e-Conveyancing for Australian Property Transactions

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A national digital system to formalise property sales, known as PEXA, is being rolled out around the country in 2014 and Queensland is likely to get on board by the end of the year.

 

With the PEXA system linking land registries, financial institutions and practitioners for the first time and there are 4 companies whose job it is to ensure the PEXA system works for Australia's lawyers and conveyancers.

 

What it strives to do is bring transparency to contracts between the parties, the funds and how they need to be settled, and it removes the element of human error, and hopefully the risk of the property settlement not taking place at the agreed place and time may be eliminated.

 

e-Conveyancing will be looking to take a large slice of Australia's $280 billion worth of property transactions, and there is $2.5 billion spent each year on conveyancing costs; the PEXA digital system is expected to cut costs by about 10% by making land registries, banks and lawyers more efficient.

 

There are about 5 million property transactions per year done manually, so if 80% of them become electronic, the remaining transactions aren't sustainable for the agencies to survive.

 

Implementing an electronic conveyancing system in Australia is not a new idea, it was placed on the agenda at the 2008 Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting, and later a company named NECDL was created to run the e-conveyancing system.

 

NECDL's key stakeholders include four state governments, the big four banks and Macquarie Capital.

 

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