REIQ Form 6: what agencies get wrong in the listing chain

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title: "REIQ Form 6: what agencies get wrong in the listing chain" description: "The Form 6 appoints the agent — it isn't the contract of sale. Confusing the two costs agencies expired appointments, commission disputes and awkward conversations at settlement. Here's the distinction, and where it usually breaks." date: "2026-07-27" category: "Queensland" published: true

Ask ten Queensland agents what a Form 6 is and you'll get ten correct answers. Ask ten pieces of real estate software and you'll get something closer to a shrug: a PDF stapled to a listing record, or worse, a "contract" field that quietly merges two entirely different documents into one.

The distinction matters, and it matters most on the days nobody is thinking about it.

What the Form 6 actually is

The Property Occupations Form 6 is the appointment of a property agent, resident letting agent or property auctioneer. A client signs it to appoint your agency. Under the Property Occupations Act 2014 (Qld) it has to be signed before an agent can lawfully provide services to that client — it is the document that makes the relationship legitimate, not a formality that follows it.

It records:

• the property and the client appointing you
• whether the appointment is open, sole or exclusive
• the start and end dates of the appointment
• the commission structure as agreed
• the agreed marketing costs and any other authorised expenses

Every one of those is a live fact for the length of the campaign. None of them is a filing-cabinet detail.

What the Form 6 is not

It is not the contract of sale. The contract is signed by buyer and seller once an offer is accepted, and it carries a completely different set of fields: the price, the deposit, the finance date, the building-and-pest date, settlement.

The Form 6 opens the listing. The contract closes it. They are months apart and they answer different questions.

This sounds obvious written down. It stops being obvious the moment a system gives you one place to put "the paperwork."

Where it actually breaks

Three failure modes turn up again and again, and none of them are about paperwork discipline. They're about where the dates live.

The appointment that quietly expires

A sole appointment has a statutory cap for residential property. A campaign runs long — a price adjustment, a slow winter, a vendor who needs convincing — and the end date passes without anyone looking at it. Nobody notices until there's a reason to notice, which is usually the worst possible moment.

The date isn't hidden. It's on a signed document that somebody filed correctly. It just isn't anywhere the team looks during a campaign, because the software treated the appointment as an event that happened rather than a state that persists.

The commission that doesn't match

Commission is agreed at appointment and invoiced at settlement, often three or four months apart. In between, the deal has been discussed in a dozen conversations, and somebody remembers the number slightly differently.

If the only authoritative copy of what was agreed is a scanned PDF, verifying it means going and finding the scan. Most people go with what they remember. That works until it doesn't.

The marketing spend nobody reconciled

Authorised marketing spend is on the Form 6. Actual spend accumulates across a campaign in a different system, or in nobody's system. At settlement the two get compared for the first time, and any gap has to be explained to a vendor who signed something specific.

What good looks like

None of this needs clever software. It needs the appointment treated as a record with a state, not a document with a filing location:

1. The appointment is its own record. Type, term, commission and marketing spend as structured fields, not an attachment.
2. The end date is visible during the campaign. Next to the listing, where the team already looks — not on the document.
3. The contract of sale is separate. Price, deposit and the key dates belong to their own record with their own deadlines, because they are their own document.
4. Reappointments are dated records too. An extension is a new fact, not an edit that overwrites the old one.

That's the model Agentiv uses for Form 6 appointments: the appointment and the contract as two tracked records, because that is what they are.

One thing this isn't

Tracking is not signing, and none of this is legal advice. Agentiv records the fields and surfaces the dates; your existing process — REIQ Realworks or whatever you use today — still executes the document. If you want advice on how a specific appointment should be completed, that's a conversation for your solicitor or the REIQ, not a software vendor.

The software's job is narrower and duller than that: make sure nobody finds out about a date after it has already passed.