Property Settlement Services is a guide to settlement day in Australian property sales, written and published by Dotto. It reads the national rules for electronic settlement from the council of land titles registrars that keeps them, and each state’s rules from that state’s own pages. Western Australia’s settlements are outside it.
General informationGeneral information about how settlement works, not legal advice about any sale. The official word is with ARNECC, the council of Australia’s land titles registrars, and with each state’s own pages, among them Consumer Affairs Victoria, the NSW Government, the Queensland Government and SA.GOV.AU.
The day the two sides meet
In Victoria’s words, settlement is the date the buyer pays the balance of the purchase price, gets the property title and becomes the registered owner, and takes possession of the property unless something else has been arranged. Consumer Affairs Victoria calls it “an official process”, usually carried out between the two sides’ legal practitioners or conveyancers and their lenders.
The day itself comes from the contract. In Victoria the seller sets the settlement date in the contract of sale. South Australia’s Land and Business (Sale and Conveyancing) Act 1994 defines the date of settlement as the date the contract fixes, or another date the parties agree in its place; where no date is fixed, it is the date settlement actually takes place.
How the two sides meet has changed. In NSW a buyer engages a lawyer or licensed conveyancer who subscribes to an electronic lodgment network to settle electronically for them, and cheques and paper documents are no longer required. Each state and territory adopted the same national law for it, and the first guide follows that law from the agreement behind it to the rules a lawyer or conveyancer must keep.
The three guides
Each guide takes one part of the day, with the place each rule belongs to named beside it.
- The law behind an electronic settlementOne agreement between the states, one council of registrars, an Act in each place, and the two rulebooks for the networks and the people who use them.
- The money on settlement dayWho may direct the balance, where funds wait in a Victorian electronic settlement, how rates are split on the day, and the tax amounts settled with the land.
- When settlement cannot happen on the dayQueensland’s four named causes of delay and the Northern Territory’s one, the locked workspace, and what the official pages leave to the contract.
What the official pages leave to the contract
Standard land contracts are the law societies’ documents. The ATO notes that every law society but the Northern Territory’s has revised its contract to carry the GST notice a seller gives.
The state pages read for these guides describe settlement day, but none of them explains the notice to complete a contract uses when one side is simply late, or what a party who settles late has to pay. Queensland’s Property Law Act 2023 and the Northern Territory’s Law of Property Act 2000 are the exception in part: each sets out what happens, and what notice may be given, when settlement fails on the day for a reason it names. The third guide sets them out side by side.
The work itself is usually done by lawyers and conveyancers. In NSW most people engage a licensed conveyancer or solicitor for it, and the two are equally qualified to do conveyancing.