Free guide · Queensland · checked 9 September 2026
What should a rental application cover letter say?
Nobody sits down and reads three pages about you. An assessor with forty applications glances at whatever appears in the bio field, for a few seconds, looking for one thing: does this household make sense for this property? A short letter isn't a lazy letter. It's the correct one.
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The short answer: two or three short paragraphs. Who is in the household and what you each do; why this property or this area specifically; and one line of context for anything in the pack that would otherwise raise a question. Leave out every claim you can't evidence, because "clean, quiet and respectful" is written by everybody, including the applicants who turn out to be none of those things. In our experience the sentence that earns its place is the one explaining why this property, because it's the only thing in your entire application the assessor can't get from anywhere else.
What it's actually for
Not to charm anybody, and not to prove you deserve the property. Its job is to answer, quickly, the question the rest of your application structurally cannot: why you, and why here. Everything else (income, history, references) is already covered by documents. The letter is the only place a human voice gets a few seconds.
In our experience that's also why length hurts. A long letter gets skipped, and when it's skipped, everything in it is lost, including the one line that would have helped.
The phrases that work against you
There's a category of sentence that appears in most rental cover letters and does active damage:
“We are clean, quiet and friendly.”
“We are easy to deal with.”
“We will treat the property as our own.”
The problem isn't that they're untrue. It's that they're unverifiable, universal and self-awarded. Everybody writes them. In our experience they don't register as reassurance. At best they're skipped, and a heavy run of them can do the opposite, because people who need to assert a quality usually aren't the ones who have it.
The principle underneath this whole site: evidence, not adjectives. You don't claim to be a reliable tenant; you attach a ledger with twelve months of on-time payments and let it say so. You don't claim to be settled; you mention the job you started in the suburb three months ago. Anything you can only assert, leave out. Anything you can point at, point at.
A worked example
One version, for a couple moving across Brisbane. Details invented.
Hello,
We’re a couple in our early thirties applying for the two-bedroom unit. I work as a registered nurse and my partner is a carpenter; we’ve both been in our jobs a few years and our payslips and rental ledger are attached.
We’re looking in this area because I started at a hospital about ten minutes away in June and I’m currently commuting close to an hour each way. The second bedroom would be a study, since my partner does his quoting and paperwork from home.
One thing worth mentioning: our current lease runs to the end of next month, so we can be flexible on a start date either side of that. Our property manager is expecting a call and has been given our details.
Happy to provide anything else that would help.
Roughly 140 words. It contains no adjective about their character, every claim in it can be checked, and the second paragraph does the work. It explains a two-person household wanting two bedrooms before anybody has to wonder.
If you're applying for several properties
You almost certainly are, and nobody thinks less of you for it. But a letter that names a specific address and then arrives for a different property is a visible mistake, and it happens constantly.
Write the letter so it works anywhere: describe why the area or the type of property suits you rather than the street number. If you do want to name the property, change it every time, and check it before you submit.
What to leave out
Your religion, your politics, your gender identity, your race, your sexuality, your health, whether you're pregnant, whether you have children: these are protected attributes under the Anti-Discrimination Act 1991 (Qld). An agent or owner may not lawfully select against you on any of them, you have a right to be assessed without reference to them, and if you believe you've been treated unlawfully there are proper avenues, starting with the Queensland Human Rights Commission.
The reason to leave them out of a cover letter is different and more mundane: they don't answer any question the assessment is asking. The letter has a few seconds of attention and one job. Anything that doesn't serve that job is using space your work history or your reason for choosing the area could have used.
That is not advice to hide who you are, and nobody should feel they have to write a letter that erases them. It's a point about what a short document with one purpose can carry.
If you use AI to write it
Plenty of people do, and there's nothing wrong with it. But the default output of every one of those tools is exactly the adjective-stuffed paragraph above, and “clean, quiet, respectful tenants who will treat your property as our own” is practically the house style.
If you use one, give it the facts and hold it to them:
Who is in the household and what you each do.
The specific reason this area or property suits you.
The one thing in your pack that needs context.
An instruction to stay under 150 words and use no adjectives about your own character.
Then read it back and delete every sentence you couldn't prove.
Does the rest of the pack read as well as the letter?
The twenty-second test checks whether your whole application is legible at a glance. A cover-letter rewrite by a person who has read thousands of them is part of every Application Assist review, from $199.
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