A leasing consultant finishes an open home in Brunswick, walks an interested couple to the door, and asks the friendliest question in the business. "So, is it just the two of you?" The prescribed form on the office system is perfectly compliant. The conversation on the doorstep may not be.

Since 31 March 2026, Victorian rental providers and their agents have had to use a prescribed rental application form. Almost every article written about it treated that as a paperwork change: download the new form, retire your template, done. The form was the easy part. Two other obligations landed at the same time, and they reach into places most agencies have not looked.

What Actually Changed On 31 March 2026

The Victorian Government's summary sets out three things. Rental providers and their agents must use the new prescribed form for rental applications, and follow clear rules about the type of information they can ask from renters.

Third party businesses such as rent tech platforms are banned from charging fees for rental applications or rent payments. Rental providers and agents may still use those platforms. The offence sits with the business running them.

And the Director of Consumer Affairs Victoria and VCAT, including Rental Dispute Resolution Victoria, can now consider additional factors when determining whether a proposed rent increase is excessive. There is a fourth item in that summary that deserves more attention. We will come back to it, because it is the one with teeth for a rent roll.

The Form Is Not The Boundary. The Conversation Is.

This is the point most agency briefings missed. The restriction is not simply that you must use the prescribed form. Tenants Victoria explains that the information a landlord or their agent can ask for, whether verbally, in writing, or as part of a rental application, must follow the rental laws, pointing to sections 30AC and 30BA of the Residential Tenancies Act 1997.

Verbally. That word does the work.

Your form can be immaculate and your open home still non-compliant. The friendly questions leasing consultants ask to build rapport and read an applicant can now create compliance risk where they seek information outside what the rental laws permit. Whether it is just the two of you. Whether the last agent was difficult. The issue is not whether a question appears on a form. A question asked at an open home, over the phone or by text does not become acceptable because it was never typed into an application.

So the compliance job is not a document swap. It is retraining the part of leasing that nobody writes down: the doorstep conversation, the follow-up phone call, the text message asking for "just one more thing before we submit this to the owner."

Train your team to treat the prescribed form and the accompanying rules as the starting boundary for information requests in every medium. Where a question falls outside the form or current guidance, a verbal conversation is not a workaround. Anything genuinely uncertain is a question for Consumer Affairs Victoria or your adviser, not a judgement call for a leasing consultant standing at a front door.

What Happens To The Other Nineteen Applications

Here is the fourth item.

The Victorian Government states that rental providers and their agents must protect renters' personal information from misuse, and will need to follow rules around destruction and de-identification when handling information provided through rental applications or rental agreements.

Sit with that for a moment, because it is a different kind of obligation from everything else in this package.

Every other reform tells you what to do at a point in time. This one concerns data you already hold, belonging to people who are not your customers and never became your tenants. For every property you lease in Victoria you might receive twenty applications and sign one. The other nineteen contain identity documents, income evidence and rental history.

Where does that sit in your business right now? Realistically: in your CRM, in a third party application platform, in a shared inbox, in a folder on someone's desktop, in the sent items of a property manager who left last year, and in whatever the owner was emailed during the approval conversation.

An obligation to destroy or de-identify is not a policy question. It is a systems question. You cannot reliably destroy information if you do not know every system in which it exists.

A leasing process where applications arrive, get assessed and get retained by default cannot satisfy a destruction obligation, because nothing in it knows when an application stopped being needed. A leasing workflow that treats an application as a record with a status and a defined end can. The difference is not sophistication. It is whether the decision to keep something was ever actually made.

Two practical questions to put to your team this week. Where does an unsuccessful application physically live once the property is leased? And who has ever deleted one?

If nobody can answer the second question, you have found your gap.

Your Third Party Platform

Most Victorian agencies run applications through a platform rather than collecting them directly. Those platforms are now caught by the fee ban, and the Government is clear that agents may keep using them.

That does not remove the need to understand how your own application process actually works. Three questions are worth putting to your provider in writing.

Whether the platform's application flow collects only what the prescribed form and the rental laws permit, including any optional or supplementary fields your agency switched on at some point and forgot.

Whether it charges renters anything at all, in any form.

And what it does with applicant data after a tenancy is signed, including how that information is retained, destroyed or de-identified within systems used as part of your agency's application process.

Get those answers in an email you can produce later.

The Package This Sits Inside

The application rules did not arrive alone, and agencies operating across state lines should hold the whole picture.

From 25 November 2025, Victoria moved to 90 days' notice for rent increases and for certain notices to vacate. Rental providers and agents are banned from asking for or accepting offers to pay rent higher than the advertised amount, or more than one month's rent in advance. A property cannot be advertised unless there is a reasonable belief it meets Victoria's minimum rental standards.

Disputes now commonly start with Rental Dispute Resolution Victoria before reaching VCAT, which is a change to where your team's escalations land as much as a change to law.

Two things are worth watching. Consumer Affairs Victoria republished its Renters Guide in July 2026, so any internal training material or applicant pack your agency assembled earlier in the year should be checked against the current version. And further Victorian rental measures have been publicly flagged since March. Treat anything you read about future changes as an early warning rather than a compliance deadline until it appears in Consumer Affairs Victoria's guidance.

If your agency also manages outside Victoria, none of the above travels. Application rules and prescribed forms are set by each state and territory separately, so a single application process across jurisdictions is not something to assume.

What To Change This Week

Five things, in the order they will bite.

1. Brief the leasing team that the restriction covers verbal questions, not just the form. This is a conversation change, not a document change.

2. Read the prescribed form as a team and treat it as the starting boundary in every medium, including phone, text and doorstep.

3. Find out where unsuccessful applications currently live, across every system and inbox.

4. Write to your application platform provider with the three questions above.

5. Decide who owns destruction and de-identification as a named responsibility, and what the process actually is. A defined point at which an application closes is what makes that possible.

Conclusion

The prescribed form took most Victorian agencies an afternoon. Retraining the doorstep conversation will take longer, because the questions being restricted are the ones nobody thinks of as questions. The destruction and de-identification requirements may take longest of all, because they ask a property management business to examine what happens to applicant data after the leasing decision is over.

Nearly five months on from 31 March, agencies that treated the date as a forms deadline have almost certainly closed the smallest of the three gaps. The other two are still open, and unlike a wrong form, neither one announces itself.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. Can we still use our own application form in Victoria?
No. Since 31 March 2026 rental providers and their agents must use the prescribed rental application form, and must follow the rules about the type of information they can ask from renters.

2. Does the restriction apply to questions we ask in person?
Tenants Victoria states that the information a landlord or agent can ask for, whether verbally, in writing, or as part of an application, must follow the rental laws, citing sections 30AC and 30BA of the Residential Tenancies Act 1997. Treat the prescribed form and the accompanying rules as the starting boundary for information requests in any medium, and check anything uncertain with Consumer Affairs Victoria.

3. Can we keep using a third party application platform?
Yes. Rental providers and agents may still use third party platforms. It is an offence for the businesses that operate them to charge renters fees for rental applications or rent payments. Confirm with your provider that its flow collects only permitted information and that it charges renters nothing.

4. What do we have to do with unsuccessful applications?
The Victorian Government states that rental providers and their agents must protect renters' personal information from misuse and will need to follow rules around destruction and de-identification of information provided through rental applications and rental agreements. Confirm the specific requirements and timing with Consumer Affairs Victoria, then build a process that can meet them.

5. What else changed in this round of Victorian reforms?
From 25 November 2025 Victoria moved to 90 days' notice for rent increases and certain notices to vacate, banned rental bidding and requests for more than one month's rent in advance, and required a reasonable belief that a property meets minimum standards before it is advertised. From 31 March 2026 the Director of Consumer Affairs Victoria and VCAT, including Rental Dispute Resolution Victoria, can consider additional factors when assessing whether a rent increase is excessive.

Important Notice

This article applies to Victoria only. Residential tenancy law in Australia is state and territory legislation. Application rules, prescribed forms, notice periods and information handling obligations differ between Australian states and territories.

Information was checked against Victorian Government material published at vic.gov.au, guidance published by Consumer Affairs Victoria at consumer.vic.gov.au, and guidance published by Tenants Victoria, available as at 21 August 2026. Consumer Affairs Victoria published an updated Renters Guide in July 2026. The relevant provisions include sections 30AC and 30BA of the Residential Tenancies Act 1997 (Vic), and the prescribed form is set out in regulations. This article does not reproduce the contents of the prescribed form or list the specific information that may or may not be requested. Obtain the current form and the current guidance directly from Consumer Affairs Victoria, as forms, regulations and guidance may change. Further Victorian rental reforms have been publicly announced and were not in force as at the date above.

Always verify current requirements with Consumer Affairs Victoria before acting. This content is general information only and does not constitute legal advice. RIOO is not a law firm.