REA’s ACCC undertaking: why greater listing flexibility matters for property sellers

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On 14 September 2026 the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission announced it had accepted a court-enforceable undertaking from REA Group, the company behind realestate.com.au. The undertaking, accepted on 11 September, covers contract terms that required or incentivised real estate agencies to list all or most of their properties on the portal, and to place all or a portion of them in its higher-priced listing tiers.

PropertyNow has offered agent-assisted private sales since 2006 and lists on realestate.com.au every day, so this matters to us, and to anyone selling or leasing a property.

What the ACCC announced

The ACCC’s concern was with what the undertaking calls “Listing Requirements”. The undertaking describes subscription agreements that required all of an agency’s properties for sale and rent to be listed on realestate.com.au (on a non-exclusive basis), and the ACCC said REA’s contracts “required or incentivised real estate agencies to list all or a portion of their properties with features that attracted higher fees”.

The ACCC said these terms may have breached section 45 of the Competition and Consumer Act, which prohibits anticompetitive agreements. REA states in the undertaking that it does not share the ACCC’s concerns, but acknowledges them and has offered the undertaking to resolve them. In its ASX announcement, REA also noted that the ACCC had not issued legal proceedings and that there had been no finding of wrongdoing.

Under the undertaking, which runs for three years from 11 September 2026, REA has committed, among other things, to:

not require agencies, as a condition of a listing subscription, to list or commit to listing all or the majority of their properties on realestate.com.au;
not make sponsorship funding for training, education, events or marketing conditional on an agency committing all or most of its listings to a particular listing tier;
from 1 January 2027, not enter into or enforce a listing-tier contract unless it offers the agency the choice to downgrade at least 25 per cent of its committed sale listings, and at least 25 per cent of its committed rental listings, to a lower tier, measured against the agency’s committed listings in the previous calendar half-year.

ACCC Chair Gina Cass-Gottlieb said the undertaking “is expected to enable real estate agents to offer their vendor or landlord clients the listing service that best meets their property advertising needs”.

Why this matters more for some agency models than others

A conventional agency may be better placed to make a portfolio-wide advertising commitment, particularly where premium placement forms part of its standard marketing approach.

PropertyNow works differently. Our customers pay a flat fee to list, and each of them decides individually whether to buy an advertising upgrade such as a Premiere listing. Our model is built around not making that decision for them. Committing the majority of hundreds of individual sellers’ listings to a premium product would mean charging every customer for an upgrade most hadn’t asked for, or absorbing the cost ourselves.

So a commercially general pricing structure, applied the same way to every agency, can have very different practical consequences depending on how that agency is built. Portfolio-wide commitments are easier to accommodate where an agency makes advertising decisions centrally, and far harder where that decision belongs to each individual property owner.

Our September 2025 discussion with REA

In September 2025, PropertyNow raised the issue directly with REA’s National Sales Manager, following a phone conversation about REA’s Premiere Plus arrangement. In our follow-up email, our own contemporaneous record of that discussion, we set out our understanding that the arrangement included a downgrade allowance of roughly 20 per cent, so around 80 per cent of new listings would otherwise sit at the premium tier.

We explained that this was commercially impossible for PropertyNow, because our customers choose upgrades individually and we could not absorb the cost of upgrading listings where the customer had not chosen that product. We proposed instead that qualifying agent-assisted private sale businesses be able to buy individual Premiere upgrades at pricing equivalent to mainstream agency arrangements, without committing the whole portfolio. The aim was to let an individual PropertyNow seller make their own advertising choice without being disadvantaged because their agency, by design, cannot commit a whole portfolio on their behalf. Preferential pricing was never the point.

That correspondence is our record of a commercial discussion, not an ACCC finding. The ACCC has said it heard from many real estate agents who were concerned about REA’s contract requirements. PropertyNow does not suggest that its September 2025 correspondence prompted the current action.

A debate that goes back a decade

The tension between portfolio-level premium arrangements and individual vendor choice is not new. In 2016, Property Media Group, applying on behalf of itself and around 170 real estate agents, sought ACCC authorisation to negotiate collectively with online listing portals including realestate.com.au and Domain. PMG argued that portal pricing effectively pushed agents into “premium all” style contracts and limited their ability to offer each vendor the advertising package that suited that property and budget. That was PMG’s case, and the ACCC did not accept it: its draft determination of August 2016 proposed to deny authorisation, noting among other things that agents “can and do enter into a diversity of contracts and listing types”, and PMG withdrew its applications the following month. Even so, the same question was being argued in front of the regulator ten years before this month’s undertaking. PropertyNow’s own engagement with the ACCC on how portal structures affect alternative models goes back to 2012 and 2017, on different issues from today’s.

Where we stand today

“For us, this comes down to consumer choice. A PropertyNow seller should be able to decide whether a premium advertising upgrade makes sense for their property, without that choice being shaped by whether their agency can commit its entire portfolio to premium products. Greater flexibility should make it easier for different agency models to compete, while leaving the advertising decision with the individual seller.”
Coreyna Blachut, CTO, PropertyNow

What we hope this means for sellers

Realestate.com.au remains an important advertising portal for our customers today. The downgrade commitment and the end of all-or-most listing requirements should give agencies more room to shape arrangements around what clients actually want. The question for alternative models like PropertyNow is how that greater flexibility ultimately flows through to the pricing and availability of individual premium upgrades. The undertaking does not guarantee any particular outcome there. We hope it means sellers can make those advertising choices on increasingly comparable terms, regardless of the agency model they choose.

Over the next three years, the outcome to watch is whether the benefits, as the ACCC put it, “flow from the real estate agents to their clients, Australian property owners”.

Our guide to selling a property privately explains the flat-fee model, and our optional add-ons page lists the upgrades customers can choose.