Property Instructions for Your Parent’s Executor: A Perth Carer’s Plan for the Family Home and What Comes With It

You’re the adult child managing things for your mum or dad in Perth. There’s the family home in a suburb they’ve lived in for thirty years, possibly an investment unit, maybe a holiday place down south. You know roughly where the title documents are, you think you know who the insurer is, and you’ve met the conveyancer once. The executor named in the will — your sibling, or you, or a solicitor — is going to have to reconstruct all of that under pressure. The plan is to write it down now, while your parent can still confirm the details.

The problem

ASIC’s MoneySmart guidance on wills and estate planning is direct: an executor’s job is to identify and administer the deceased’s assets, and the speed of that work depends entirely on how well the assets are documented. Property is the largest single line item in most Australian estates and also the most paperwork-heavy. The executor needs to know which properties exist, the exact ownership structure (sole name, joint tenants, tenants in common, family trust, SMSF), where the certificate of title is held, who the mortgagee is, who the insurer is, who the property manager is for any tenanted property, and which conveyancer or solicitor handled the last transaction.

When that information lives only in your aging parent’s memory — or split across a filing cabinet, a solicitor who has since retired, and an accountant in a different state — the executor spends the first two months of administration just finding things. Probate takes longer. Insurance lapses on a vacant property. A tenant goes unmanaged. The estate carries holding costs that didn’t need to exist.

What the Asset Instruction Vault does

The Digital Legacy Vault is an asset-instruction register: your parent (with your help, as carer) records what they own, where it is, and who you’ve named to receive the instructions. The simplified version records, per property: the full address, the ownership structure, the title reference and where the certificate of title is physically held, the mortgagee and loan reference, the insurer and policy number, the property manager or tenant details, the conveyancer or solicitor who acted on purchase, and any beneficiary preference your parent has expressed about that property. It does NOT hold the deed itself, the title certificate, or login credentials to any portal.

The boundary matters: the Digital Legacy Vault is not a financial product, not a custody service, and not legal or financial advice. It’s an instructions register. That keeps the vault outside the AFSL regime and outside AUSTRAC reporting — which is also why a carer can set it up for a parent without triggering a regulated-product threshold.

How it works

  1. You sit with your parent and add each property to the vault — address, ownership structure, title reference, mortgagee, insurer, property manager, conveyancer.
  2. You note where the physical title document and insurance certificate live (the bottom drawer in the study; a safety deposit box at the bank in Subiaco; the solicitor’s file).
  3. You name the executor as the recipient for the property module. The executor accepts and the vault records their consent under the Privacy Act’s handling principles for third-party personal information.
  4. You set the release rule — typically on production of a death certificate, or on a doctor’s certification of incapacity if the vault is also supporting an enduring power of attorney workflow.
  5. When the time comes, the executor is notified and sees the property module: a clean inventory of what exists, where the documents are, and who to ring first. They begin probate with a map rather than a mystery.

Why this matters in Perth

Perth property estates often look simple from the outside and turn out to be tangled underneath. A family home held in joint names with a deceased spouse from a decade ago, where the title was never updated. An investment unit in Joondalup managed by an agent whose details are in an email account no one can access. A south-west holiday block held through a family trust set up in the 1990s, with the trust deed sitting in a solicitor’s archive in West Perth. Landgate’s title registration system is straightforward to search once you know what to search for — but the executor has to know the property exists first. A documented instructions register, prepared while your parent is still able to confirm each line, is the difference between a six-week probate file and a six-month one.

Sources

Join the waitlist

Join the waitlist — first access when the Digital Legacy Vault opens for Perth carers

We’re opening waitlist access in tranches. Sign up to be notified when carers in Perth can register a property module on behalf of an aging parent. The Digital Legacy Vault holds instructions about what exists and how your parent’s executor can find it — not the title deeds, not the bank logins, and not the keys.