Insurables — Australian business risk, sourced and dated

Property managers: public liability requirements in Western Australia

Cover for legal liability to third parties for personal injury or property damage arising from business activities.

Data as at

Verified for Western Australia

  • Licence liability condition: No professional indemnity requirement for real estate agents. A full-text reading of the Act found no substantive PI obligation. Protection runs through the REAL ESTATE AND BUSINESS AGENTS FIDELITY GUARANTEE FUND, which reimburses people who suffer loss of trust money or trust property through the criminal or fraudulent actions of a licensed agent. AND NOTE A TRAP: Western Australia DOES require professional indemnity insurance — but of SETTLEMENT AGENTS, the conveyancers, under the separate Settlement Agents Act 1981 (WA), where a triennial certificate holder must at all times be insured under the Commissioner's Master Policy Agreement. Two property professions, one state, opposite answers. THE THING NOBODY EXPLAINS: Australia protects the clients of real estate agents in TWO fundamentally different ways, and which one you live under decides whether you need professional indemnity insurance at all. Some jurisdictions require the AGENT to carry PI. Others require no insurance whatsoever and instead run a STATUTORY FUND — financed by the interest earned on agents' trust accounts — that compensates clients directly when an agent misuses trust money. New South Wales, Tasmania and the Northern Territory take the insurance route. Victoria, Western Australia, South Australia and the ACT take the fund route. Queensland sits between them. An agent moving state does not merely face a different limit; they face a different mechanism. WA · effective 2026-08-24 Western Australia Government · 2026-08-24
  • Licence evidence required: None for a real estate agent. A settlement agent must hold a current certificate of insurance under the Commissioner's Master Policy at all times. WA · effective 2026-08-24 Western Australia Government · 2026-08-24
  • Licensing body: In WA, property management is NOT a separate licence — WA defines a "real estate transaction" to include the leasing and letting of land and expressly to include the collection of rents or other payments for use or occupation. The phrase "property manager" does not appear in the Act at all. ACROSS AUSTRALIA: six of seven jurisdictions fold property management into the real estate agent licence; only South Australia and Tasmania name it separately, and even they do so under the same Act rather than a separate statute. Anyone hunting for a standalone "property manager licence" is usually looking for something that does not exist. WA · effective 2026-08-24 Western Australia Government · 2026-08-24

What contracts commonly ask for

Principals and head contractors set their own insurance requirements, and those are frequently higher than a licence condition. The requirement that binds is the higher of the two, and both have to be read from the actual document.

What this cover costs

This site publishes no cost benchmark for this cover. A benchmark needs a real sample of documents, and none is published until the sample is large enough to compute a median honestly. A benchmark from a handful of policies is a guess with a decimal point.

Sources