The short answer
Australian law does not prohibit cold calling homeowners outright, it attaches obligations to it. The Do Not Call Register Act 2006 restricts which numbers a real estate agent may call, and the telemarketing industry standard of 2017 governs the calling hours, the identification and the duty to end the call on request. Real estate has no exemption from either.
What to take away
- The Do Not Call Register Act 2006 does not ban unsolicited calls. It bans calls to numbers on the register, and the register only tells you which those are after you have checked.
- A wash result is good for 30 days, and the protection belongs to whoever performed the wash, so a list somebody else washed and sold you does not carry its defence across to you.
- Permitted calling hours are set by the standard, not by convention: 9am to 8pm on weekdays, 9am to 5pm on Saturdays, and no calls on a Sunday or a national public holiday.
- If you arrange for somebody else to make the calls, section 11(9) treats you as having caused them, so outsourcing the dialling moves the work and not the liability.
So can an agent ring a homeowner who never asked to be rung?
Nothing in Australian law bans the call. What the law does is attach obligations to it, and they are not optional.
Australia does not prohibit unsolicited calls to households. What it prohibits is calling a number that is on the Do Not Call Register, calling outside a set of permitted hours, and calling without saying who you are. Those prohibitions come from two instruments: the Do Not Call Register Act 2006, which governs which numbers may be called, and the Telecommunications (Telemarketing and Research Calls) Industry Standard 2017, which governs how the call must be conducted. The regulator for both is the Australian Communications and Media Authority. A real estate agent who washes the list, calls inside the hours, identifies themselves at the start and stops when asked is doing what those two instruments describe.
What does the Do Not Call Register actually stop you doing?
It stops you calling numbers that are on it. That is the whole mechanism, and the register is not a list you can read. You submit your numbers, the register tells you which of them are registered, and you may then call the rest.
12.49 million
Australian numbers on the Do Not Call Register at 30 June 2023: 5.83 million fixed line, 6.26 million mobile and 410,000 fax. Registration is permanent, so the pool only grows.
Do Not Call Register statistics
The next question is whether an appraisal call is the kind of call the Act is about. Section 5 defines a telemarketing call as a voice call with a purpose of offering, advertising or promoting goods, services, land or an interest in land, or a business opportunity.
The ACMA has not left the application to inference. Its published guidance for the real estate industry lists, as examples of telemarketing calls, a call to offer a free property appraisal of a person's property and a call to solicit the listing of a person's property. That guidance dates from 2008 and refers to the superseded 2007 standard, so check the current version before relying on the detail, but the definitions it rests on have not changed.
Nor is there an exemption to fall back on. Schedule 1 of the Act exempts four categories of caller, and real estate is not among them:
- Government bodies
- Registered charities
- Registered political parties, independent members and candidates
- Educational institutions contacting students, former students or their households
According to the Do Not Call Register, a number counts as checked if the list was washed in the last 30 days and the number was not on the register then. The protection holds even if the number is added during those 30 days.
That window is where compliant agencies quietly stop being compliant. A list gets washed in March, it produces appraisals, it goes back in the drawer, and in June somebody works it again because it worked last time. Nothing on the screen has changed. The list is now a set of numbers whose status is unknown, and unknown is not the same as clear.
When are you allowed to make the call?
Section 8 of the industry standard sets the hours, and they are tighter than the working day most agents keep. Section 8(4) fixes them to the clock at the called person's usual residential address, which is the detail that catches an agency in Sydney working a list in Perth.
| Day | Earliest | Latest |
|---|---|---|
| Monday to Friday | 9:00am | 8:00pm |
| Saturday | 9:00am | 5:00pm |
| Sunday | No calls | No calls |
| National public holidays | No calls | No calls |
Two practical consequences follow. Sunday, the day an agent has the most time and the day a homeowner is most likely to be home, is closed. And a national list has no single legal window: the overlap between 9am in Perth and 8pm in Sydney is narrower than either, so a compliant multi state campaign starts later and finishes earlier than an agent expects.
What has to be said in the first ten seconds?
Section 9(2) of the standard requires the caller's own given name, the business details, the name of the person who caused the call to be made, and the purpose of the call. Section 9(4) requires contact details for whoever handles complaints, on request. Section 13(1)(b) requires the call to be terminated immediately when the recipient asks, with no grace period, and section 14 requires calling line identification that can receive a return call for at least 30 days.
An opening built around what section 9(2) requires
The agency, the street and the sale are invented. Where a call is made on behalf of somebody other than the caller's own agency, section 9(2) also requires that person to be named.
- Agent
- Good morning, my name is Sarah, I am calling from Vale Property in Blackburn.
- Agent
- I am ringing to see whether you would like an appraisal of your place, and I will be quick. Is now alright?
- Homeowner
- What is this about?
- Agent
- We just sold number 42 and I wanted to let you know what it made. If you would rather I did not call again, tell me now and I will take you off the list permanently.
The last line is not required by anything. It is in this script because an offer to remove somebody, made before they have to ask, is the difference between a call people tolerate and a call people complain about, and complaints are what bring a regulator to your door.
Does the register apply to business numbers and to people you already know?
Registrable numbers are the ones used primarily for private or domestic purposes, so a number used exclusively for business generally cannot be registered. A number used for both, which describes a great many sole traders, can be registered where it is used mostly for private purposes. You find out by washing, not by guessing what a number is for.
Consent is the other path and it is narrower than it sounds. The ACMA's guidance for the real estate industry treats express consent as lasting three months unless it was given for a longer or indefinite period, treats consent inferred from a one off transaction as lasting only for that transaction, and says that having somebody's phone number is not consent. The burden of showing consent existed sits with the caller.
So the appraisal request you took eighteen months ago is not a permission slip. The safe reading is the simple one: wash the list, every list, every 30 days, and treat consent as a reason to be confident rather than a reason to skip the check.
Who wears it when a purchased list turns out to be dirty?
You do. Section 11(9) says that where you arrange for somebody else to make calls and they make them, you are taken to have caused those calls to be made. Outsourcing the dialling to a call centre, an offshore assistant or a piece of software moves the work and not the liability.
The prewashed list is the sharper version of the same trap. The 30 day protection belongs to whoever performed the wash, so a list somebody else washed and then sold you does not carry its defence across to you. Wash it yourself, and keep the result you generated rather than the one you were handed.
What happens if you get it wrong?
The penalties under the Act are civil rather than criminal, and they are structured by day rather than by call. The Do Not Call Register publishes the ranges.
| Instrument | Maximum |
|---|---|
| Court penalty, Do Not Call Register Act | $2.22 million for each day on which infringements occurred |
| Infringement notice | $222,000 for each day on which contraventions occurred |
| Contravention of the industry standard | $250,000 for each contravention |
One thing worth saying plainly, because the rest of this industry gestures at it. We searched for an ACMA enforcement action against an Australian real estate agency for telemarketing and did not find one. That is not a reason to relax. It means the reported cases are large volume telemarketers, and it means nobody in this industry has yet been the example.
What changes when the caller is an AI?
Legally, less than you would think, and the Act says so directly. Section 4 defines a voice call to include a call involving a recorded or synthetic voice, so an AI agent offering an appraisal is making a telemarketing call in exactly the sense the Act means. The number still has to be washed, the hours still apply, the identification obligation still applies, and the call still has to end when the person asks.
What changes is the volume, and volume is what turns a sloppy process into an enforcement action. A human making forty calls a day with a stale list is a small problem. Software making four hundred is the same mistake at ten times the rate.
The process that keeps you inside the lines
What a compliant outbound calling process looks like
Wash the list before every campaign, not before every quarter
Submit the numbers to the Do Not Call Register and keep the result. Diarise the expiry at 30 days. If a campaign is still running on day 31, it stops until the list is washed again.
Set the calling window to the called person's timezone
Not the office's. Section 8(4) fixes the hours to the clock at their usual residential address, so a list spanning states has a window narrower than the standard's hours suggest.
Lock the opening line
Your given name, the business, whoever caused the call to be made, and the purpose, in the first sentence, every time. It is the one part of the call that should not be left to how somebody is feeling that morning.
Record the request to stop, the moment it is made
Not at the end of the day. A number that has asked not to be called should be incapable of being dialled again by anyone in the agency, which means it belongs in the system rather than in a note.
Keep the evidence
The wash result, the time of each call, the identification used and every request to stop. If a complaint arrives eight months later, the file is the only version of events that counts.
The agents who still prospect by phone in this country are mostly the ones who have made those checks automatic. If you want the numbers on what that prospecting produces, we counted them in how many calls it takes to win one listing, and the words that make the calls work are in the appraisal call script.
Common questions
- Do I have to check the Do Not Call Register before every campaign?
- You have to be able to show that each number you called was checked and not registered at the time of the call, and a wash result is treated as valid for 30 days. In practice that means checking before each campaign, and checking again on any list that has been sitting for a month. A list washed once and worked for a quarter is not a washed list.
- Can I call a mobile number, or only a landline?
- Both mobile and fixed line numbers can be listed on the Do Not Call Register, so both have to be washed. At 30 June 2023 the register held 6.26 million mobile numbers and 5.83 million fixed line numbers. There is no rule that makes mobiles fair game, and a mobile reaches a person rather than a house, so a wrong call is harder for the recipient to ignore.
- What if the homeowner asks me to stop calling?
- End the call at that point. Section 13(1)(b) of the industry standard requires a telemarketing call to be terminated immediately when the recipient asks, with no grace period. Then make sure the number cannot be dialled again by anyone in the agency. Recording that in a system rather than a notebook is what stops the same person being called by a colleague next month.
- Is it legal to use an AI voice to make these calls in Australia?
- The Act expressly covers calls made with a recorded or synthetic voice, so the same obligations apply and nothing about the technology creates an exemption. On disclosure, we searched and did not find a general Australian statute requiring a caller to announce that it is an AI, although misleading a consumer about who they are dealing with engages the Australian Consumer Law regardless. Our own agent says it is an AI when asked.
- Does buying a prewashed list make it the vendor's problem?
- No. The 30 day defence belongs to whoever performed the wash, and liability rests with the person who made the call or caused it to be made rather than with whoever supplied the list. A supplier's assurance is a commercial promise between you and them, not a defence. If you buy data, wash it yourself before you call it, and keep the result you generated.
- Do I need to tell people the call is being recorded?
- Recording obligations are separate from the telemarketing rules and they are set state by state under the listening devices and surveillance devices legislation, so this is one to check for your own jurisdiction and to take advice on rather than to take from an article. As a matter of practice, saying it at the start costs a sentence and removes the worst version of the conversation you can have afterwards.
Sources
- 1Do Not Call Register Act 2006. Federal Register of Legislation, Compilation in force, 2026.
- 2Telecommunications (Telemarketing and Research Calls) Industry Standard 2017. Federal Register of Legislation, Made 2017, in force 2026.
- 3Compliance and breaches. Do Not Call Register, Accessed August 2026.
- 4Using the register. Do Not Call Register, Accessed August 2026.
- 5Do Not Call Register statistics. Do Not Call Register, At 30 June 2023.
- 6Dealing with telemarketing. Australian Communications and Media Authority, Accessed August 2026.
Written by
Jason
Founder, ListingLine
Builds the AI voice agent that ListingLine customers point at their farm area. Spends most of his week reading call transcripts, which is an unusual and fairly grim way to learn what Australian homeowners will and will not talk about on the phone.