Vendor bids and dummy bidding at a Queensland auction: what is allowed

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Kooky

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

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Somewhere in the middle of many Queensland auctions, the auctioneer says two words that change the mood of the crowd: "vendor bid". Some bidders hear a trick. Some sellers hear a tool they never quite understood. Both are asking whether the person selling a home is really allowed to bid on it.

In Queensland the answer is yes, within limits that are short enough to learn in a few minutes. A seller's bid must be announced for what it is, and it stops at the reserve price. A bid dressed up as a buyer's bid, made to push a genuine bidder higher once the home is already for sale to the highest offer, is a different thing altogether, and the Office of Fair Trading calls it illegal in plain words.

This guide sets out what the Property Occupations Regulation 2014 says about bids by the seller, how the Office of Fair Trading explains the rule to buyers, sellers and auctioneers, what the conditions of auction usually add, where dummy and collusive bidding begin, who can be penalised and by how much, and where Queensland parts company with New South Wales and Victoria. It describes the general rule. How it applies to one auction depends on that auction's own conditions and facts.

Fines are the 200 and 1,000 penalty unit maximums in section 186 of the Property Occupations Act 2014, at the $172.70 penalty unit in force from 1 July 2026. The register period is in section 23 of the Property Occupations Regulation 2014.

What a vendor bid is

A vendor bid is a bid made by the seller of the property, or by someone acting for the seller, during the seller's own auction. It is not an offer to buy. A seller cannot sensibly purchase a home from themselves, and nobody at the auction thinks otherwise. The bid is a signal: the last genuine offer is not enough, and the seller wants the bidding to start, or to continue, from a higher figure.

The Office of Fair Trading, on its Queensland Government page for people buying at auction, puts the position in one sentence: in Queensland, auctioneers can accept vendor bids, but only up to the reserve price. The reserve is the lowest price the seller has agreed in writing to accept, and how it is set and kept confidential is the subject of a separate guide in this magazine. What matters here is that the reserve is the line. Below it, the property is not yet for sale to the room, and the seller may still take part. At it or above it, the property is "on the market" and, in the Office of Fair Trading's words to auctioneers, the vendor must accept the highest bid as the sale price.

The two sentences in the regulation

The rule itself is brief. Part 5 of the Property Occupations Regulation 2014 sets conduct standards for licensees, made under section 235 of the Property Occupations Act 2014, and section 24 of the regulation is headed "Bids by seller". It applies to a seller of property offered for sale by auction and contains two duties.

The first is disclosure. If the seller or the seller's agent bids for the property when it is offered for sale, the auctioneer must disclose to the other bidders that the bid is made by the seller or the seller's agent. The second is a ceiling. If the seller sets a reserve price for the property, the auctioneer must not accept a bid from the seller or the seller's agent that is higher than the reserve price.

Both duties sit on the auctioneer, who is the person licensed to run the sale, and not on the seller. And the section counts no bids: nothing in it limits the seller to one, two or any other number.

The table below gathers what the regulation and the Office of Fair Trading's pages say about each kind of bid a crowd might meet.

Who may make the bid, and how often

The Office of Fair Trading's page for sellers says it directly: in Queensland, you can bid on your own property, but only up to the reserve price. Its page for buyers describes the mechanics. Before bidding reaches the reserve, the auctioneer can bid on the seller's behalf, or can accept bids from the seller or from the seller's representative.

So there are three possible voices. The auctioneer may call the bid from the rostrum, which is what most crowds see. The seller may bid in person. Or a representative may do it for them. The regulation uses the words "seller's agent" for that third person, and the version of the regulation read for this guide does not define the term, so who exactly qualifies in a borderline case is not something the text settles.

Whoever makes it, the bid passes through the same gate. The auctioneer must accept it, and the auctioneer must disclose it. One practical point follows from the neighbouring rule on registration, section 23 of the same regulation, which requires the auctioneer to make sure a bidder is registered before accepting a bid and is written without an exception for the seller. A seller who intends to bid in person, or to send someone, therefore has every reason to settle that with the auctioneer before the day and not in the middle of the call.

On frequency, the regulation is silent, and published conditions of sale show how much room that leaves. The Public Trustee of Queensland's auction conditions state that the seller reserves the right to bid in person or by the auctioneer as often as the seller thinks fit. Other sellers' conditions may say less, or something different, and each auction is governed by its own.

How the bid must be announced

The regulation asks for disclosure "to the other bidders" and does not prescribe a form of words. The Office of Fair Trading's guidance is equally short: the auctioneer must announce when a bid is a vendor bid, and its page for the industry tells auctioneers they must disclose whenever a bid is a vendor bid. In practice the announcement is made at the moment of the bid, in the auctioneer's own voice, so that nobody in the crowd can mistake it for a rival buyer.

The announcement does not name anyone. Section 25 of the regulation bars an auctioneer from disclosing the identity of a registered bidder to anyone other than an inspector or a court, with a narrow exception for passing a bidder's identity to the seller or the seller's agent when that is necessary to negotiate after a property is passed in or otherwise to help the sale along. A crowd is told that a bid is the vendor's. It is not told who else is bidding.

For a bidder, the announcement carries more information than it seems to.

A seller may want to weigh that before asking for a vendor bid: it moves the bidding, and it also shows part of the seller's hand.

The reserve as the ceiling

The second duty in section 24 turns the reserve into a ceiling on the seller's own bidding. The regulation says the auctioneer must not accept a seller's bid that is "higher than" the reserve. The Office of Fair Trading explains the same rule from the buyer's side: once bidding reaches the reserve, any further vendor bid becomes a false bid, and false bids are illegal.

The two formulations meet at the same place. Once a genuine bid reaches the reserve, the property is on the market. From that moment every bid is supposed to be a real offer from someone who will sign the contract and pay the deposit if the hammer falls, and a seller's bid has no honest function left. It could only do one thing, which is to make the leading bidder pay more than the competition required.

The sequence is easiest to see in order.

When bidding stops below the reserve and the last bid standing is the vendor's, the property is passed in, and what follows for the seller and the highest genuine bidder is covered in this magazine's guide to passed-in auctions.

When the seller sets no reserve

A reserve is optional. The Office of Fair Trading tells sellers that they do not have to set one, that going without is very risky, and that a seller without a reserve must accept the highest bid even if it falls well short of expectations. It tells auctioneers that they must ask the vendor whether a reserve has been set and, if none has, must warn the vendor in writing that they will be obliged to accept the highest bid. The same page gives the penalty for an auctioneer who skips that step as $34,540.

This matters for vendor bidding because the ceiling in section 24 is written for the case where "the seller sets a reserve price". With no reserve there is no zone below it. The Office of Fair Trading's buyer page treats a property with no reserve as being on the market, where the auction must end in a sale, and describes vendor bids only as something that happens before a reserve is reached. A seller who wants the protection of being able to bid has, in practical terms, one way to get it, which is to set a reserve in writing first.

The disclosure duty, by contrast, has no such condition attached. It applies whenever the seller or the seller's agent bids, reserve or no reserve.

What the conditions of auction add

The regulation polices the auctioneer. The conditions of auction are where the seller's intentions are put to the bidders. The Office of Fair Trading tells auctioneers that they need to disclose the conditions of sale, which may cover the deposit, inspection details and similar matters, and that the unsigned sale contract may be used to do it. Those conditions are generally displayed or made available before the auction and referred to by the auctioneer before the first bid.

The Public Trustee's published conditions are a convenient example, because they are public and short. Alongside the clause reserving the seller's right to bid in person or through the auctioneer, they state that every property is sold subject to a reserve, that the highest acknowledged bidder buys subject to that reserve, that no bid may be retracted, that the auctioneer may refuse any bid and that disputes over bids are settled at the auctioneer's discretion.

A clause of that kind tells bidders in advance that vendor bids may occur. What it cannot do is override the regulation. Conditions that reserve a right to bid "as often as the seller thinks fit" still sit under section 24: each such bid has to be disclosed as the seller's, and none may be accepted above the reserve. Conditions differ between sellers and between agencies, so the copy for the particular auction is the one that counts.

Dummy and collusive bidding

The Office of Fair Trading defines a dummy bid as an attempt to raise the bidding after the reserve price has been reached. It lists who might make one: the seller, the seller's family or friends, the auctioneer, or any other "planted" individual. And it gives the conclusion in three words: dummy bids are illegal.

The difference from a vendor bid is not who benefits, since both serve the seller. It lies in two things. A vendor bid is announced, and a dummy bid pretends to be a stranger's. A vendor bid happens while the home is not yet for sale to the room, and a dummy bid arrives after it is, when the only person it can affect is the genuine bidder in front.

A related case sits below the reserve. A friend of the seller who bids from the crowd before the reserve is reached, without being announced, is not within the Office of Fair Trading's description of a dummy bid, which is tied to bidding after the reserve. But if that person is bidding for the seller, the disclosure duty in section 24 is engaged, and a bid by the seller's side that reaches the crowd looking like a buyer's is exactly what the section exists to prevent. Whether an auctioneer knew, or ought to have known, who was behind a bid is a question of fact in each case.

Collusive bidding usually means the opposite arrangement: bidders agreeing among themselves to hold back so that one of them buys cheaply. The Queensland provisions read for this guide, sections 23 to 25 of the regulation and the Office of Fair Trading's auction pages, deal with bids by the seller and say nothing specific about agreements between buyers. Whether another law reaches such an arrangement depends on the case, and this guide does not state a Queensland rule on it because none was found in those sources.

A vendor bid and a dummy bid can be the same dollar figure from the same household. What separates them is the announcement and the side of the reserve they fall on.

Who answers for a breach, and to whom

Because section 24 is a conduct standard for licensees, the first person exposed is the auctioneer, together with any licensed agency behind the auction. The Property Occupations Act 2014 lists the grounds on which disciplinary proceedings may be started against a licensee in section 172. They include contravening the Act and conduct that is incompetent or unprofessional. The chief executive brings such proceedings in the Queensland Civil and Administrative Tribunal, known as QCAT.

Section 186 of the Act sets out what the tribunal may order if it finds grounds. It may reprimand the licensee. It may impose a fine of up to 200 penalty units on an individual or up to 1,000 penalty units on a corporation. The Queensland Law Society's journal reported the penalty unit rising to $172.70 from 1 July 2026 under the Penalties and Sentences (Penalty Unit Value) Amendment Regulation 2026, which puts those maximums at $34,540 and $172,700. The tribunal may also order compensation to a person who suffered loss because of the conduct, suspend or cancel a licence, attach conditions to it, or disqualify a person from holding one for a stated period or permanently. Those are maximums and options. What a tribunal actually orders turns on the conduct proved.

For the seller, the relative or the "planted" bidder, the picture is less tidy. The Office of Fair Trading's pages tell them that false bids and dummy bids are illegal, but they quote no dollar figure for a person who is not a licensee, and the conduct standards in the regulation are addressed to the auctioneer. No Queensland penalty specific to a seller or a planted bidder was found in the sources read for this guide, so none is given here. A buyer who believes the price was pushed up by a false bid may have remedies under the general law on misleading conduct or under the contract itself. Whether they do, and against whom, depends on evidence that is specific to the auction and is a matter for legal advice on those facts.

The paper trail behind the bids

An allegation about a bid is easier to test in Queensland than a bidder might expect, because the regulation makes the auctioneer write things down. Under section 23 each registered bidder is recorded by name and address against a unique identifier, after producing satisfactory evidence of identity, and the register is kept for at least five years after its last entry. This magazine's guide to the bidders register covers that process in full.

Section 11 of the regulation adds the auction contract book. When a property is placed with the auctioneer for sale, the book must record any reserve price. After the auction it must record the sale price and the buyer or, if the property did not sell, the highest bid and, where known, the name and address of the highest bidder. Each of those record-keeping duties carries a maximum penalty of 10 penalty units, which is $1,727 at the current unit.

Put together, the records show who was entitled to bid, what the reserve was and where the bidding ended. They are not open to the public, but they mean a complaint about a bid that should not have been accepted can be checked against documents made at the time.

How Queensland differs from New South Wales and Victoria

Auction law is made state by state, and the vendor bid is one of the places where the states have chosen differently. Readers who have bought or sold further south often arrive with rules in mind that are not Queensland's.

In New South Wales, the bidders guide published by the State Government for residential and rural property auctions says the auctioneer is entitled to make one bid only on behalf of the seller. The auctioneer must announce before the auction that one such bid is permitted, and must announce, immediately before or while making it, that it is a vendor bid. The same guide says dummy bidding can bring a fine of up to $55,000 for the bidder, for a seller who asked for the bids and for an agent or auctioneer involved, and gives the same maximum for collusion that interferes with free and open competition.

In Victoria, Consumer Affairs Victoria says a vendor bid can only be made by the auctioneer and must be announced by the auctioneer when it is made. Vendor bids and co-owner bids are allowed only if the arrangements are set out in the rules displayed before the auction and announced at the start. A co-owner who genuinely wants to buy may bid in person or through a representative in the crowd, but not through the auctioneer. Its page calls dummy bidding illegal and says it is also an offence to arrange for someone else to make an illegal bid, with penalties it describes as substantial without giving an amount.

The table leaves one difference out, which is the penalty. The dollar maximums found for Queensland attach to licensees through the tribunal, where the New South Wales guide names a fine that applies to the dummy bidder and the seller as well. The two words "vendor bid" therefore carry slightly different promises depending on where the auction is held.

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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