-year periods

A property management department works under a second timetable. The tenancy Act sets its own retention periods for three documents, and they are shorter.

The agreement. Under section 63, the lessor or the lessor's agent must keep a copy of the tenancy agreement for 1 year after the term of the agreement ends.

The entry condition report. Under section 65, the lessor or agent must keep the signed copy of the condition report that the tenant returned, or another copy of it, at least until 1 year after the last residential tenancy agreement ends. The reference to the last agreement matters where a tenancy is renewed: the entry report describes the property at the start of the first agreement, and the period does not begin to run while the same tenancy continues under later ones.

The exit condition report. Under section 66, the lessor or agent must keep a copy of the condition report signed by both parties for at least 1 year after the agreement ends.

All three periods count forward from an ending, not from the date the document was made. An entry condition report for a tenancy that lasts six years must be kept for the whole six years and at least one more.

For an agency, the one-year periods rarely decide anything alone. The managing agent is also a licensee, and where a tenancy document is also one the licensee is required to keep under the licensing legislation, the 5-year minimum in the regulation is the longer of the two. The one-year periods are most relevant to a lessor who manages a property personally and holds no licence.

Paper or electronic: what the text actually says

Read together, the provisions give a consistent answer on form, with three fixed points.

First, electronic keeping is expressly contemplated. Both regulations have a section on keeping documents in electronic form, and the auction contract book may be kept in hard copy or electronic form by the terms of section 14.

Second, electronic keeping is conditional. The capacity, monthly backup and separate-location requirements apply whenever the electronic route is used. They are not optional good practice; each is a penalty provision.

Third, some paper survives. Month-end trust information and deleted ledger accounts must exist as hard copies. Receipt forms and deposit forms are required in duplicate.

The tenancy provisions read for this guide speak of keeping "a copy" of the agreement and of the condition reports, and for the entry report they allow the signed copy "or another copy". They do not say that the copy must be on paper.

The periods side by side

The table gathers the periods and form rules described above. It contains only what was read in the three instruments.

One figure recurs outside the table. Every provision in the two regulations that was read for this guide states the same maximum penalty, 10 penalty units, and the auction book section applies it subsection by subsection. The amount is modest beside the consequences of the underlying problem: a trust account that cannot be audited, or a file that cannot be produced, tends to raise harder questions than the record-keeping breach itself.

Records these three instruments do not cover

An agency's retention schedule has more lines than the table. Four other bodies of rules add record duties, and their periods are deliberately not stated here, because they were not read in their primary text for this guide.

The Acts behind the regulations. The Property Occupations Act 2014 and the Agents Financial Administration Act 2014 create many of the documents that the two 5-year rules attach to, and the second deals with the audit of trust accounts. The regulations set the period and the form; the Acts are where the full list of required documents is found.

Other tenancy rules. The tenancy Act also deals with records of rent, and since the reforms that took effect in 2025 it has contained rules on the destruction of personal information collected from applicants and tenants. Those destruction rules run in the opposite direction to everything above: they set a latest date, not an earliest one.

Anti-money laundering. Since 1 July 2026, real estate businesses have been brought within the Commonwealth anti-money laundering regime administered by AUSTRAC, which carries its own record-keeping duties for the checks made on buyers and sellers. Those are federal rules with their own periods and they sit alongside the Queensland ones.

Tax and employment. An agency is also a business and usually an employer, and Commonwealth tax and workplace laws set separate periods for financial and staff records.

The practical difficulty lies in the overlap. A single sales file can contain a document the licensing regulation requires for at least 5 years, a trust receipt under the same minimum, an identity check governed by federal law, and personal details that privacy rules would prefer not to be held for longer than needed. A single tenancy file can contain an agreement with a one-year minimum, a ledger with a five-year minimum, and application documents with a destruction deadline. Software that applies one retention date to a whole file will be wrong for some part of it.

A retention schedule is a list of documents, not of files: each document has its own minimum, and a few have a maximum as well.

That is the main thing the Queensland text teaches an agency moving its records to a new system. The law does not ask whether the office is paperless. It asks, document by document, whether the record exists, whether it can be found and audited, whether a copy survives away from the office, and whether it is still there when the minimum period has run.

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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