Buying a House, Unit or Land

There are several critical searches we strongly recommend you do including the title search and plan image (to check you have the right property); contaminated land search; main roads search (to check they’re not widening the road and taking part of your property soon); and land tax which cost around $200 all up. Then there is the rates and water searches, and the cost of these will depend mostly on the area you’re purchasing in the charges differ from Council to Council. So on average, searches cost around the $650 mark.

If you do not have a simultaneous transaction (i.e. you’re not also selling or refinancing another property) then the only likely delay in your transaction will be your Bank arranging your loan for this property, and the Seller having their mortgage/s released. The standard time is 30 days in Queensland contracts and this tends to be more around the 45-60 days in other States. We can work as quickly as you need us to, so if you have to settle the property sooner than anticipated we’ll try to push things along with the other side and your financier.

We recommend insuring the property immediately. In Queensland, the risk of the property passes to you the day after Contract Date i.e. when you both sign/exchange contracts, which means even though you don’t yet legally own the property – if it burns down a week later, the Buyer has to rebuild it for the Seller. In other States, you may still want to insure the property from Contract Date in case the Seller isn’t insured – it may be easier to rely on your insurance rather than have the Seller terminate the contract if something goes wrong.

We’ll need a copy of your identification i.e. Driver’s License and Passport if possible, plus your address, email and phone number, to set up our electronic file. Once the Contract is provided by the Agent, we’ll review it to make sure the property disclosures are made and any special conditions to make sure your rights are protected. We’ll also do some preliminary searches to see what may need to go into the Contract and that you are buying the correct property!

No, we can manage the entire transaction working with you via telephone, email and teleconference/webcam if you would like to have a face-to-face meeting. This saves you time, and also saves money not having to pay for inner city parking. You can just post any original documents to Level 54, 111 Eagle Street, Brisbane QLD 4000, email us at admin@virtuallegal.com.au or call on 1300 550 150.

The position on what duties are payable depends on the State in which you’re transferring property, and also the situation of the transfer i.e. if you have had a property settlement with an ex-partner or spouse, then you may be able to avoid payment of duty so long as you have the correct documentation prepared. In some states, where you are transferring to your spouse, you may fall under an exception and avoid duty, but there will be strict conditions around this. Generally where you are transferring to a family member and it is not part of administration of an estate, you will have to pay duty on the value of the property, even where no money is changing hands.

Yes, we will provide you with the Buyers Searches List so that you can see all of the searches that we may be able to do for you and let us know what you and your builder need. We don’t charge extra for ordering additional searches and there is no margin for us on the searches – we just send the direct cost to you, once you’ve approved the purchase.