New Reserve Price Rules Start This Week: What It Means If You're Buying in Victoria

If you are planning to bid at auction in Melbourne over the next few weekends, there is a new rule working in your favour. From this month, agents selling by auction or fixed date sale in Victoria must publish the seller's reserve price at least seven days before the sale. For an auction happening on 16 October, for example, the reserve has to be public by 9 October. It is one of the more practical changes Consumer Affairs Victoria has made to underquoting laws in some time, and it lands at a moment when buyers already have more leverage than they have had in years.

A new kind of transparency

Under the old system, buyers often went into an auction guessing at the seller's true expectations, relying on an agent's quoted range that may or may not have reflected where the property would actually sell. The new rules replace the old Statement of Information with a Property Price Statement, which has to include more detail about the comparable sales used to support the advertised price. The bigger change for bidders is the reserve itself. Once published, it must be shown as a single dollar figure, not a range and not dressed up with words like "offers over" or "from". Sold prices will also become public within a week of a sale becoming unconditional, which should make it easier over time to judge whether a quoted price was realistic in the first place.

What this means if you are bidding

In practice, this takes some of the guesswork out of deciding which auctions are worth your time. If a reserve is well above what you are prepared or able to pay, you can rule a property out before spending money on a building inspection, pest report or legal review of the contract. If it sits within reach, you know the property is genuinely in play and can plan your bidding accordingly. Industry commentators have also pointed out an obvious trade off. The Real Estate Institute of Victoria has raised concerns that mandatory disclosure could push some vendors away from public auction toward private sale, where there is less transparency rather than more. Whether that plays out at scale remains to be seen, but it is a reasonable thing to keep in mind as the rules bed in over the rest of this year.

A floor, not a ceiling

The one thing worth being clear eyed about is what a published reserve actually tells you. It is the seller's minimum, not a prediction of the final price. In a softer market, with auction clearance rates well below where they were twelve months ago and more stock sitting unsold for longer, properties are increasingly selling at or close to reserve. But a popular property in a tightly held pocket can still attract competitive bidding well above it. Treat the published figure as a useful data point for your own research, not a substitute for it.

Why your finance should be sorted first

The real value of knowing a reserve a week out is being able to act on it quickly, and that only works if your finance is already in order. Lenders still assess what you can borrow using a buffer of three percentage points above the loan's actual interest rate, so your genuine borrowing power can look quite different from what a quick online calculator suggests, especially after this year's run of rate rises. Getting your finance approved in principle before you start bidding seriously means that when a reserve is published on a property you like, you already know whether it fits your budget rather than finding out under pressure on auction day.

None of this changes the fundamentals of buying well. Do your own research, get your due diligence done early, and treat the reserve as one input among several. But a little more transparency a week before the hammer falls is a genuine, practical improvement for anyone trying to buy in this market.

Figures in this article are drawn from Consumer Affairs Victoria's guidance on the 2026 property sales and underquoting law changes, effective 1 October 2026 with auction and fixed date sale requirements applying from 16 October 2026, and from Real Estate Institute of Victoria commentary reported by Broker News. The APRA serviceability buffer figure reflects APRA's current prudential guidance.

This article is general information only and does not take into account your personal objectives, financial situation or needs. Please speak with a Claremont Financial broker before making any borrowing decision.