Somewhere in the file for the building you have just settled on is a date you did not choose: the day its rent last went up, under the previous owner, for a tenant who may since have moved out. In Queensland that date is yours now. Your next increase waits on it, and any tenant in the building can ask you to prove it.
Everything about how a portfolio is kept argues against that. Operations are organised around agreements and owners. A tenancy starts and a file opens; it ends and the file closes; a building changes hands and the new owner starts a ledger of their own. For years the rent increase clock lived in the same place, attached to the tenancy, so the instinct that a new agreement or a new owner meant a fresh start was not laziness. It was how the rule worked.
Since June 2024 the rule reads through all of that. The 12 months run from the last increase for the premises, whoever the tenant was, whoever the agent was, and whoever owned the building when it happened. A new agreement at a higher rent is itself an increase, so a vacancy re-let at a new figure starts the clock as surely as a notice does. The agreement has to carry the date of the last increase, and a tenant who asks for the evidence behind it is owed that evidence within 14 days, with the previous tenant's details blacked out.
The cost of the old instinct arrives in three shapes. The first increase after settlement, scheduled on your own calendar rather than the building's, lands months early and is an offence rather than a mistake. The sale file that never carried the date, so a tenant's request sends you back to a vendor's agent who has moved on, with 14 days running. And the quiet one: the increase you do not take at all, because nobody can say for certain that you are allowed to, so the building sits at the old rent for a year it did not have to.
None of these is a pricing problem. The number was always yours to set. They are record problems, and the record they need is a fact about the building rather than about any tenant: when did the rent last rise here, under anyone, and what document shows it. A portfolio that keys its records to tenancies has no natural home for that fact, which is why it is so often missing on the day it is asked for.
In Queensland the rent increase clock is a fixture of the premises, and it changes hands with the keys.
Handled differently, the date becomes a property fact and stays with the property. Every tenancy, every agent, and every owner reads from the same record, so the earliest lawful date for the next increase is computed from the building's history rather than from the newest piece of paper. The agreement carries the date because the record does. A tenant's request is answered from the file in an afternoon, with nothing to chase. And an acquisition arrives with its clock already read: the first thing you learn about a building you are buying is when its rent can next move, which is a better thing to know before settlement than after.
Scaalr runs each Queensland increase as a scheduled event validated against the state's profile, the two-month floor and the 12-month window checked when you set it and again before anything serves, the notice composed, signed, and recorded, and the worklist's market card saying plainly that the premises' last increase across owners and tenants is yours to verify first. The rule, the three dates a notice must carry, and the 14-day proof duty are in QLD Rent Increases: 12 Months Per Premises, 2 Months' Notice.
For the complete guide to the 12-month rule, the notice, and the proof, see: QLD Rent Increases: 12 Months Per Premises, 2 Months' Notice.
Put one building on it first. $99 covers your first 50 units, Alex included. Cancel anytime.