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Sustainability declaration adds costs to real estate sales

The new sustainability declaration requirements impose an unwarranted extra cost on homeowners and delays the residential sales process, as the complex form must be completed before a home is marketed and the information provided must be included with all marketing material.

These requirements act as a brake on effective real estate marketing. There will inevitably be homes that do not receive sufficient marketing exposure and home owners may suffer lower realised sale prices as a result.

The intellectually or even financially disadvantaged may have less capacity to accurately complete the declaration.

Consumers who are selling their homes face unfair and substantial fines for failing to accurately complete the declaration. They also face the huge cost of civil lawsuits if the form is inaccurate in any detail.

Commercial providers have already sprung up to capitalise on this further layer of bureaucracy to complete the forms for homeowners - with no guarantee of any greater accuracy. The form completion expense may have to be incurred several times during the sales process given that the information must always be up-to-date.

Real estate agents also expose themselves to liability if they inadvertently, for example, fail to include a declaration in marketing material or the declaration contains outdated information.

On behalf of homeowners and real estate agents, I urge you to abolish this ill-conceived and costly procedure.

Yours faithfully,