Buy a house in Queensland, and you get five business days to change your mind. Buy a warehouse, and you get nothing. There is no statutory cooling-off period on commercial and industrial purchases, so your only protection is the one you negotiated into the contract before you signed it.

That changes what a checklist is for. The list itself is the easy part. The hard part is running the right checks in the right order within a window that is usually two to four weeks long, and knowing which findings are worth walking away over.

What do I need to know before buying commercial property?

Before buying commercial property, you need to confirm four things: the intended use is lawfully approved, the title carries no interest you cannot live with, the land is not on a contamination register, and every lease produces the income the listing claims. Everything else on a due diligence checklist supports one of those four.

Most deals that fall over do so on one of them, and usually on the first. A tenant paying rent for years does not prove the use was ever approved. Plenty of Brisbane industrial sheds have a mezzanine, an office fit-out or a wash bay that nobody ever lodged an application for, and the liability transfers to whoever owns the building when the council notices.

Your due diligence period is your whole safety net.

A commercial due diligence period is a negotiated contract condition, commonly 14 to 30 days from signing, during which the buyer can investigate the property and terminate if the results are unsatisfactory. It is not automatic. Unlike residential contracts, commercial contracts include no statutory cooling-off period in Queensland, so an unconditional signature is binding from the moment it is given.

Two things worth pushing for when the condition is drafted. Make the satisfaction test subjective, so you decide whether the results are acceptable rather than arguing about whether a defect is material. And start the clock when the seller delivers the documents, not on the contract date, as a week spent chasing lease copies is a week of your period gone.

Pro Tip: Agents will sometimes push for a short period to keep other buyers warm. A tight timeframe is negotiable, but the searches are not. If the period is too short to complete them, that is an argument for a longer period, not for fewer checks.

Run the checks in order of what they cost.

This is where most checklists leave buyers stranded. Thirty items in no particular order means a buyer commissions a structural report in week one and discovers in week three that the zoning never permitted the use. Work from cheapest to dearest, and stop the moment something disqualifies the property.

The logic is simple. A title search and a contamination register search cost less than a tank of fuel and can end a deal in an afternoon. A structural engineer’s report costs thousands and tells you nothing useful about a building you were never going to be allowed to use the way you planned.

There is a second reason for the order. Findings in the first tier give you room to renegotiate in the second. An easement or an unapproved mezzanine discovered early is a price conversation, and knowing when to walk away from a negotiation is easier when you found the problem on day two rather than day 19.

The seller’s disclosure statement is a start, not a substitute.

Since 1 August 2025, most Queensland sellers must give a buyer a Form 2 seller disclosure statement and prescribed certificates before the contract is signed, and the scheme covers commercial property as well as residential. A buyer may be able to terminate if the seller does not comply. It does not replace due diligence before buying commercial property, because the statement covers title and register matters rather than building condition, lease quality or whether the income holds up.

The exemptions matter more in commercial than anywhere else. Disclosure is not required where the buyer is a listed corporation or a government entity, where the parties are related and the buyer gives a waiver notice, or where the price exceeds $10 million including GST and the buyer signs a waiver. If you are asked to sign a waiver, understand that you are giving up a statutory protection, not completing a formality.

Contamination is the one item where the register search is genuinely decisive. The Environmental Management Register and the Contaminated Land Register are maintained by the state; a seller must notify a buyer if the land is listed, and a failure to do so can give the buyer a right to rescind. Former service stations, panel shops, dry cleaners and older industrial sites are the usual candidates, and a listing does not automatically stop a purchase. It changes who carries the remediation obligation, which is a question for your solicitor before settlement rather than after.

If it is tenanted, the lease is the asset.

You are not merely buying a building with tenants in it. You are buying the leases, and the building is where they happen to sit. Read every lease in full, including the variations and side letters that never made it into the sale information pack.

• Rent and reviews. Confirm what is actually being paid against what the schedule says, and check whether reviews are fixed, CPI-linked or market. A market review in a soft sector can go down.
• Term, options and expiry profile. Cluster expiries are the risk nobody prices. Three tenancies ending in the same quarter is a very different asset to three ending 18 months apart.
• Outgoings recovery. Check what the lease allows the landlord to recover, and be careful with retail. Where the Retail Shop Leases Act 1994 (Qld) applies, land tax is excluded from recoverable outgoings and a clause requiring a retail tenant to pay it is void, which can quietly move a cost onto your side of the ledger.
• Whether the Act applies at all. A lease may fall under the retail regime if the premises are under 1,000 square metres and used for a retail business, or sit in a retail shopping centre. That brings disclosure obligations, a statutory minimum five-year occupancy right in most cases, and limits on what you can pass through.
• Security. Bank guarantees, security deposits and personal guarantees should be verified as current and transferable, not assumed from a schedule.

Arrears, rent-free periods still running and incentives yet to be amortised all sit behind a clean-looking rent roll. Ask for the bank statements, not just the summary.

What the inspection should cover

A commercial property inspection checklist is not a longer version of a building and pest report. The structure matters, but so do the compliance items that become your problem at settlement: fire safety systems and their maintenance records, an asbestos register for buildings of the relevant age, the certificate of classification confirming approved use, slab loading and clearance for industrial, roof condition and age, three-phase power and services capacity, accessibility, and any make-good obligations you inherit.

Read the report for cost and timing rather than for a pass or a fail. A roof with five years left is not a reason to stop; it is a line in your capital plan, and what to do with a difficult inspection report is usually a negotiation question rather than a walk-away one.

Before you go unconditional

Three items to settle with your advisers:

• Whether the sale qualifies as a GST-free going concern, which generally requires a written agreement and both parties registered for GST, and which changes your cash requirement at settlement considerably. 
• What transfer duty and ongoing land tax will actually cost in your ownership structure. 
• Whether the purchase still fits the honest version of your risk profile as an investor once the findings are in, rather than the version you held at inspection.

This is general information rather than legal or financial advice. Queensland’s disclosure, contamination and retail leasing rules turn on facts specific to each property, so use a solicitor who does commercial conveyancing regularly.

Where to start

Draft your due diligence condition before you make an offer, not after it is accepted. Book the first-tier searches for the day the contract is signed. And write down in advance what finding would make you walk, because that decision is far harder to make once you are 19 days in and emotionally committed.

If you would rather not run the commercial property buying process alone, our commercial buyer’s agents help handle due diligence on warehouses, medical suites, offices and retail across Brisbane, the Gold Coast and the Sunshine Coast. Tell us what you are looking at, and we will tell you which checks matter most for that asset type before you commit to anything.