Real Estate Agent Audits | Costs & Process

Bartley Partners provides ongoing support to numerous real estate firms from sole practitioners through to larger corporates. One of the services we offer (outside of growth strategies, marketing advisory, tax planning, advisory etc.) is trust account audits.

The majority of audits we complete are paperless! With a paperless audit, we will send you an invite to a secure online cloud folder which will be accessible by you and your auditor. This will contain instructions on the source documents required and the format for these documents. Throughout the audit process, our accountants and auditors are always available in person, either by phone or via email. Outside of audit time, our experienced and professional staff are available to provide additional accounting or advisory services to ensure that the audit of your trust accounts is handled smoothly and without a last-minute rush.

 Costs

The cost of your real estate audit is dependent on:

• How clean your books are is the most important factor in determining how long a job will take and thus how much it will cost.
• After a few bad experiences we have started to remind new clients up front that if you cannot easily extract reports for us showing whose money is whose in your trust account at any one time then we won’t be able to either! We had one agent complain that she spent days trying to figure out whose money she had at the end of the month… as if the fact she couldn’t figure out something that fundamental to a trust account without days of effort was the auditor’s fault. Needless to say, she failed her audit.
• How many transactions have you put through your trust account? During an audit we need to audit a material number of transactions. That means the more transactions that you have put through a trust account the more it will cost us in time to go through and provide a comprehensive audit.
• For very small audits, the fees start at $600+GST; for larger audits it will be over a grand.
• We also give discounts on trust account audits for clients with large amounts of work with the firm.

On-site real estate audits

Our audit partners also travel throughout Australia assisting real estate agents to complete their annual audits and, being based in Adelaide, Bartley Partners can provide a real estate agent audit at very competitive rates, particularly when compared to higher cost centres such as Melbourne or Sydney.