Insurables — Australian business risk, sourced and dated

Real estate agents: professional indemnity requirements in Tasmania

Cover for legal liability arising from professional advice or services, written on a claims-made basis.

Data as at

Verified for Tasmania

  • Licence liability condition: YES — and Tasmania is one of only three jurisdictions that requires it. Section 131(2): a property agent "must maintain insurance cover that indemnifies the property agent against any liability that the property agent may incur in respect of any loss or damage suffered by other people occasioned by any act, default, omission, neglect or defalcation by the property agent in the course of his or her business". The penalty runs to 500 penalty units. Tasmania is BELT AND BRACES: it requires the insurance AND maintains a separate Property Agents Guarantee Fund, where Victoria, WA, SA and the ACT rely on the fund alone. 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. TAS · effective 2026-08-24 Tasmania Government · 2026-08-25
  • Licence evidence required: Evidence on every renewal of the policy, in a form the Board specifies. And the consequence of a gap is automatic: section 132(1) provides that the licence "is to be taken to have been suspended during any period when the property agent does not have the insurance cover required". No decision, no notice — the same automatic-suspension mechanism Tasmania uses for conveyancers. TAS · effective 2026-08-24 Tasmania Government · 2026-08-25
  • Licensing body: Consumer, Building and Occupational Services, under the Property Agents and Land Transactions Act 2016 (Tas). TAS · effective 2026-08-24 Tasmania Government · 2026-08-25

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