Homes were flooded in February, but real estate agents are under no obligation to tell buyers

Desperate homeowners are selling their property months after it was damaged in a flood disaster in southeast Queensland – but the risk of flooding is not always made clear to home hunters.

While the damage is evident in many homes, it is not so in other homes and sometimes there is no mention of the listings.

ABC spoke with several real estate agents who said their clients made the decision to sell because they couldn’t bear the grief of enduring another flood.

Many said sellers were listing their damaged homes at a discount, hoping that insurance payments would cover any loss they incur.

Indoubili real estate agent Jessica King details a list of flood-damaged properties for weeks.

Her clients bought their “forever home” in Grassville on the west side of Brisbane last year hoping to move in when their two young children are ready to go to school.

They believed that they were decades away from another disaster.

“We were going to temporarily rent it out for 12 months, but then the floods hit,” King said.

“The havoc seeing her firsthand… It basically shattered them. They were honestly just shell-shocked.”

The pair have now decided to sell and move to an area very far from the flood zone, but Ms King said buyers need to be realistic.

“The majority of Brisbane is on a flood plain,” she said.

“People need to be realistic with insurance and put a cat aside in case of a flood.

“This flood was very different from 2011. Some areas that had not previously been flooded were affected, and in some cases homes that were flooded in 2011 were not affected by this flood.

Amy McMahon, Member of Parliament for Southern Brisbane Greens, said many of her local constituents claimed they had not been told their homes had been flooded when they bought them or started renting them in the area.

In the days following the February flood, she was helping clean up a batch of units in eastern Brisbane.

Weeks later, she said, four of the five units were listed for sale online.

“The list did not mention that just a few weeks ago, those apartments had really serious flooding,” she said.

“It is the responsibility of sellers and landlords to notify people if a property is flooded so that people do not have to go through this again.

Otherwise, you are putting people’s homes, lives and property at risk.

Agents are not required to inform potential buyers

Antonia Mercurella, chief executive of the Real Estate Institute of Queensland (REIQ), said there was no legal requirement for agents to tell buyers that a home had previously been flooded.

“We do not have a uniform legal disclosure system,” she said.

“The Queensland government has engaged a group of stakeholders to review this issue and possibly consider a new and more modern form of legal disclosure when it comes to the sale, but at this point this group is not recommending flood disclosure.”

She said this is largely because buyers can get the information elsewhere, either by talking to neighbors or an agent, or through flood mapping.

“if [they] She would have given a wrong answer about it, that would definitely constitute illegal behavior.”

Ms. Mercurella urged buyers and renters to do their research before making an offer.

“A lot of these events are now unpredictable.”

Judna resident Julianar Hellwig can appreciate flood-damaged property owners desperate to leave.

She was away on a trip in Melbourne when her daughter Jessica called, saying that the house they had only occupied for three months and had just finished renovating the day before, was running out of water.

“It was just sleepless nights,” Jessica said. “Like, it’s awful to live through that.”

Hellwig didn’t believe her daughter until she saw pictures of her home in the news.

Three months later, signs on the window show evidence of rising water. Plaster was ripped off the walls and donated furniture filled the lower levels of their home.

Hellwig said she knew the area was in a flood zone, but thought it would be decades before the last “one in 100-year flood” hit.

They have now applied for the Queensland Government’s buyback scheme.

When asked what it means for her and her mother to get out of the zone, Jessica said, “Everything.”

“It is not sustainable to live in fear of floods all the time.

“It’s one of those unforgettable things.”

Hellwigs said that if they could go back in time, they would never buy the property.