As you may be aware the Queensland Government is in the process of implementing its residential tenancy reform.

There are two key pieces of legislation, namely:

1) the Housing Legislation Amendment Act, which makes quite a lot of amendments to the Residential Tenancies and Rooming Accommodation Act; and

2) the Residential Tenancies and Rooming Accommodation Amendment Regulation, which makes some key changes to the Residential Tenancies and Rooming Accommodation Regulation.

As a result of these amendments to both the Act and the Regulations, there will be a number of important changes to our current Forms, such as, for example, adding the following pop-up warning into our Form 18a:

‘WARNING:
Standard term 6 (and section 70 of the Act) mean that a fixed term agreement may continue as a periodic tenancy if the tenancy has not been ended on the end date of the fixed term.
As the amended Section 291 (which comes into effect from 01 October 2022) removes the ability to give a notice to leave without ground for periodic tenancies, if the fixed term tenancy is not ended, it could continue as a periodic tenancy and termination without grounds may not exist.
It is recommended you obtain your Client’s instructions regarding terminating this Agreement within the statutory timeframes (and with notice to leave expiring no later than the end date) if the Client wishes to avoid the agreement continuing as a periodic agreement.’

We have been aware of this legislation for quite some time and have been amending our forms (and drafting new forms such as our new 'Lessors Response to Request to Keep Pet at the Premises' form), to ensure our forms continue to comply with the applicable legislation and meet Agents needs.

The vast majority of the Queensland residential forms are prescribed, meaning they have to not only comply with the legislation, but must also reflect the authorised form published by the Residential Tenancies Authority.

At this stage, draft pre-release versions of these forms have not yet been released by the RTA. Accordingly, while we have updated our forms to comply with the provisions of the new legislation, we are unable to finalise the forms and advise our agents on the content of the changes until the RTA have issued the new prescribed forms.

The legislation comes into effect on 01 October 2022, and after this date, once the RTA have released the new prescribed forms, we will be releasing our new forms and updating our Forms Change History, to ensure our Agents are aware of the key changes.

In the interim, the RTA have published some information about the legislative changes which are available at the following link:
Rental Law Changes.