The rules around property valuation advice are not static. Professional bodies revise their guidance, and the ATO revises its own. When that happens, material we have already published can become out of date — including pages, videos and answers that were accurate when they were made.
This page records each change we have acted on: what the new guidance says, what we had said, and what we did about it. It is kept because a correction nobody can find is not a correction.
How this page works#
Entries are added, never edited. Once an entry is published it stays as written, including the parts that later turn out to be wrong. If guidance changes again, or if we get something wrong here, that becomes a new entry that supersedes the old one — and the old one is marked, not deleted or quietly rewritten.
That is the same rule the evidence records we sell are built on. It would be a strange business that asked customers to trust a dated, unalterable record while silently editing its own.
Each entry has a permanent anchor (the # link beside its heading). Pinned comments
on our videos and notes on our pages link to those anchors, so a reader who arrives
years later reaches the version that was current when they were sent there, and can see
what has happened since.
Entries are listed newest first.
29 August 2026 — the API’s levels of valuation advice#
Status: current. Not superseded.
What changed. On 26 August 2026 the Australian Property Institute published Levels of Property Valuation Advice, reflecting its Rules of Professional Conduct, which commenced on 1 August 2025, and the International Valuation Standards 2025 edition. It sets out four levels of advice and which decisions each is fit for.
Two points bear directly on what we had published:
- A desktop report — a qualified valuer working from data with no inspection — is Level 3. Under the API Rules it is “never an International Valuation Standards compliant valuation”, and the report must say the property was not inspected.
- For tax matters including capital gains tax, the guide says to use a Level 1 comprehensive valuation report with a full inspection: “If the figure will be tested by someone else, such as the ATO, a court, a lawyer, a co-owner or a beneficiary, use a Level 1 comprehensive valuation report.”
What we had said. Several of our pages offered a desktop as the entry point, the recommendation, or the price answer for a CGT figure. The wording is struck through below rather than described, so you can read what we actually published:
Most CGT purposes are well served by a desktop assessment (from $254).
Is a desktop assessment still ATO-acceptable?
It can be, but it is not a full valuation.
CGT cost base evidence, typical suburban property → Desktop
Three of our videos describe a desktop as a “desktop valuation”, which is the term in common trade use but not the one the API uses — precisely because a desktop is not a valuation under the International Valuation Standards.
What we changed. Across our sites, the inspected report now leads wherever the figure is one the ATO may test, and the desktop follows with its limitation stated. No price was removed and the desktop was not withdrawn — the guide itself says a Level 2 or Level 3 “may be appropriate, provided you read and accept the stated limitations”. It simply stops being the answer to a CGT question.
What we did not change, and why. The annual market value of a property held in a self-managed super fund. The ATO’s position there is a lower floor: trustees “are not required to obtain a valuation by a qualified independent valuer … for the purposes of preparing the fund’s accounts and statements”, and SISR reg 8.02B does not require an independent valuation each year for real property. A desktop report signed by a qualified valuer sits well above that floor, so it remains a sensible product for an annual SMSF figure. A related-party SMSF dealing is different, and we did change that: those are tested by an auditor and can be tested by the ATO.
Videos. Three of our published videos were recorded before this guidance existed. We have not taken them down and we have not re-recorded them — a video that has been watched should not quietly change. An amendment notice has been written for each, and what those notices say is set out below.
Those notices are not yet on the videos. They are published here first, so the correction is public even while the videos still carry the original wording. This page said they were already posted; on 31 August 2026 that was checked and they were not, and saying so is the same obligation the rest of this page exists to meet.
| Video | What the amendment says |
|---|---|
| How much does a property valuation cost for CGT? | The figures quoted remain published market figures, but for a CGT figure the inspected report is the one to budget for, and a “signed desktop valuation” is more precisely a desktop report. |
| What does a valuation cost against what the formula could save? | Same terminology point. |
| What’s the difference between a desktop valuation and a data-only estimate? | The distinction the video draws — a signed professional opinion versus an unsigned algorithm — is the right one and matches the API’s own framing. The term “desktop valuation” is the imprecision; the API calls it a desktop report. |
What this page is not#
It is not a claim that everything else we publish is current. It records changes we have found and acted on. If you spot something on this site that a newer standard has overtaken, tell us and it will appear here.
General information only — not tax, financial or legal advice. Talk to a registered tax professional about your own situation.