There is a question sitting at the centre of Australia’s new home construction market that almost nobody wants to ask out loud.

Who is accountable when a sales consultant overpromises? Who is responsible when a builder broker sets unrealistic expectations, places an unprepared client with the wrong builder, and the whole thing falls apart? Who can a client go to when the person who guided their biggest financial decision had no formal qualification, no licence, and no regulatory oversight of any kind?

Right now, the answer is nobody.

Emily Pollard, founder of Nesta Builder Brokers and co-host of The Good Builder Podcast, has been raising this issue directly with industry bodies. The response she has received tells its own story.

“I literally called the QBCC. I was like, what are you going to do? There is extremely vulnerable people who are being taken advantage of in this industry. Who is going to step in here?”

The QBCC, to its credit, licences builders. But it does not licence the people bringing clients to those builders. It does not touch new home sales consultants, channel partners, or builder brokers. The real estate industry has its own licensing requirements, but those apply to the sale of established homes, not new construction. The gap is significant, and it is wide open.

What a Builder Broker Actually Does

To understand why this matters, it helps to understand how the new home sales ecosystem actually works.

In residential construction, a builder broker or channel partner acts as an intermediary between clients and building companies. They run their own lead generation, qualify buyers, match them to builders on their panel, and guide them through the sales and pre-construction process.

It is a role that carries real influence over some of the most consequential financial decisions Australians make. Building a home involves a client’s life savings, often their superannuation, and typically 30 years of mortgage repayments. The person advising them through that process is completely unregulated.

Pollard is not suggesting all operators in this space are acting badly. Her point is structural. When there is no licensing body, no ethics board, no minimum qualification and no regulatory oversight, the quality of operators across the market becomes entirely uneven.

“Where’s the ethics board? If you want to create change, you want to improve an industry and the people who work within it and the client experience, then there has to be something that changes.”

The Base Price Problem

One of the clearest examples of the harm that flows from this regulatory vacuum is base pricing.

In established real estate, an agent who deliberately underquotes a property by a substantial margin can face fines and lose their licence. That accountability does not exist in new home construction.

The practice of advertising a base build price that bears little relationship to what a home will actually cost at contract has become common across the sector. The gap between the advertised price and the final contract sum is often significant.

“It is illegal from a real estate agent to underquote a listing for a pre-established house by $200,000 and they can be fined and lose their license. Why are we allowed base pricing that’s hundreds of thousands of dollars under the actual cost to lead people in?”

The answer is that there is no mechanism to prevent it. No licence to lose. No regulator to answer to. No enforceable standard.

The client who signs up based on an advertised price of $230,000 and receives a contract for $349,000 has limited recourse. The salesperson who set that expectation faces no formal consequence. The builder who priced honestly at the contract stage bears the reputational cost of a client who feels misled, even if the builder did nothing wrong.

The Scale of What Clients Do Not Know

Pollard works directly with clients through the new home process and describes the level of confusion she regularly encounters.

“I have an inclusion list that has 60 different things and I have no idea what any of them mean. That’s fact. Because everyone offers something different, which is fine. But if there’s no education around this for clients, they’re really just, to be honest, pissing in the wind.”

This is not a failure of individual clients. Most people who build a home do it once or twice in a lifetime. They are not expected to understand the difference between an H1 and H2 slab classification, what a BAL rating means for their build cost, or how covenant requirements affect their design choices.

That is precisely why the role of a builder broker or new home sales consultant is so important. And precisely why the absence of any standard of competence for people performing that role is so problematic.

An unqualified operator can set expectations, recommend builders, and guide a client through a process they do not fully understand, all without any obligation to demonstrate that they know what they are doing.

The Mortgage Broker Parallel

Pollard draws a direct comparison to the mortgage broking industry, and it is a useful one.

Twenty years ago, the mortgage broking sector operated with minimal oversight. Quality varied enormously. Bad outcomes for clients were common. Over time, a licensing and regulatory framework was introduced. Today, over 70 percent of home loans in Australia are written through mortgage brokers, and the sector is substantially more professional as a result.

“Now, over 70 percent of loans come from a mortgage broker. People want someone to do the work for them. They want an unbiased opinion, they want options, they want to be educated on their options. And they want to make decisions. And that’s the game changer here, I feel, in this industry as to what could happen. But we need to be mindful that the people who are stepping into these businesses need to understand the industry.”

The parallel is precise. New home construction is a complex, high-value transaction where most clients have limited knowledge. Intermediaries play an important role in helping clients navigate it. The difference is that mortgage brokers are now accountable. Builder brokers are not.

Who Gets Hurt When It Goes Wrong

When poor advice, unrealistic expectations or mismatched client-builder pairings lead to bad outcomes, the consequences are not evenly distributed.

Clients carry the financial and emotional cost of builds that fall apart, blow out in cost, or fail to meet what they were told to expect. In some cases, they have committed deposits or prelim fees to a process that was flawed from the start.

Builders carry reputational damage when clients blame them for outcomes that originated in the sales process. They absorb the cost of managing unhappy clients through builds they never should have taken on.

And the broader industry carries a perception problem it has struggled to shake for years.

The unregulated space allows poor operators to continue operating. It creates an environment where even clients who work with reputable brokers cannot easily tell them apart from those who are not. And it makes it harder for the professionals in the space to demonstrate that the service has genuine, qualified value.

What Regulation Would Need to Cover

Pollard is not arguing for red tape. She is arguing for a basic standard of competence and accountability.

A licensing or registration framework for new home sales intermediaries could reasonably require demonstrated knowledge of residential construction processes, understanding of common contract conditions, disclosure of commercial arrangements with builders, clear obligations around how clients are qualified and matched, and a complaints process with genuine consequences.

None of that would prevent competition or limit the growth of the sector. It would raise the floor.

Right now, anyone can position themselves as a builder broker, channel partner or new home sales consultant and begin advising clients on one of the most significant financial decisions of their lives. The builder they work with is licensed. The building inspector is licensed. The conveyancer is licensed. The mortgage broker is licensed. The builder broker is not.

What This Means for Builders

For builders, this is not someone else’s problem.

Every client who arrives at your door with expectations set by an unqualified intermediary creates a problem for your business. Every contract that falls over because a client was brought in with an unrealistic budget or a mismatched brief is a cost you absorb. Every review written by a client who feels misled by the sales process damages your reputation, regardless of the quality of your construction.

Builders have an interest in seeing this space cleaned up. A more professional and accountable intermediary market means better-qualified clients, fewer contract fallouts, stronger trust across the sector, and a cleaner line of accountability when things go wrong.

Pollard has started raising this publicly. It is a conversation the industry needs to have.

“If you can do some type of audit, ask your staff where the problems are. If you think things are pitch perfect, then where do your results want to be? What milestones are you reaching? And if you’re not, let’s figure out why.”

The absence of regulation in this space has persisted because no single body has claimed it as their responsibility. That is unlikely to change without sustained pressure from the industry itself.

For more conversations about the issues that matter to builders, listen to The Good Builder Podcast, visit thegoodbuilder.com.au and subscribe to the weekly newsletter.

This article contains general information only and does not constitute legal, financial or professional advice.

Author: TGB Editorial