A snap three-day lockdown has been announced for Greater Brisbane today but the Real Estate Institute of Queensland says it should have minimal impact on local real estate businesses.
Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk announced the lockdown, which will commence at 5pm today, following 10 new positive COVID-19 cases in the state overnight, including four due to community transmission.
Ms Palaszczuk said two of the new infections were directly linked to a positive case detected late last week.
“What this means for Greater Brisbane is that we will have to go into a three-day lockdown,“ Ms Palaszczuk told a press conference this morning.
“This is the UK strain, it is highly infectious, we need to do this now to avoid a longer lockdown.”
The lockdown will apply to the Brisbane local government area as well as Redland City, Logan, Moreton Bay and Ipswich regions.
But the REIQ said it anticipated “minimal impact to open homes and appointments” as a result of the lockdown.
“That’s because [open homes] mostly happen over the weekend, but also coming into this weekend of the four days for Easter, there are already restrictions in place for certain businesses to trade and that includes real estate agents,” an REIQ spokesman told Elite Agent.
“If we look to past precedence when it comes to lockdowns in Queensland, the State Government has shown that it has been very effective in managing these outbreaks,” he said.
“Queensland in particular has really been able to come out of the other side more favourably when compared to other states, so we do hope that this is another mandated decision that will see us only have to lock down for three days, so it should be business as usual as soon as possible.
“The only direct impact that we do imagine would be for property management inspections for rental properties that had already been pre-arranged and booked in over the next three days.”
He said agents and property managers had become adept at implementing digital solutions during last year’s social restrictions and a three-day lockdown in Greater Brisbane in January.
“Real estate agents have a great ability to be able to revert back to using various technologies in order to do either a digital inspection or live feed via Facebook, or simply reschedule inspections for a later date, pending approval from the clients and the landlord,” he said.
Ms Palaszczuk said the current lockdown restrictions would be re-examined on Wednesday.
