Victoria's real housing reform is the price record, not the reserve
Publishing auction reserves will generate fights and may not survive. Publishing every sale price for 18 months quietly dismantles the asymmetry that made underquoting pay. Make that half permanent.
When Australian homes are sold at auction, the seller sets a secret minimum price, called the reserve. Agents have long advertised prices below what a home is likely to fetch, drawing crowds of bidders who cannot win. From this month, Victorian law makes agents publish the reserve a week before the auction, and publish the actual sale price for at least 18 months afterwards.
The headline is the published reserve, but the lasting reform is the published sale price. A free public record of what houses actually fetch lets every buyer check an agent's quote, which no regulator can do at scale.
The number nobody has to tell you
The figure that matters most in a house purchase is the one that has been hardest to obtain: what the place down the road actually sold for. Everything else in the transaction is an estimate built on top of it. From this month, in Victoria, agents must publish that number and keep it published for at least 18 months.
That is the half of the new law that got the smaller headline, and it is the half that will still be doing useful work in five years. The other half — publishing the seller’s reserve price a week before the auction — produced the minister’s soundbite about wasted weekends and the industry’s objection that reserves move. It is also the half most likely to be litigated, amended or quietly watered down.
Underquoting is an asymmetry, not a character flaw
Underquoting means advertising a property at a price well below what it is expected to fetch, so that more people turn up and bid. The cost lands on buyers who were never in contention: building inspections, conveyancing advice, finance applications, and the weekends the Victorian consumer affairs minister referred to. None of that is refundable when the hammer falls two hundred thousand dollars above the quoted range.
The reason the practice has been so hard to stamp out is structural. A quoted price range is supposed to be grounded in comparable sales. The agent has the comparables. The buyer, in the main, does not. Enforcement therefore means a regulator reconstructing, after the fact, what one agent knew about one property — expensive, slow, and necessarily rare.
A public register of outcomes flips that. If every sale price is on the record for a year and a half, any buyer can test a quoted range against the street before spending a cent on a building report. Thousands of people checking cheaply beats one enforcement team checking expensively. It is the only form of consumer protection in housing that scales.
The fragile half
A reserve is the lowest price a seller will accept. Publishing it a week out is a bigger change to the auction than it sounds: a sale with a secret floor is a game in which neither side knows where the floor sits, and publishing it turns the floor into an anchor that shapes the opening bid and the finish.
It also runs into a dilemma the government has not obviously resolved. Either the published reserve binds the vendor on the day, in which case the Real Estate Institute of Victoria’s complaint has force — markets and bidding genuinely do move what a seller will accept between Monday and Saturday — or it does not bind, in which case what has been disclosed is an intention, and intentions can be revised upward at five to twelve. Transparency about a number that may be abandoned is not transparency about the price.
The state should say which it is, in terms an ordinary bidder can understand, because the answer determines whether the rule is worth defending at all.
Why the register matters beyond the auction
Housing finance runs on comparable sales. Lenders’ valuers use them. Automated valuation models used in mortgage approvals are built on them. Buyers deciding what to offer, and what deposit they need, are implicitly doing the same arithmetic with worse inputs. When the record of what properties fetched is not required to be published, the quality of anyone’s estimate depends on who they can pay for data. Publishing outcomes is therefore not just a consumer-affairs measure; it narrows the gap between the professional estimate and the household one.
The case against this argument
Two objections deserve answering properly.
The first is the industry’s: that the rules are confusing and inconsistent, and that a published reserve may deter bidders who conclude they cannot reach it, thinning auctions and costing vendors — who are ordinary people too, often in a market that has been among the country’s weakest. That is a real risk. But a thinner auction of serious bidders is the point. The bidders deterred are, by construction, the ones who were never going to win, and whose attendance was the whole purpose of a misleading quote. And the weakness of the reserve rule is an argument for fixing the reserve rule, not for abandoning the price record alongside it.
The second is privacy: a sale price is a household’s financial position made public. But it is a transaction concluded in public, at a public auction, already known to the agent, the buyer, the underbidders and the state revenue office. Making it available to the next buyer in the same street is not an intrusion. If anything, 18 months is the wrong number in the wrong direction. Comparables do not expire on schedule.
What would settle it
One statistic would resolve the argument about reserves within a year: how often a published reserve was changed on auction day, and in which direction. Nobody currently has to report it. Somebody should.
Consumer Affairs Victoria should do three things this financial year. Publish the sale-price data as a single free, downloadable register rather than leaving it scattered across individual listing pages, where it is discoverable only by people who already know what to look for. Extend the retention period well beyond 18 months, because comparable sales do not stop being comparable at the anniversary. And collect and publish, each year, how often published reserves were revised on the day and by how much.
The other states and territories watching Victoria should copy the price register first and argue about reserve disclosure afterwards. The register is the cheap, durable part; the reserve rule is the part that still has to prove itself.
What would change this view
If Consumer Affairs Victoria publishes figures within twelve months showing that published reserves held unchanged on auction day in the large majority of sales, and that underquoting complaints fell sharply over the same period, then the reserve rule is carrying the load and I have the two halves backwards.
In that case the right conclusion is that a binding, pre-committed floor disciplines quoting more directly than a sales register ever could, and other states should copy the reserve rule first. I would also expect the opposite evidence to be visible: a published count of reserves revised upward on the day would settle the dilemma immediately, which is precisely why that number should be collected.
Worked from
- New Victorian laws reveal auction reserves, so buyers stop wasting weekends
ABC News · 2026-10-15