Who prepares the contract when you sell your Queensland home yourself?

Every Queensland seller who considers selling without an agent arrives at the same question and stops there.

Who writes the contract?

It is a fair question with an unglamorous answer, and the answer is the reason a lot of people hand over eighteen thousand dollars they did not need to spend. So let us deal with it directly.

The short answer

A solicitor or conveyancer prepares the contract. Not the agent.

That is true whether you sell privately, through an agency, or through us. The document is a legal instrument with termination rights, statutory warranties and adjustment mechanics inside it. An agent is not qualified to draft it and, in Queensland, does not.

What an agent typically does is fill in the blanks on a standard REIQ contract once terms are agreed, and coordinate the signing. That is a real service. It is not an $18,900 service.

What that number is

Commission at 2.1 per cent on a $900,000 Queensland sale is $18,900 plus GST. At the upper end of what agents charge it is materially more.

Here is the part worth being honest about, because the comparison is often presented dishonestly. Your legal costs do not disappear when you use an agent. You pay for your disclosure statement and your conveyancing in both scenarios. They are not a cost of selling privately, they are a cost of selling.

So the real comparison is narrower than the ads suggest, and it still is not close:

So what does the process actually look like

We asked Luke Gould, principal solicitor at Bush to Beach Legal, to walk through how a private sale differs legally from an agency sale in Queensland. His answer was the shortest of the interview.

That is the whole thing. There is no separate legal pathway for a private sale in Queensland, no additional consent, no extra document. The same contract, the same disclosure obligations, the same settlement mechanics.

And Queensland is unusually well set up for it, for a structural reason most sellers have never had explained.

Think about what that means for a private seller. In Victoria, a great deal of negotiation happens before anyone signs anything, which genuinely rewards someone who does it for a living. In Queensland, the standard contract carries the finance and building and pest conditions inside it. You agree a price, the contract goes out with the standard conditions, and the conditional period does the work.

How the sequence runs

Before you list. Your disclosure statement gets prepared and sits ready. Luke’s advice was to have it done before the first open home, not after the first offer, because a buyer has to review and sign it before entering a contract. Through Sellers Disclosure Queensland, the arm of his firm that does this work, a house statement including the searches is $895 and turns around the same day, provided you have found your rates and water notices. A unit takes about a week, because body corporate reports set that pace.

You list and you show the property. This is the part people assume is hard and is not. You open your own front door. We handle the campaign, the portals, the enquiry, and the buyer matching.

An offer arrives and you agree terms. Price, deposit, settlement date, finance date, building and pest date, anything special.

Your solicitor prepares the contract. Same day or within 24 hours, on Luke’s account of it, once he has what he needs.

Everyone signs. On our platform the contract is loaded in and the buyer and seller sign it electronically, which removes the courier-and-scanner phase that used to eat three days. Buyers get a step by step guide to signing.

Your solicitor runs it to settlement. Key dates diarised and monitored, ATO clearance certificate ordered, outgoing lender coordinated, PEXA settlement booked, settlement figures calculated.

Look at that list again and count how many steps require an agent. One. The one where you open your own front door.

The thing that actually needs doing well

Not the contract. The paperwork has a professional attached to it and a fixed fee, and it is nearly impossible to get catastrophically wrong if you engage someone competent early.

What needs doing well is the disclosure statement, and it needs doing by somebody who does them all day. An incomplete or incorrect Form 2 gives your buyer the right to terminate at any time up to settlement, which is the single largest risk a Queensland seller carries. Luke was direct about who gets caught.

We go through that in detail in our full interview with Luke on Queensland disclosure mistakes, including the genuinely strange gaps in what the form requires. There are also three compliance items that sit entirely outside the Form 2 and catch sellers at settlement, covered here.

Do you need a solicitor or a conveyancer

In Queensland, both exist and both do conveyancing. A solicitor can also advise you on the contract terms themselves, draft special conditions, and act if something goes wrong. On a private sale, where nobody else in the transaction is looking after your interests, that is worth something.

Ask for a fixed fee and ask what is excluded from it. Luke’s own framing of why that matters is the reason we refer work to him.

We refer Queensland sellers to Bush to Beach Legal. We do not take a referral fee, and we are not paid to say any of this.

For the full process end to end, start with our guide to selling a house privately in Queensland.

Then look at what it costs to list with us. On a $900,000 sale, the gap between our Lite plan and 2.1 per cent commission is about $18,000, and it goes to you.

General information about Queensland property law, not legal advice, current as at September 2026. Your sale will have facts in it that this article does not. Get advice on your own circumstances. Dollar figures are worked examples on the stated sale price, not market medians. Third party fees quoted are as advised to us in September 2026 and are not ours to guarantee.