More than half of Brisbane house advertisements name no price. In 2 situations the agent is barred by law from telling you

Everybody has been to an open home they could not afford. You spend the Saturday, you fall a little bit in love, and then somebody says a number out loud that was never going to work. Nobody wasted your morning on purpose. The advertisement just never told you.

As of Monday 25 August 2026, there are 5,710 established houses and townhouses advertised for sale across greater Brisbane (postcodes 4000 to 4199, homes already under contract excluded). Only 2,616 of them show a dollar figure. The other 3,094, which is 54%, show a phrase instead. Across every kind of home including units and apartments it is 4,840 of 8,778, so 55%. Whichever way you cut it, the coin flip is real.

And here is the part I did not expect when I started counting. In Queensland there are 2 situations where the agent is not being cagey with you, they are legally not allowed to answer. More on that shortly. First, what these advertisements actually say.

What "contact agent", "offers over" and the rest of the price box actually mean

Every listing has a price box. When there is no number in it there is a phrase, and the phrases are not random. Here is every house and townhouse advertisement in greater Brisbane this morning, sorted by what sits in that box.

Read the third row down. 975 advertisements, 17% of the whole Brisbane market for houses and townhouses, have a price box that says nothing except For Sale. We know it is for sale. That is why it is on the website.

What the rest of them mean, in plain words:

• Offers over $X. A real number, and the largest priced group in Brisbane at 1,400 advertisements. The Queensland Government guidance on property advertising is direct about it: "If you use an offers-over price, it should be the minimum amount the vendor is willing to accept to sell the property." Whether it behaves that way is a separate question and I put it to the record further down.
• Contact agent. No figure, you have to ring. 403 advertisements.
• Submit all offers, offers invited, inviting offers. No figure, the seller wants to see what turns up. 609 advertisements, and this is the wording an advertisement most often changes to when the number comes off.
• By negotiation, price by negotiation, negotiable sale. No figure. 233 advertisements.
• Expressions of interest, or EOI. No figure, usually with a closing date, and more common on the unusual homes. 81 advertisements.
• Price on application, POA, please contact for price, awaiting price guide. The polite version of contact agent. 26 advertisements across Brisbane right now, which is rarer than the phrase's reputation suggests, and small enough that they sit inside the some other wording row rather than getting their own line.
• Auction. No figure, and in Queensland that one is not the seller's choice. 406 advertisements.
• Under offer, under contract. A different animal entirely. It means somebody has already signed, so the advertisement is not hiding a price, it is telling you the price stopped mattering to you. 483 Brisbane house and townhouse advertisements read under contract, under offer or sold this morning, and I have left every one of them out of every count in this post.

Is it legal? In Queensland, telling you is the part that can be illegal

Whenever this comes up, somebody says it should be illegal. I have had it said to me plenty of times and I half believed it myself. So rather than guess, I went and read the Act.

There is no rule in it that says an advertisement has to carry a number. Four sections of the Property Occupations Act 2014 carry the word price in their heading, and 2 of them are about what an agent has to hand the seller while the other 2 are bans on telling anybody else. Not one says a figure has to go on the advertisement.

Victoria went the other way. Over there every residential property advertised for sale has to come with a Statement of Information, and a selling price has to be written in it. New South Wales does not go that far, its underquoting rules police the number when an agent gives you one rather than forcing one out, and that state has flagged new advertising-price rules for late 2026. Queensland has nothing that makes anybody name a price at all, and what our Act has instead is the opposite of what most people assume. Section 216 is where it lives.

The first situation is auction. If a home is going to auction, section 216(2) says the agent must not disclose to anybody outside the seller's own camp the reserve price, an amount the agent thinks would buy it, or a price guide. Maximum penalty 540 penalty units. A penalty unit is the state's fine currency, the regulation sets one at $172.70 from 1 July 2026 and the Act multiplies it out, so 540 of them is $93,258. Section 214 puts the identical rule on the auctioneer. So when you ring about an auction listing and the agent will not give you a range, that is not a sales technique. That is somebody declining to commit an offence.

The second situation is the one that caught me out. Section 216(3): where the home is not going to auction and "the seller has instructed the real estate agent not to disclose the price at which the seller is willing to sell the offered property", the agent must not give you an amount they think would buy it, or a price guide. Same maximum penalty.

Read that twice, because it moves the argument. The seller decides. Once the seller says keep it quiet, the agent cannot tell you even if they would like to. The complaints that reach me about this are aimed at the agent almost every time, and a fair slice of the time the agent is only the messenger.

There is a third piece worth knowing. Section 215 covers what happens when a seller asks an agent what their home is likely to sell for. The agent does not have to answer at all. But if the agent decides to answer, they have to hand over a comparative market analysis with it, which is the comparable sales that justify the number. And section 216(6) says the agent must not give that market information to anybody else without the seller's written approval. So where that file exists it is sitting on somebody's desk, and you are not automatically entitled to a copy.

I am not a lawyer and none of this is legal advice. Every section above links straight to the Act, the full list with dates is in the sources at the bottom of this post, and those sections are short enough to read over a coffee.

Which Brisbane suburbs have the most listings with no price

170 greater Brisbane suburbs have 12 or more houses and townhouses advertised right now. Across those 170 the share of advertisements with no dollar figure runs from 11% at the lowest to 94% at the highest, and the middle suburb sits at 56%. Half of Brisbane's suburbs are worse than a coin flip.

Two honesty notes before anybody screenshots that.

First, there is a 12 advertisement floor on it, and the floor rules out some suburbs you might have expected to see. Brookfield has 5 house and townhouse advertisements on the market this morning that are not already under contract, and all 5 show no price. It is 100%, it is also 5 advertisements, and I am not hanging a story on 5 advertisements. Same for Pullenvale, which is really an acreage market and has 1 house advertisement in this count.

Second, look at the auction column. Wishart has 9 auction campaigns inside 23 advertisements, Kuraby has 11 inside 18, and by law not one of those can carry a price guide. In those 2 suburbs a solid slice of the silence is the campaign type rather than the seller.

A quick word on what that top group is not. Eyeballing it you might see a south side pattern, Sunnybank, Robertson, Wishart, Kuraby, Parkinson and Rochedale South all sitting near each other. I checked, and it is not there. Split the whole market by the river and the south runs 56% of 3,156 advertisements with no figure, the north 55% of 1,789. That is the same number twice. Twelve rows of a sorted table will show you a pattern that the other 158 rows do not have, which is exactly why I print the middle and the ends of every distribution rather than just the top.

At the other end sit the suburbs that just tell you.

Read that second table next to the first one. Macleay Island and Russell Island name a price on nearly everything, and their houses sell around $510k to $590k. Albany Creek, Mitchelton, Sandgate and Kingston are ordinary mainland suburbs that just put the number up. There is no rule of physics making a Brisbane advertisement go quiet.

Both tables above are the 12 rows at each end. The full file has every one of the 239 greater Brisbane suburbs in it, so you can look up your own instead of taking my word for the ends. 170 of the 239 clear the 12 advertisement floor. The other 69 are in the file too, with a column on every row saying which side of the floor it sits on, because a suburb with 3 advertisements on the market can read 100% and mean nothing at all.

It is mostly a price thing, and only a little bit a hard-to-value thing

The obvious theory is that dear suburbs hide the number and cheap suburbs do not. Mostly true, and it climbs like a staircase. Group those 170 suburbs by what their houses have actually been selling for over the 12 months to 25 August 2026 and the share with no price rises the whole way up.

The bottom rung is 2 suburbs only, Russell Island and Macleay Island, so read it as its own market rather than as the start of the ladder. From $750k up it is a steady climb, 50% to 67%.

But price is not the whole story. Measured across those 169 suburbs, the pull between a suburb's median sold house price and its no-price share comes out at 0.43, on a scale where 1 would mean price explains everything and 0 would mean it explains nothing. Real, and nowhere near everything. Sandgate has a $1.5m median and shows a price on 11 of its 15 advertisements. Rochedale South has a $1.18m median and hides it on 49 of 62.

The argument for leaving the price off is that some homes are genuinely hard to value, especially in a thin market where nothing comparable has sold lately. That is a fair argument, and it is testable, so I tested it. Take only the suburbs whose houses sell in the $1m to $1.5m range, then split them by how many houses actually change hands there in a year. The thin ones (under 60 house sales a year) hide the price on 55% of advertisements. The thick ones (60 or more) hide it on 51%. A 4 point gap.

So the hard-to-value story is real and it is small. Where it does show up loudly is property type: on 25 August 2026, 71 of 99 acreage advertisements in Brisbane show no figure, 72%, against 54% for houses. Unusual land, unusual price, fair enough.

And it is not only a top-end habit. Of the 11 mainland Brisbane suburbs where houses have been selling under $900,000 over the 12 months to 25 August 2026, half the advertisements live that morning still show no dollar figure. 193 of 388. That is first home buyer country.

The number comes off when the campaign stalls

This next part only works because I keep a daily copy of every advertisement instead of just reading what is on screen today. Once a price comes off an advertisement, the old wording is gone from the page. It is not gone from my copy.

When an advertisement changes what it says in the price box, I keep both versions. Which means I can count the advertisements that started with a dollar figure and swapped it for a phrase, against the ones that did the opposite.

Between 7 July and 24 August 2026, across greater Brisbane, 777 house and townhouse advertisements took a dollar figure down and never put one back. Over the same 7 weeks, 241 put a figure up and left it there. Another 182 flip-flopped, and those are out of both sides, along with any campaign that simply converted to an auction.

More than 3 go dark for every 1 that comes clean.

What that looks like on real advertisements, wording as published, suburb only:

• Offers Over $1,679,000 became For Sale. Cannon Hill.
• Buyer Guide $849,000 became FOR SALE. Mount Gravatt East.
• Offers over $1,675,000 became Contact Agent. Holland Park.
• New Listing $1,495,000 became New Price. Wellington Point.

That last one is my favourite thing in the entire dataset. The advertisement announces a new price and then declines to say what it is.

The timing tells you why it happens. The median advertisement had been running 36 days on my record when the figure came off. 204 of the 777, better than 1 in 4, had already recorded a public price cut on that same campaign before the number vanished. The last visible ask had a median of $1.2m and ran from $499,000 up to $7m, so this is not a top-end quirk. 657 of the 777 are still advertised today.

Read that sequence in order. List with a number. Cut the number. Take the number away. This is not a marketing style somebody picked on day 1, it is what a campaign does when it stops working.

Which leads somewhere uncomfortable for every price-cut count anybody publishes, mine included. You cannot record a cut on an advertisement that stopped showing a price. When a seller retreats behind a phrase, the retreat leaves my record, and it leaves every portal's record too. So the counts in the weekly Brisbane price cut post and in the price staircase are floors. They always were. This is the mechanism.

Does "offers over" actually mean anything

Fair question, since it is the most common priced wording in Brisbane at 1,400 advertisements, and the Queensland Government guidance says it should be the minimum the vendor is willing to accept.

I matched Brisbane houses and townhouses that sold in the 12 months to 25 August 2026 back to the last offers-over figure their advertisement was showing. 359 sales matched. 240 of them sold at or above that figure. 119, so 33%, sold for less. The median outcome landed 0.9% above the advertised figure, which is basically on the number.

Two thirds of the time the floor holds, then. A third of the time it does not, and to be fair to the sellers a chunk of that will be a figure that got cut late in the campaign or a seller who decided a bird in the hand beat their own opening line. Treat offers over $X as the seller's opening position and nothing stronger. But notice the median: the typical home sells within about a percent of it, which makes it far better information than any phrase in the table above.

What the silence actually costs you

Three things, and only 1 of them is the obvious one.

You cannot shortlist. With 3,094 of 5,710 advertisements carrying no number, a Saturday of inspections gets planned on guesswork, and the correction turns up at the front door when somebody finally says a figure out loud.

You cannot line homes up against each other. Two similar houses, 1 says $1.2m and 1 says For Sale, and there is no honest way to rank them. Which, to be fair, is part of why the phrase gets used at all.

And the seller's case for it is not nothing. If you are selling something genuinely unusual, naming a number caps you at that number, and naming the wrong one either leaves money on the table or scares off the people who would have paid more. An agent will tell you a home introduced without a figure gets judged on the home, and that is a real argument. The trouble is the table above. 975 Brisbane advertisements say nothing but For Sale, and most of those homes are perfectly ordinary.

The third one is what a mortgage broker would raise before either of the others, and it is the sharpest. A contract formed at auction is carved out of the Queensland cooling-off period completely, by section 160 of the same Act. Just about every other residential contract gets 5 business days under section 166, ending at 5pm on the fifth. Auction gets none. There is a tail on it too, because if the home is passed in and you sign as a registered bidder within the next 2 clear business days, section 160 takes the cooling off away from that contract as well. So the 1 campaign type where the law guarantees you will not be handed a price is also the campaign type where you sign with no cooling off and usually no finance clause. Get the money question settled properly before you are standing on a footpath with your hand in the air.

Then there is the wall behind the wall. Of the 45,042 Brisbane property sales in our record for the 12 months to 25 August 2026, 10,763 carry no published sale price at all, so 24%. Houses on their own are far better, 10% of 15,358. Some of that is a seller asking for privacy and some of it simply never gets published. Either way, when you go hunting for the comparable sale that would price the quiet advertisement down the road, roughly 1 in 10 house sales will not have a number attached either.

Buyers are now asking ChatGPT for the price

I put an early cut of these numbers in front of a few thousand Brisbane locals before writing this up, and more than 1 of them said the same thing back: when the advertisement has no price, put the address into an AI chat and ask what it is worth. It deserves a straight answer instead of a sneer, because it is genuinely what people do next.

I have no problem with the instinct. I would rather somebody did that than walked into an open home with nothing at all. But there is 1 test worth putting on any number you get handed, and it has nothing to do with whether a human or a machine produced it.

Ask where the number came from, then go and look at that thing yourself.

A useful valuation can tell you which sales it used, when they sold, how many there were and how alike they were to the home you asked about. If you cannot click through to the sales it counted, you have been handed a feeling with a dollar sign on it. The trouble with a confident wrong answer is that it sounds exactly like a confident right one, and it will never volunteer that it is guessing.

That is not an AI test. Put it on me too. Every number in this post has a date on it, a denominator beside it and a definition at the bottom, and if the definitions are wrong then the numbers are wrong and somebody should say so.

What to do when the advertisement will not say

The practical version, in the order I would do it.

• Price the home yourself first, before you ring anybody. Recent comparable sales on the same street or the next one over, similar land, similar condition. If the only comparable sales you can find are 12 months old, you are pricing last year's market.
• Then ask the agent the questions the law does let them answer. What has sold nearby recently and for how much. How long this campaign has been running. What the last advertised price was and when it changed. How many groups have been through. Whether an offer has been made and knocked back. None of those is a price guide, and the last 2 tell you more about the seller's position than a number would.
• Ask outright whether the home is going to auction, and whether the seller has instructed the agent not to disclose a price. Those are the 2 legal walls above. If the answer is yes to either, stop pushing on that door and price it yourself, because you are asking somebody to break the law.
• Watch the price box over time instead of only today. An advertisement that had a number last month and does not now is telling you something loud. So is one that has run 60 days at an unchanged figure.
• If it is going to auction, sort the money out before the day and sort it properly. An auction contract carries no finance clause and no cooling off, so a pre-approval that nobody has actually verified is a promise rather than a loan. Ask your broker or your lender to confirm the property itself is acceptable security, not just that your income adds up, and get a valuation done on it if you can.
• Put a number in writing anyway. A seller hiding the price still has to answer a real offer, and in a market this slow the ones who say no in August tend to still have your phone number in October.

How I counted this

The definitions carry this post, so here they are straight.

• Brisbane means postcodes 4000 to 4199. The council area plus Logan, the Redlands, the southern Redcliffe peninsula and the bay islands. Same boundary as my other posts.
• Everything is as at Monday 25 August 2026, from a daily record of every listing. Houses and townhouses only, matched on the property type field rather than a text search, because searching the text for house also catches every townhouse. Units, land, acreage and commercial are out except where I say otherwise.
• Advertisements already reading under contract, under offer, deposit taken or sold are excluded from every count. A sold advertisement with no price is not a seller hiding one. That is 483 advertisements removed from a live pool of 6,193, which leaves 5,710.
• Shows a price is measured on the words the advertisement actually displays, not on our own parsed price field. This matters more than anything else here. Right now 1,089 live Brisbane listings carry a parsed price with no dollar sign anywhere in the advertisement text, and 571 that plainly display a dollar figure have no parsed price at all. Measuring the parsed field would have been wrong in both directions.
• Auction campaigns are counted in the headline, because a buyer scrolling the portal still sees an advertisement with no price on it, and then split out separately everywhere it matters. 481 of the 5,710 are auction campaigns and 406 of those carry no figure.
• Suburb tables need 12 or more advertisements. Median sold prices are houses only, actual sales, 12 months to 25 August 2026, and only suburbs with 10 or more sales. The published tables are the 12 rows at each end, and the file of all 239 suburbs in the sources below carries the ones under the floor as well, flagged.
• The price-text history runs from 7 July 2026 to 24 August 2026. The record itself starts on 4 July and I dropped the first 3 days deliberately, because a new record catches a backlog of changes that did not all happen on those days. Campaign ages are floors for the same reason.
• These counts move daily as homes sell, withdraw and list. Run the same query next Tuesday and cells will shift a point or two. Compare the shape across posts, never the decimals.

Sources

Every legal claim above links to the provision it comes from. Here is the same list in one place, with what I read and when I read it. Government guidance pages get rewritten without notice, so the date matters as much as the link.

• Property Occupations Act 2014 (Qld), Queensland Legislation, current as at 1 August 2025. Accessed 25 August 2026. The provisions used here are section 160 and section 166 for cooling off, section 214 for the auctioneer, section 215 for the comparative market analysis and section 216 for what a real estate agent must not disclose.
• Penalties and Sentences Regulation 2025 (Qld), section 4, current as at 1 July 2026, which prescribes the value of a penalty unit as $172.70. Accessed 25 August 2026. Penalties and Sentences Act 1992 (Qld), section 5 is what turns a number of penalty units into dollars.
• Property advertising, Office of Fair Trading, Queensland Government. Page last updated 1 July 2026, accessed 25 August 2026. The offers-over sentence quoted above is that page word for word.
• Understanding property prices and underquoting for buyers, Consumer Affairs Victoria. Page last updated 20 May 2025, accessed 25 August 2026. Used only for the Victorian comparison.
• Underquoting guidance for property professionals, NSW Fair Trading. Page last updated 8 July 2026, accessed 25 August 2026. Used only for the New South Wales comparison.
• Every greater Brisbane suburb in this post, as a CSV. All 239 suburbs, floor or no floor, released under CC BY 4.0.

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