Police paying more to rent empty building than cost to buy it: watchdog

November 5, 2026 — 5:13pmA superintendent without significant commercial property experience led police negotiations for the exorbitant lease of a building that would have been cheaper to buy outright, an investigation by the corruption watchdog has found.The Crime and Corruption Commission’s “Investigation Sphynx” also found Queensland Police had not secured funding for the building before the contract was signed.The lease for the Stones Corner building was signed without funding allocated for the deal.Nine NewsThe Queensland Police Service committed in 2023 to about $116 million in lease costs over 15 years – or more than $500,000 a month – for 433 Logan Road in Stones Corner, which it later found was unfit for purpose as a station and never occupied.Last year, Police Minister Dan Purdie described the agreement as “potentially the worst deal in history” and expressed hope someone would be held to account.The CCC investigation did not make findings of corruption, but identified significant governance and control weaknesses that led to the high-profile bungled agreement.It said a superintendent without significant commercial property transaction experience, and whose main job was to assess whether the property met the QPS’s needs, led negotiations for the lease.The QPS did not follow its own internal leasing process, and the Queensland Government Accommodation Office wasn’t involved.It said the commitment was made before the QPS had secured the government funding on which it depended, and before due diligence was carried out.It was later discovered the building was unsuitable for police needs, but by then it was too late to back out of the agreement.“A basic value-for-money assessment, comparing available options, was not conducted,” the report said, noting the building had been worth less than the amount that would be paid in rent over the period.It added critical decisions were often undocumented, making it hard to track who had made them and why.Culture within the QPS was criticised: “The simultaneous failure of multiple controls, each of which may, if acted upon, have prevented the transaction, cannot be attributed to chance.“Instead, these failures reflect the prevailing organisational culture and its practices, which determined how and whether controls were applied.”The report made nine recommendations to the QPS, designed to improve governance and internal culture. It made two recommendations to the state government.Acting police commissioner Brett Pointing spoke to reporters on Thursday afternoon, saying the QPS would accept all recommendations.He didn’t reveal how a superintendent ended up negotiating the deal, and declined to say if heads would roll over the scandal.Pointing confirmed it would now be reviewed through the police discipline system.“I think there’s two groups of people that I’d like to apologise to,” he said.“One is the Queensland community, this is a large waste of taxpayers’ money, and [the other is] the men and women of the QPS; that’s a significant amount of money that I’d rather be spending on keeping the community safe.”Pointing said police had been in discussions with the landowner about their options going forward for the lease, and didn’t rule out the possibility of still using the building in some capacity.He added he believed the culture of the QPS had changed “dramatically” since the lease was signed.Start the day with a summary of the day’s most important and interesting stories, analysis and insights. Sign up for our Morning Edition newsletter.More:Queensland PoliceFor subscribersCCCCommercial real estateQueensland governmentLNPDan PurdieFrom our partners