Category Deposit Recovery

This article was written by Nancy Wang Principal Solicitor at W & G Lawyers.

Picture the moment. You hold a call option over a development site. The deposit, a substantial sum, was paid to the owner months ago and the deed says it is non-refundable unless the owner is in breach. The option expires in a matter of days. During the option period a government proposal has surfaced that may take a strip of the frontage, and with it the viability of the project. Nobody has breached anything. The owner is sympathetic, and the owner has your money.

You are standing at a crossroads where every road appears to lead somewhere you do not want to go. This article is about that crossroads, and about the counter-intuitive road that a buyer took in a 2024 Supreme Court of Queensland decision to recover a $275,000 deposit. The buyer did not step back from the deal. It stepped further in.

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This article was written by Nancy Wang Principal Solicitor at W & G Lawyers. 

Most people assume that if you go ahead with a deal knowing something is wrong, you’ve made your bed — you can’t complain about it later. A recent Queensland Supreme Court decision shows that’s not always how the law works. A buyer who knew about a serious problem with a property before it signed the contract still walked away and got its $275,000 deposit back. Here’s how, and what it means for anyone buying property.

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