You already have the file. We are asking you to publish it.
This page is written for somebody inside a licensing body who has been asked to look at this and has no budget, no project and no appetite for an integration. It is the shortest honest account of what is being asked and what it costs.
The ask, in one paragraph
Export the list of current licences you already hold to a CSV. Put it at a stable address on a domain you already control. Say how often it changes. That is the whole of it.
Five columns are enough: the licence reference exactly as you write it, the status, the trade, the registered name, and the date the row last changed. Extra columns are allowed and ignored by anyone who does not understand them.
Signing that file is one further step, and it is the step that makes the file impossible to forge or mirror convincingly. It is a key and a DNS record on a domain you already own. There is no registration, no account, and nothing to tell this lab about.
licence,status,trade,legal_name,updated
4102938,active,real-estate-agent,Northpier Property Pty Ltd,2026-11-08
4102955,suspended,real-estate-agent,Calloway Group Pty Ltd,2026-11-08
4103011,active,auctioneer,Brightwater Holdings Pty Ltd,2026-11-08
4103047,active,resident-letting-agent,Seabright Letting Pty Ltd,2026-11-08A real example, four rows. Nothing in it is personal data you do not already publish on your own search page, one licence at a time.
What it is not
- It is not an API
No endpoint to run, no uptime to promise, no support queue, no rate limits, no keys to issue. A file on a web server is the entire interface.
- It is not an integration
There is no software to install, no vendor to procure, no contract to sign, and nothing to connect to any system of ours. We do not need access to anything you hold.
- It is not a commitment to us
You are not joining anything. There is no membership, no governance seat, no logo to display and no agreement to enter. If this lab disappeared tomorrow the file would keep working.
- It is not new data
Everything in the file is already public. It is what your own search page returns, one record at a time, to anybody who types a name into it.
- It is not a transfer of responsibility
You remain the only source of truth about your own licences. A file that says somebody is licensed is your statement, not ours, and nobody else can make it on your behalf.
What it costs
For somebody who already runs the register, exporting the list is an afternoon. The number of authorities in this index who already produce exactly this file, for internal use or for a partner, is larger than the number who publish it.
Publishing it costs whatever putting a file on your own web server costs in your organisation, which is usually a change request rather than a project.
Signing adds a key and one DNS record. If your organisation already issues qualified electronic signatures, and many in this index do, the key exists and the question is only which file it signs.
The objection this lab hears most is that nobody has asked for this. That is usually true, and it is the reason the index exists: so that the gap is a published fact rather than a request from one party.
The second most common is that it is a legal question rather than a technical one. That is fair, and it is the conversation worth having. Nothing in this page needs a technical decision first.
What changes for the people you regulate
Today a fraudster copies a real licence number, which is public text, and quotes it in an email. The person being impersonated has no way to demonstrate the difference, and the client has no way to check without finding and trusting your search page.
With the file published, anybody can check the number against the authority that issued it, automatically, in the moment a payment is about to happen. The professional stops being defenceless and your register stops being a page somebody has to find.
With the file signed, a copy of it cannot be forged or altered convincingly, and a mirror of your data can be checked against you rather than taken on faith. That matters more than it sounds: data scraped from registers is already being resold, and today nobody can tell a faithful copy from an edited one.
This is level 3 on the levels page, and grade A on the index. No authority in 54 has reached it.
Where your register probably stands
The index surveys 54 registers across 37 jurisdictions. Most authorities land in one of four places, and the single next step is different for each.
| Grade | If this is you | The one next step |
|---|---|---|
| B | Bulk machine-readable export, unsigned | Sign the file |
| C | Public page per licence, stable address, no bulk export | Export the list |
| D | Public search form only, no stable address | Give every licence a stable address |
| E | No public lookup | Publish anything at all |
If your register is already in the index, its row names your authority and the address somebody checked. If it is wrong, say so and the correction is published beside it with its date. If it is not in the index yet, that is not a judgement: it means nobody has looked.
What this lab wants from you
A conversation, before anything else. The most useful thing anybody inside an authority can tell this lab is which part of the ask is impossible in practice and why, because that is the part the specification has got wrong.
Nothing said in that conversation is published without agreement. What gets published is the correction to the index, which is a factual matter about what your register does today.
If you work at an issuing authority, say so in the first line of the message. That is the conversation this lab most wants to have, and it moves faster than anything else here.