What the REIQ is and what it does for Queensland's property agents

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Kooky

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

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The four letters REIQ turn up everywhere in Queensland property. They are printed on the standard contract a buyer signs. They are quoted in news reports about vacancy rates and house prices. They sit on stickers in agency windows and on trophies in reception areas. Many people assume the institute behind them is the body that licenses and disciplines real estate agents.

It is not. The Real Estate Institute of Queensland is a professional association, a body that agents and agencies may choose to join. The licensing of agents and the enforcement of the law belong to a government regulator, the Office of Fair Trading. The two are easily confused because their work touches the same people, and because the institute has had a hand in shaping several of the rules the regulator now enforces.

This guide explains what the institute is, how it is organised, what it produces and where its role stops. It draws on the institute's own releases and program pages, on the Office of Fair Trading and on trade press reports. It is a description of an institution, written for readers who meet its name and want to know what stands behind it.

REIQ media releases, 20 and 24 February 2026; Office of Fair Trading CPD pages.

A professional body, not a regulator

The distinction is the first thing to settle. In Queensland, nobody may sell or let property for others without a licence or a registration certificate under the Property Occupations Act 2014. Those documents are issued by the Office of Fair Trading, part of the Department of Justice. The regulator sets the training requirement, checks criminal history, keeps the public register, requires trust accounts to be audited, prosecutes offences and can suspend or cancel a licence.

Membership of the institute is not among the regulator's requirements. The Office of Fair Trading's licensing pages list age, training and suitability as the conditions for a licence or registration, and say nothing about belonging to any association. An agent can practise lawfully for a whole career without joining.

The institute's own description of itself is as the state peak body for real estate professionals, the phrase its chief executive, Antonia Mercorella, used when it launched its practice guidelines in 2023. A peak body represents a sector to government and the public, sets voluntary standards for its members and provides services to them. It has no power to license, fine or ban.

Who the institute represents

The profession the institute speaks for is broader than house sales. In a media release of 20 February 2026, Ms Mercorella observed that most people associate real estate with residential sales, while a wide variety of sectors and specialisations sit under the same umbrella.

The institute organises that variety into six chapters: auctioneers, business brokers, buyer's agents, commercial and industrial, property management and residential sales. Each has a committee of members from that sector.

The release explains how the committees work. Members are appointed for a two-year term, and the current term began in January 2026. Each committee chose its chair at its first meeting in February. The chairs announced for 2026-27 were Jack Barrett of Torres Property for auctioneers; Roland West of Link Business Brisbane, returning, for business brokers; Jayne Robbins of The Informed Buyer for buyer's agents; Jason Luckhardt of NAI Harcourts, returning, for commercial and industrial; Rebecca Fogarty of Blackbird and Finch for property management; and Jason Rose of Elders Real Estate Ipswich for residential sales.

According to the release, the committees give the institute insights from different parts of the profession and act as a sounding board on its education, training, events, best practice guidelines and policy positions. In effect they are the channel through which a working property manager in a regional town, or a business broker in Brisbane, can influence what the institute says to government.

The six sectors correspond to the licences Queensland issues. Residential and commercial agents, property managers, buyer's agents and business brokers all work under a real estate agent licence or a salesperson registration. Auctioneers hold their own licence. The institute's structure follows the law's.

Training and continuing professional development

Education is the service most agents use first. Before anyone can be registered as a salesperson, the Office of Fair Trading requires 12 units of competency from the Certificate IV in Real Estate Practice, delivered by a registered training organisation; a full licence requires 19.

The larger change came with compulsory continuing professional development, known as CPD. Since 6 June 2025, agents, salespeople and auctioneers in Queensland have had to complete two approved sessions in each year of their licence. The institute had pressed for the reform. In a release of 4 March 2025, Ms Mercorella said: "We advocated long and hard for CPD to raise the levels of professionalism of all practising real estate professionals." The same release records that the institute sat on the Office of Fair Trading's advisory panel on the scheme.

The institute is now one of the scheme's providers. Its program page lists 33 courses in the competency-based category, called Type 1, and 30 in the professional development category, called Type 2. It delivers them as online self-paced courses, live and recorded webinars, video resources and face-to-face training, and offers a tracker that tells a licence holder when the sessions for the year are due.

It is not the only provider. The Office of Fair Trading approves registered training organisations, industry bodies and government departments to deliver sessions, and the Residential Tenancies Authority announced on 3 February 2026 that it had become an approved provider with three sessions on tenancy. A licence holder may complete the yearly requirement entirely outside the institute.

That arrangement illustrates the institute's position well. It argued for a rule, helped to design it, and now competes to supply the training the rule requires, while the regulator alone decides what counts.

Practice guidelines and legal guidance

The second product is guidance on how to do the job properly. Elite Agent reported on 3 April 2023 that the institute had launched a set of Best Practice Guidelines covering every sector of its membership: residential sales, commercial sales, property management, buyer's agents, auctioneers and business brokers.

The report says the guidelines were developed in consultation with the relevant governing authorities and industry leaders. They are arranged in sector-specific chapters, with links to the relevant forms and footnotes to the legislation. Ms Mercorella linked them to the institute's purpose, saying one of its key commitments is to raise professional standards.

Guidelines of this kind fill the space between the law and daily practice. The Property Occupations Act and its regulation say what an agent must and must not do. They do not say how to run a multiple-offer situation fairly, what to record after a routine inspection or how to explain an appointment form to an elderly seller. A professional body's guidance does, and although it has no legal force of its own, it describes what careful practice looks like.

The institute also publishes practice articles for agents, many written by lawyers. One, by a partner of Carter Newell Lawyers, sets out the consequences of working without the appropriate licence, including the rule in section 89 of the Act that an unlicensed person cannot recover or keep commission. Others have covered misleading advertising and trust account breaches. These articles are a running commentary on the law as it applies to agencies.

When new obligations arrive, the institute acts as an interpreter. Ahead of the national anti-money-laundering rules that began to apply to real estate on 1 July 2026, its member information says it held education sessions across the state on agents' new responsibilities, and it directed members to the federal regulator's starter kit and free webinars for businesses entering the regime.

Contracts and forms

For the public, the most familiar of the institute's products is a document. The standard contract used for the sale of houses and residential land across Queensland is published jointly by the institute and the Queensland Law Society, and carries both names. Most buyers and sellers in the state sign it without ever dealing with the institute directly.

A standard contract is a public good of a quiet kind. Because nearly every agent, solicitor and conveyancer uses the same terms, each party's adviser knows where the finance clause is and what it says, and disputes turn on the facts and not on unfamiliar drafting. The institute maintains it with the solicitors' professional body.

Agents meet the institute's forms through software. For about a decade, Queensland agents completed them on a platform called Forms Live under a licensing agreement between its developer and the institute. Elite Agent reported on 6 July 2026 that the agreement had concluded and that, from 30 June 2026, the platform was operating independently in Queensland with its own forms prepared with the law firm Dentons. The developer continues to work under licence with institutes in several other states, the report said.

For agencies, the change separates a familiar software platform from the institute's own forms. For clients, it is a reminder that the prescribed government forms, such as the Form 6 appointment, are set by the Office of Fair Trading and are the same whoever supplies the software, while contracts and supporting documents can differ between publishers.

Market data and public comment

The institute is one of the regular sources of Queensland property figures. It publishes residential vacancy rates by region each quarter and comments on sales and price data, and its chief executive is a frequent voice in coverage of housing policy.

Its figures have particular value outside the capital, because its vacancy survey reports on regional centres individually.

Readers should keep the source in mind, as with any industry body. The institute represents agents, and its commentary on policy reflects its members' interests as well as its analysis. That is the ordinary position of a peak body, and it does not make the data unreliable; it means the numbers and the advocacy are best read separately.

Awards for Excellence

The institute's awards are its most visible event. The 2026 program closes with a gala at The Star Brisbane on Saturday 31 October, and covers work done between 1 July 2025 and 30 June 2026, according to the nomination book.

The categories follow the sectors. There are agency awards by size and by specialism, individual awards for salespeople, property managers, auctioneers, buyer's agents, business brokers, business development managers and support staff, rising star awards, and a set of performance-based awards for settled commissions and settled transactions, split between south-east Queensland and the regions. A Multi-Office Network of the Year award was added in 2026, which the chief executive said members had asked for.

The judging rules are published. Written entries are scored out of 100 by at least two judges working separately, the scores are added, and selected categories include an interview. An entrant who wins the same category three years running enters the Hall of Fame and steps out of that category for two years.

Awards are run by and for the institute's members, so they are a measure within the membership and not across every licensed agent in the state. Within that limit, the written categories ask an agency to document its year, and the process is closer to a peer review than to a sales ranking.

The national connection

The institute's relationship with the national body has been the most notable change in its recent history. It left the Real Estate Institute of Australia in 2015. On 24 February 2026 it announced that it would rejoin from 1 July 2026, and Elite Agent reported that the move ended an 11-year separation.

In the announcement, Ms Mercorella explained the reasoning. Real estate is governed mainly by state laws, she said, but national matters do arise, and the national body is based in Canberra, where federal policy is made. The national institute's chief executive, Scott Rollason, said in the same release: "With every State and Territory now represented, REIA is once again a fully federated body."

The national issues are easy to name. Anti-money-laundering law, taxation of investment property, migration and lending rules are all federal, and all affect how Queensland agents work. A state institute outside the national body had to make its case on those matters alone.

Members also gained access to national recognition. The institute's release of 22 May 2026 reported that Queensland members won five titles at the 2026 National Awards for Excellence, in residential sales, residential property management, business broking, operational support and achievement. Winners of eligible state categories in 2026 have a pathway to the national awards in 2027, according to the institute's awards page.

Advocacy: how a rule gets changed

The clearest example of the institute's influence on the law is the one already described. Compulsory professional development did not exist in Queensland before 6 June 2025. The institute campaigned for it, by its chief executive's account over a long period, took a seat on the regulator's advisory panel and then built training to meet it.

The process shows how advocacy by a professional body normally works. The institute identifies a problem its members see, in this case a profession whose law was changing faster than its training. It proposes a rule to government. If government agrees, it consults the institute and others on the detail. The resulting rule is the Parliament's and the regulator's, not the institute's, and binds members and non-members alike.

Not every position the institute takes succeeds, and not every reform it supports is welcomed by every agent. Members who pay for two sessions a year may feel the cost more than the benefit. The chapter committees exist partly to carry that kind of feedback back to the institute before it settles a position.

What it means for a client

For a seller, buyer, landlord or tenant, the institute matters in three practical ways.

The first is the contract. The terms a buyer and seller sign are, in most residential sales, the ones the institute publishes with the Law Society.

The second is the meaning of membership. An agency that displays the institute's badge has chosen to join a body with published practice guidelines and access to training and legal guidance. That is a signal of intent, and it is voluntary. It is not the licence. The licence is checked on the Office of Fair Trading's public register, which is free to search and shows whether a person or company is currently entitled to act.

The third is where to take a problem. A complaint that an agent has broken the law, mishandled trust money or worked without a licence goes to the regulator, which has the powers to investigate and act. The institute's role is with its members: educating them, guiding them and representing them.

Read that way, the four letters mean something specific. They identify the profession's own organisation in Queensland: the place where agents train, argue about standards, celebrate one another and decide what to ask of government. The authority to say who may be an agent, and who may no longer be one, sits elsewhere.

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 →