How Front of the Pile creates its guidance.

Front of the Pile is written from the processing side of Queensland rental applications: the desk where the pile lands, gets skimmed, shortlisted and passed to an owner. The people behind it have years of hands-on experience in Queensland leasing and property management, reading applications the way agencies actually read them, which is rarely the way renters imagine.

That’s the whole point of the site. The rules are public; the RTA publishes them well. What renters can’t easily find out is what happens to their pack after they press submit, and which small things make an assessor stop. We write those things down.

The site is deliberately brand-first rather than person-first for now. That isn’t evasion; it’s a choice to let the tools, the sources and the track record carry the authority until the time is right to say more.

What the rule says. Anything about what an agent can request, what a bond can be, notice periods, forms and deadlines is checked against the primary source: the Residential Tenancies and Rooming Accommodation Act 2008, the RTA’s current forms and fact sheets, and where relevant the Office of the Information Commissioner, Tenants Queensland and QCAT. Every guide lists its sources at the bottom.

What happens in practice. How a pack is read, which extras help, how a pet is best presented, why a start date matters. That’s experience, and we label it as such: “in our experience” means exactly that. It is general information, not advice about your case.

We try never to blur the two. If a sentence reads like a legal rule, it should have a source; if it reads like judgement, it should say so.

Every guide and tool carries a “last checked” date and a line saying what it applies to. Rules change; the date is the promise. When Queensland tenancy law or an RTA form changes, the affected pages are re-checked and the date moves. Material changes are logged on What’s new.

Calculators (bond, rent in advance, reletting costs, rent-to-income) run on the current Queensland figures and show their working. Nothing you type into them leaves your browser.

Content is written and checked by people with Queensland leasing experience. We use software to help draft and to check consistency, and a person signs off every page before it goes live. We don’t mass-produce pages for search engines, and we don’t copy the RTA’s material. We link to it.

Guarantee approval, or quote approval rates. Predict whether you’ll get a place. Tell you to offer above the advertised rent or pay months up front. Help you create documents that aren’t true. Claim preferential access to any agency (none exists here). Invent testimonials. Sell your data.

We cannot make an owner choose you. What we can do is remove the avoidable reasons not to.

The free tools work without an account and without an email address; your answers stay on your device unless you choose to save or email them. We count visits with cookieless analytics that store no personal data. If you give us your email for the checklist or the launch list, it’s used for that and nothing else. Application Assist documents are accepted only through a secure upload and deleted within 60 days of your review being delivered. The full detail is in the privacy policy.

Everything here applies to Queensland general tenancies unless a page says otherwise. Other states have different rules, forms and bodies, so we won’t stretch Queensland guidance to cover them. When other states are added, the site will ask where you’re renting and show you the right rules, not the same page with a different state name.

If something here is wrong, out of date, or reads as legal advice when it shouldn’t, email hello@frontofthepile.com.au with the page and the problem. Corrections are made and dated on the page, and noted on What’s new. We’d rather be corrected than quietly wrong.