I settled a property last Tuesday. The entire financial settlement — transfer of title, mortgage discharge, new mortgage registration, and funds disbursement — happened electronically in about forty-five minutes. No bank cheques. No physical document exchanges. No anxious phone calls between solicitors trying to confirm that “the cheque is in the taxi.”

Ten years ago, that same transaction would have taken most of a day and involved at least three people physically travelling to a settlement room. Progress is real. But if you think Australian property transfers are fully digitised, you haven’t tried selling a property in Tasmania recently.

The PEXA Reality

PEXA dominates electronic conveyancing in Australia. They handle the vast majority of property settlements in NSW, Victoria, Queensland, Western Australia, and South Australia. When it works — and it usually does — it’s genuinely impressive. Title transfers that used to require physical documents, wet signatures, and in-person settlements now happen through a digital workspace.

The numbers tell the story. PEXA processed over 4 million transactions last financial year. Settlement times have dropped. Error rates are lower than paper-based processes. And the environmental impact of eliminating millions of printed documents isn’t trivial.

But here’s the thing nobody mentions in the glossy case studies: the parts of property transfer that sit outside the settlement itself are still remarkably analogue.

What’s Still Manual

Contract preparation is still largely a manual process. Yes, there are precedent libraries and template systems, but every contract gets customised. Special conditions, specific inclusions and exclusions, vendor disclosures — all of this requires human drafting and human review. I haven’t seen any AI tool that I’d trust to draft a contract of sale for a Sydney property without substantial human oversight.

Searches and enquiries are another bottleneck. Title searches are electronic. Fine. But try getting a timely response from your local council about zoning compliance, outstanding notices, or development applications affecting a neighbouring property. Some councils have digital portals. Others require you to submit a written request and wait two to four weeks.

Section 10.7 certificates in NSW (formerly Section 149) are a good example of this patchwork. Some councils issue them within 48 hours through an online portal. Others take three weeks and require a physical form. The inconsistency is maddening.

The Identification Problem

One area that’s improved enormously is verification of identity (VOI). The requirement for face-to-face identity verification of all parties to a property transaction was introduced after some spectacular title fraud cases in the early 2010s. Initially, this meant everyone had to physically visit a solicitor or conveyancer with their passport and driver’s licence.

Now, several platforms offer remote VOI through video calls with document verification technology. It’s faster, more convenient, and arguably more secure than the old process — a well-trained AI system checking document security features is more reliable than a conveyancer squinting at a passport photo.

The Australian Registrars’ National Electronic Conveyancing Council (ARNECC) has been gradually expanding what’s permitted for electronic verification, though the rules still vary by jurisdiction.

Where the Gaps Hurt Most

The biggest frustration I see regularly is the disconnect between the digital settlement process and the non-digital everything-else.

A typical property sale in Sydney involves: listing, marketing, negotiations, contract preparation, exchange, building and pest inspections, finance approval, further negotiations about defects or conditions, settlement preparation, and final settlement. Of these steps, only the final settlement is truly digitised.

Exchange of contracts is still done by solicitors physically or electronically exchanging signed contracts. The cooling-off period is still managed by phone calls and letters. Finance conditions are still confirmed by emails from banks that arrive when they feel like it.

First home buyers feel this most acutely. They’re a generation that manages their entire financial life through apps. Then they buy their first property and discover they need to sit in a solicitor’s office signing paper documents with a witness. It’s jarring.

What Needs to Happen Next

The settlement piece is largely solved. What Australian property transfer needs now is digitisation of everything around the settlement. Standardised digital contracts rather than PDFs. Universal online portals for council searches with mandated response times. A single national digital identity framework.

None of this is technically difficult. It’s politically and bureaucratically difficult. Every stakeholder has their own systems, their own timelines, and their own reasons for not changing.

But the direction is clear, even if the pace is frustrating. Five years from now, the end-to-end process will be substantially more digital. The question is whether we get there through coordinated reform or through slow, painful accumulation of individual improvements.

Based on 25 years watching this industry change, I know which one I’d bet on. And it’s not the coordinated option.