Can real estate agents cold call? The Do Not Call Register explained

Yes, with conditions. Cold calling is not banned in Australia. But under the Do Not Call Register Act 2006 it is unlawful to make an unsolicited telemarketing call, and that includes a call offering a free appraisal or asking for a listing, to any number on the register unless the person has consented. There is no real estate exemption. In practice, those conditions rule out most stranger calling at scale.

That is the short answer, and it is the one most of the advice online gets wrong in one of two directions. Half of it is written for the United States or the United Kingdom, where different laws apply. The other half is written by people selling calling tools, who need the answer to be yes. The honest Australian answer is narrower and more useful: the phone is still a lawful prospecting tool, but who you may call is governed by a handful of specific instruments, and they draw the line in a very particular place. This article walks through where that line sits. It is one part of our broader guide to lawful prospecting in Australia, which covers the calling, texting, email and data rules together.

One thing before we start: this article is general information, not legal advice, and it states the position as at July 2026. If you are designing an outbound program, get advice on your specific circumstances from a lawyer qualified in this area.

What the Do Not Call Register is

The Do Not Call Register is a national register of Australian phone numbers whose owners have said they do not want to receive telemarketing calls. It was established by the Do Not Call Register Act 2006 (Cth), and it is administered by the Australian Communications and Media Authority, the ACMA.

Section 11 of the Act prohibits making an unsolicited telemarketing call to a number on the register. The Act does carve out a short list of exempt callers in Schedule 1: government bodies, registered charities, political parties and candidates, and educational institutions. It is a closed list. Real estate is not on it, and neither is any other commercial industry.

This is worth sitting with, because a lot of agents carry a quiet belief that the register is aimed at overseas call centres and energy resellers, not at a local agent ringing their own farm area. The Act does not classify callers by how local or well-intentioned they are. It classifies calls.

A call about listing a property is a telemarketing call

The Act defines a telemarketing call broadly, and the definition in section 5 covers calls promoting the supply of land or an interest in land. The ACMA has removed any doubt about how this lands on our industry. Its real estate guidance names two specific calls as telemarketing calls that must not be made to registered numbers without consent:

• A call to offer a free property appraisal.
• A call to solicit the listing of a person's property.

Those are not edge cases. They are the two most common prospecting calls in Australian real estate. The friendly framing does not change the classification: "I'm just calling to see if you'd like to know what your home is worth in today's market" is, in the regulator's language, a call to offer a free property appraisal.

When an agent may still call: consent

A call to a registered number is only lawful when the person has consented to it. Consent comes in two forms, and the difference matters more than anything else in this article.

Express consent is the person telling you, clearly, that you may call. A signed sign-in sheet at an open home that says you may contact them. A ticked box on an appraisal request form. A clear verbal yes that you noted at the time. Express consent is the strong ground, and it is worth building your intake habits around capturing it.

Inferred consent arises from an existing relationship, where a reasonable person in that relationship would expect your call. A vendor you are actively selling for. A buyer you are working with this month. An appraisal contact from a few weeks ago who asked you to stay in touch.

Inferred consent is real, but it is much narrower than the industry tends to assume. Two limits do most of the damage to the casual reading:

• It fades with the relationship. The ACMA's published approach ties consent inferred from a single transaction to the life of that transaction. A purchaser you sold to once, three years ago, with no contact since, is thin ground for an inferred-consent call. For files that have gone quiet for years, the safe move is to refresh consent through a channel you can lawfully use before the campaign, not to assume the old relationship still carries it.
• A published number is not consent. The Act is explicit that consent cannot be inferred from the mere publication of a number. Pulling mobile numbers from directories, old listings or public records does not create a right to call them.

Consent can also be withdrawn at any time. If someone asks you to stop calling, that request beats everything above. And whichever form of consent you rely on, be able to show it: when it was given, how, and for what. If a complaint ever lands, the record is the difference between a conversation and a finding.

Washing your list: what it means and who it protects

Washing a list means checking your numbers against the Do Not Call Register and removing the registered ones before you dial. Access to washing runs through the register operator, and it is the basic hygiene step for any calling campaign, including campaigns to your own database.

Three things about washing that get missed:

• A wash is current for 30 days. People join the register continuously, so a wash from last quarter protects nothing. Re-wash before each campaign.
• The protection attaches to the party that ran the wash. A list that arrives from someone else described as pre-washed does not carry that protection with it. If you did not run the wash, you are not the one the defence covers.
• Washing solves only the register problem. It removes registered numbers. It does not create consent, it does not fix how a number was collected in the first place, and it does not convert a stranger into a contact. A washed list of strangers is still a list of strangers.

The rules that apply even when the call is lawful

Clearing the register question is not the end of it. The Telecommunications (Telemarketing and Research Calls) Industry Standard 2017 governs how any telemarketing call must be conducted, whoever it is made to. Under the Standard, a caller must keep to the permitted calling hours, identify themselves and the business the call is being made for, ensure the calling number is visible to the person receiving the call, and end the call promptly when asked. Check the ACMA's current guidance for the exact permitted hours before you build a calling schedule.

Two further points for anyone being pitched calling technology. If any part of a call is carried by a recorded or synthetic voice, the Standard imposes additional information obligations on the call, and a synthetic voice designed to pass as human raises a separate exposure under section 18 of the Australian Consumer Law, which prohibits misleading or deceptive conduct. And the scheme reaches calls made on your behalf. If a provider or a contractor dials for you, the arrangement does not insulate anyone. The enforcement record below makes that concrete.

Neighbour farming, bought lists and scraped data

Now the version of cold calling agents actually get pitched: ring the streets around a recent sale, announce the result, offer an appraisal. The numbers come from a purchased dataset or a scraping tool, and the pitch usually includes the word "compliant" somewhere near the price.

Walk it through against the instruments above and it comes apart in layers:

• The registered numbers cannot be called at all. There is no consent, no existing relationship, and no exemption. An appraisal offer to a registered stranger is precisely the call the ACMA's guidance names.
• Washing removes those numbers but cures nothing else. The remaining numbers still belong to strangers whose data was collected without their involvement. The Privacy Act 1988 and its Australian Privacy Principles govern how personal information is collected, used and disclosed, and buying or scraping contact data for outreach raises collection and notice problems that a wash does not touch. A business that trades in personal information can also lose the small business exemption that many agencies assume covers them.
• The follow-up legs fail on their own. Modern prospecting is never just one call, and the SMS and email that follow are commercial electronic messages under the Spam Act 2003, which requires consent the stranger has never given. Consent is not inferred from a published address there either. The Spam Act deserves its own treatment, and we cover it in the Spam Act rules for agents.

Put together: cold outreach to strangers at scale on purchased or scraped data cannot be made compliant in practice. No configuration of calling technology changes that analysis, because the defect is not in the tool. It is in the absence of consent, and consent is the one thing a vendor cannot sell you. If you are weighing up a data purchase, the fuller economics are in buying real estate leads in Australia: what they really cost.

It is worth being precise about what survives this analysis, because some things do. The Do Not Call Register Act governs phone calls, and the Spam Act governs electronic messages. A letterbox drop or a knock on the door sits outside both. That is why the lawful shape of neighbourhood farming runs in that order: a letter or a doorstep conversation that invites the person to opt in, and then calls, texts and emails only to the people who did. Permission first, then the phone.

Penalties and enforcement

The register is not a polite request. The ACMA investigates complaints, and it publishes its enforcement outcomes. The one every principal should know: in March 2025, the Federal Court ordered penalties of $1.5 million against V Marketing Australia for calls made in breach of the Do Not Call Register rules on behalf of another business, and $60,000 against its director personally.

Two lessons sit inside that outcome. The calls were made on behalf of another business, and the penalty still landed, so outsourcing the dialling does not outsource the exposure. And the director paid personally, so the corporate structure is not the shield it is assumed to be. If your name is on the agency, the calling program run in your name is your problem.

The rules at a glance

Instrument	What it governs	What it means when you pick up the phone
Do Not Call Register Act 2006 (Cth)	Unsolicited telemarketing calls to registered numbers	No appraisal or listing calls to registered numbers without express or inferred consent. No real estate exemption.
Telecommunications (Telemarketing and Research Calls) Industry Standard 2017	The conduct of telemarketing calls	Permitted hours, caller identification, visible calling number, terminate on request. Extra obligations where a recorded or synthetic voice is used.
Spam Act 2003 (Cth)	Commercial electronic messages (SMS and email)	Consent, sender identification and a working unsubscribe on every prospecting text and email. Consent is not inferred from a published address.
Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) and the APPs	Collection, use and disclosure of personal information	How you obtained a number matters. Bought and scraped data raises collection and notice problems, and trading in personal information can cost you the small business exemption.
Australian Consumer Law, s 18	Misleading or deceptive conduct	A synthetic voice presented as human is an exposure, whatever the calling rules say.

The list you can always call: your own

Here is the part the compliance write-ups usually skip, and it is the most practical paragraph in this article. Every rule above gets easier, and most of them fall away entirely, when the person on the list already knows you.

Your past appraisals. Your past vendors and the buyers you settled. The open-home attendees who wrote their details on your sign-in sheet. The enquiries that came through your listings and then went quiet. These are relationships with a name, a date and a paper trail, which is exactly the shape consent takes. The discipline still applies: wash before a campaign, keep to the Standard on every call, refresh consent where a file has been silent for years, and honour every stop request the moment it lands. But you are working ground you are entitled to work.

The irony of the whole cold calling question is that the average agent is sitting on hundreds of these contacts while wondering whether it is legal to ring strangers. It is the wrong question in both directions: the stranger list is closed off, and the earned list is wide open and mostly untouched. We have written before about prospecting without cold calling and about how to win listings from the database you already own. The law, as it happens, points at the same list your economics do.

This article is general information, not legal advice. It reflects the position as at July 2026. For advice on your own outbound program, speak to a lawyer qualified in this area.

Sources

• Do Not Call Register Act 2006 (Cth), legislation.gov.au
• Telecommunications (Telemarketing and Research Calls) Industry Standard 2017, legislation.gov.au
• ACMA, Do Not Call Register guidance for the real estate industry, acma.gov.au
• Spam Act 2003 (Cth), legislation.gov.au
• Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) and the Australian Privacy Principles, oaic.gov.au
• ACMA v V Marketing Australia, Federal Court, March 2025 (penalty outcome as published by the ACMA)

Staying on the right side of these rules is not complicated, but it takes discipline: washing before every campaign, recording consent, keeping files current. Those hours come from somewhere, and for most agents they come out of follow-up, the work that actually books appraisals. NeuraCall works your own database, permission-first, past appraisals and open-home attendees and opted-in contacts only, so the follow-up keeps running while you sell. If your list has gone quiet while you did everything else, book a discovery call. Bring the list; we will show you what a lawful week on it looks like.