Buying industrial land in South East Queensland: the due diligence checklist

By Brenscot Builders | Last reviewed September 2026

Industrial land is bought on a set of assumptions: that you can build what you want on it, that the building will fit, that trucks can reach it, that the services are there, and that nothing in the ground will stop you. Each of those assumptions can be tested before you are committed. Most of the tests are cheap, and several are free.

The ones that get skipped are rarely skipped because they are hard. They are skipped because the contract has a short due diligence period and nobody started on day one.

The short answer

Before you commit, confirm six things: what the planning scheme allows on the site and what approvals already attach to it; whether the land is on a contamination register and what was done there historically; what the title actually carries, including the terms of any easement; whether the site floods and to what depth and velocity; whether water, sewer and power have the capacity you need, not just a connection at the boundary; and whether your vehicles can legally reach the site. Order the free searches first, then spend money on the site-specific work.

Start with the free and fast searches

Three searches cost nothing or close to it and can be back within days. Do them before you spend anything on consultants.

The vegetation management property report. The Queensland Government provides a free report covering the regulated vegetation management map, regional ecosystems, wetlands and watercourses, the protected plants flora survey trigger map and koala habitat mapping. It is usually emailed within three business days. Industrial buyers skip this constantly on the assumption that a cleared paddock has no vegetation issue, but regrowth categories still bite, and koala mapping in South East Queensland is the hardest constraint on this list.

The contaminated land registers. Queensland keeps two under the Environmental Protection Act 1994. The Environmental Management Register lists land where a notifiable activity has been carried out, or that is contaminated. The Contaminated Land Register lists only land that requires remediation. A search by lot on plan carries a small fee and results usually come back the same day.

The council's flood product. Brisbane City Council publishes a FloodWise Property Report, generated from the flood information adopted in City Plan 2014. The City of Moreton Bay publishes a Flood Check property report and a Flood Check development report.

Contamination: what a clear search does and doesn't tell you

An Environmental Management Register listing does not mean the land is unusable. The Queensland Government is explicit that a listing "is an indication that the land is likely to be contaminated but it does not mean it needs to be cleaned up or is not suitable for its current land use".

The more important point runs the other way. A clear search is not a clean site. The register results do not include contaminated land where the administering authority has not been notified of the contamination. Plenty of historical industrial activity was never reported.

So read the registers alongside the site's history. Schedule 3 of the Act lists the notifiable activities that trigger listing, and the industrial ones are the usual suspects: metal treatment including anodising, galvanising, pickling and electroplating; foundry operations; smelting; petrol depots, terminals and refineries; asphalt or bitumen manufacture; railway yards including goods handling and maintenance areas; and paint manufacture above a stated capacity. If any of those happened on the land, expect to investigate whatever the register says.

The seller has a duty to tell you. Under section 408 of the Act, an owner must give a buyer written notice before agreeing to dispose of land recorded on either register. If that notice is not given, the buyer may rescind the agreement by written notice before completion or before taking possession, whichever happens first. If the owner gives the notice late, the buyer has 21 business days from receiving it to rescind, after which the right is taken to have been waived.

Do not rely on this as your protection. Commentary from Queensland firms makes the practical point that a buyer should not presume a formal written notice will arrive separately, that giving access to a data room may be enough to fix a buyer with awareness, and that informal disclosure before the contract may remove the rescission right altogether. The statutory notice is a backstop, not a substitute for your own searching.

Investigations. Where the history warrants it, a suitably qualified person carries out a preliminary site investigation to establish the site's history and areas of concern, and a detailed site investigation if testing is needed. Assessment is done against the National Environment Protection (Assessment of Site Contamination) Measure 2013.

Planning: buy the full certificate

Under section 265 of the Planning Act 2016 you can apply to the council for a planning and development certificate. There are three types, and the difference matters.

CertificateWhat it gives you
LimitedA summary of the planning scheme and charges resolution provisions applying to the premises, planning instruments, designations and infrastructure charges
StandardEverything in the limited certificate, plus a copy of every decision notice and negotiated decision notice for a development approval in effect, compliance certificates, exemption certificates, court judgments, infrastructure agreements and proposed scheme amendments
FullEverything in the limited and standard certificates, plus a statement about whether each condition has been fulfilled, unfulfilled infrastructure obligations and prosecutions

For industrial land, the full certificate is the one that matters, because unfulfilled conditions on an earlier approval travel with the land. Uncompleted works and outstanding infrastructure obligations become yours. Councils set their own fees and response times vary by certificate type, so ask the council for its current timeframes when you apply.

Alongside the certificate, check the zone and precinct, the level of assessment for the use you intend, and every overlay. Brisbane's City Plan mapping generates a property report showing zoning, overlays, the neighbourhood plan and the local government infrastructure plan. Brisbane also has an industrial amenity overlay, which is directly relevant and routinely missed.

Check for a temporary local planning instrument. A TLPI responds to an emerging planning issue and a council has up to two years to fold it into the scheme. TLPIs lapse and get replaced, and council web pages are not always updated when they do. Ask the council what instrument is actually in force today rather than relying on a page that may be stale.

Existing use rights are not self-proving. Section 260 of the Planning Act protects a use that was lawful immediately before a scheme change. But the burden of proving an existing lawful use right sits with the person alleging it, and the right can be lost where the intensity or scale of the use has materially increased, or where the use has ceased. If you are buying on the strength of an existing use, get the documentary evidence during due diligence: approvals, operational records, aerial photography. A vendor's assurance is worth nothing if it cannot be proved later.

Seller disclosure: a second, separate regime

Queensland's seller disclosure regime under the Property Law Act 2023 commenced on 1 August 2025 and applies to sales of registered freehold lots, commercial and industrial included. Before the buyer signs, the seller must give a disclosure statement and the applicable prescribed certificates. At auction, disclosure goes to registered bidders before the auction starts.

If the seller fails to give the documents, or they are inaccurate or incomplete on a material matter the buyer did not know about and which would have stopped them signing, the buyer may terminate at any time before settlement and have the deposit refunded. There is no statutory right to compensation, so termination is the remedy.

Two points buyers get wrong. First, the obligations are generally non-waivable. Second, there is a carve-out where the price is more than $10 million including GST, but it is not a mutual contracting-out: it operates as a waiver the buyer gives by notice before signing, and the seller cannot impose it. Proposed lots sold off the plan are excluded, along with a further list of exceptions including sales to listed corporations, government entities and certain related-party and co-ownership transactions.

This regime and the Environmental Protection Act duty run independently. Complying with one does not satisfy the other.

Title: read the easement, not just the title search

A title search names the dealings registered against the land. It does not tell you what they say. Buying the instrument image for each easement and covenant is the step most often skipped, and on an industrial site the terms are what decide whether you can build.

An easement's width, load limits and any prohibition on building over it determine whether your hardstand, awning or truck apron can cross it. A covenant can limit height or use. A caveat signals a third party claiming an interest.

The bigger trap is the unregistered encumbrance. Underground sewerage and stormwater infrastructure does not always appear on the title register and is difficult to detect in a standard title search. On a large industrial site, a trunk main under the middle of your building pad is a very expensive discovery.

An identification survey establishes the boundaries and shows whether buildings or structures cross them in either direction. On industrial land this earns its fee, because hardstand, fences, gantries and truck aprons routinely sit close to or over boundaries, and a slab encroachment is far more expensive to cure than a fence line.

Flooding: know which product you are reading

Councils publish more than one flood product and they are not interchangeable.

The City of Moreton Bay puts the distinction plainly: Flood Check "maps the frequency and depth of floods. They do not map the velocity of water or the risks to life and property associated with development and therefore cannot be directly compared to the flood and coastal hazard overlay maps." The planning scheme overlays categorise risk using depth, velocity and potential frequency.

So there are effectively four things to look at: the general awareness map, the property or development report, the planning scheme overlay that actually drives assessment and conditions, and, where the council mapping is too coarse for the decision you are making, a site-specific flood study by a consulting engineer.

For an industrial building the practical questions are the flood planning level, the freeboard required, and whether flow velocity constrains where you can put the building and the hardstand. See stormwater management.

Ground conditions

A pre-purchase geotechnical investigation is worth doing before you are committed, not after. Field work typically includes boreholes, material logging, groundwater levels, sample collection and in-situ testing, with laboratory classification and CBR testing. Rock is investigated by coring and point load testing.

Three findings drive industrial cost more than any others: CBR governs pavement thickness for truck hardstand; reactive soils, soft soils or uncontrolled fill can push you from a simple slab on ground to a stiffened or piled solution; and groundwater depth governs excavation and dewatering. On a large-footprint site these are among the largest swing items in a build budget. See footings and foundations.

Acid sulfate soils. Queensland's planning framework maps these in two sub-categories: land at or below 5 m AHD, and land above 5 m AHD and below 20 m AHD. The second is a reach-down trigger, catching sites whose surface sits above 5 m AHD but where excavation goes down to or below it. Much of South East Queensland's industrial land sits on low-lying coastal and riverine flats, which is exactly the band that matters. Disturbing acid sulfate soils without a management plan generates acid, attacks concrete and steel in the ground and can damage a waterway, which makes it an Environmental Protection Act problem as well as a planning one. The volumetric triggers sit in each council's overlay code, so confirm them for the site.

Services: available is not the same as adequate

A connection at the boundary tells you nothing about capacity.

Water and sewer. In the Moreton Bay, Sunshine Coast and Noosa areas, Unitywater states that most commercial or industrial developments require connection approval, and its pre-lodgement application gives upfront advice on the allowable yield for the site and whether existing infrastructure can accommodate the development or needs upgrading. That is the right pre-contract enquiry. Industrial sites may also need backflow prevention and containment devices, or pre-treatment such as a grease arrestor. In Brisbane, Ipswich, Lockyer Valley, Scenic Rim and Somerset, Urban Utilities provides the equivalent advice product.

Power. Energex publishes a Network Load and Export Capacity Map showing indicative asset location, rating and estimated capacity. It is useful for screening, but Energex's own disclaimer is the point: the information is general in nature, may rest on assumptions that change, and "should not be relied upon". For any site needing real load, only a formal connection enquiry gives a reliable answer. See power supply and the Energex connection.

Telecommunications. The nbn address checker answers whether the standard network serves the premises and by what technology, but it does not cover business fibre or enterprise ethernet, which is a separate enquiry.

Truck access: three separate checks

Confirming your vehicles can reach the site takes three questions, not one.

  1. Is the route on the approved network for that vehicle class? The NHVR Route Planner maps approved heavy vehicle routes.
  2. Can the local road take it? The council is the road manager for local roads. Load limits, bridge and culvert capacity and the turning radius at the last intersection all decide this, and none of it shows up on a zoning map.
  3. If access is from a state-controlled road, will Transport and Main Roads approve it? TMR manages vehicular access to state-controlled roads under the Transport Infrastructure Act 1994, and two approvals are needed: a permitted road access location approval, and a road works approval. These are separate from the council development approval and they are not quick.

Industrial zoning does not guarantee that a B-double can get to the door. See clear height, doors and truck access.

Cultural heritage and native title

These two get conflated and they are different.

Native title cannot be recognised over freehold land. For a freehold industrial site it is effectively a non-issue. For leasehold land, or land recently converted from state tenure, check it.

The Aboriginal cultural heritage duty of care applies regardless of tenure. Under the Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Act 2003, land users must take all reasonable and practicable measures to ensure their activity does not harm Aboriginal cultural heritage. The duty applies on private land and whether or not the heritage has been formally recorded, and substantial penalties apply, considerably higher for corporations than individuals. Gazetted duty of care guidelines sit under the Act.

A cultural heritage management plan is mandatory only where an environmental impact statement is required for the project, which a typical industrial development does not trigger. But the duty of care still applies to every ground disturbance. For a greenfield site with significant earthworks, an assessment and, where the risk warrants it, a voluntary plan is the way to buy certainty.

The order we would do it in

  1. Free and fast: vegetation management property report, contamination register search, council flood product, title search, NHVR route check
  2. Documents: full planning and development certificate, instrument images for every easement and covenant, the seller's disclosure statement and certificates
  3. Site-specific: geotechnical investigation, identification survey, services capacity enquiries to the water utility and Energex
  4. Only if the history warrants it: preliminary and detailed site investigation for contamination
  5. Throughout: a town planner's view on the level of assessment for your intended use, and a solicitor on the contract and the disclosure position

Commercial contracts negotiate their own due diligence period. Make sure the period you agree is long enough for a council certificate and a geotechnical report to come back, because those two set the pace.

Frequently asked questions

What is an EMR search in Queensland?

A search of the Environmental Management Register, which lists land where a notifiable activity has been or is being carried out, or that is contaminated. It is searched by lot on plan, carries a small fee, and results usually come back the same day. The Contaminated Land Register is separate and lists only land requiring remediation.

Does a clear contamination search mean the land is clean?

No. The registers only record contamination that has been notified. Land contaminated by historical activity that was never reported will not appear. Read the search alongside the site's history.

What does a seller have to tell me about contamination?

Under section 408 of the Environmental Protection Act 1994, an owner must give written notice before agreeing to dispose of land recorded on either register. If that notice is not given, the buyer can rescind before completion or possession. Separately, the Property Law Act 2023 seller disclosure regime requires a disclosure statement and prescribed certificates before the buyer signs.

Which planning and development certificate should I get?

For industrial land, the full certificate. It is the only one that tells you whether the conditions on an earlier development approval have actually been fulfilled, and unfulfilled conditions pass to you with the land.

How long does due diligence take on industrial land?

Longer than a residential purchase, because council certificates, geotechnical investigation and services capacity enquiries each take time. Set the contract period around the slowest item rather than the fastest, and start the free searches on day one.

Sources

General information only

This article is general information, current as at September 2026. It is not legal, planning or environmental advice. Planning schemes, overlays and temporary local planning instruments change, and the position is specific to each site. Obtain advice from a solicitor, town planner and suitably qualified environmental and geotechnical consultants before you commit to a purchase.

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