Property Instructions for Your Sibling: A Perth Carer’s Plan for Your Parent’s Home and Holdings

You’re the one who drives Mum to her appointments, who keeps the file of insurance renewals on the kitchen bench, and who knows that the Mandurah unit was put into a family trust about a decade ago — or was it? Your sibling lives interstate, helps where they can, and will be the co-executor when the time comes. The plan is to leave them a clear list of every property your parent owns, who insures it, who holds the title, and who the conveyancer is — without ever needing to share a password or move a deed.

The problem

When an older parent dies or loses capacity, property is rarely the simple part. ASIC’s MoneySmart estate planning guidance points out that an executor’s first job is to identify what the deceased owned — and Australian estates routinely stall for months because that inventory has to be reconstructed from scratch. Title documents sit in a solicitor’s safe custody from 1998. The investment unit is held in a discretionary trust whose deed nobody has read in years. The holiday shack at Yallingup is on a leasehold the family barely remembers. Insurance is with one broker, the mortgage with another bank, and the property manager’s contact is in your parent’s phone — which is locked.

Your sibling, as co-executor or successor attorney, doesn’t need your parent’s MyGov password or the keys to the safe. They need to know: which properties exist, how each is owned (sole, joint tenants, tenants in common, trust), who insures each one, who holds the title documents, who the managing agent is for any tenanted property, and what your parent’s stated preference is for each. Without that, the estate pays for the executor’s time to find out — and the family carries the stress.

What the Digital Legacy Vault does

The Digital Legacy Vault is an asset-instruction register: you record what your parent owns, where to find it, and who you’ve named as the recipient of those instructions. The simplified version (built for individuals and families, including carers acting with a parent’s authority) records, per property: the address, the ownership structure, the insurer and policy number, the mortgagee contact if any, where the certificate of title is held, the conveyancer or solicitor on file, the managing agent for tenanted properties, and your parent’s stated beneficiary preference. The vault does NOT hold the deed, the title document itself, mortgage logins, or any credential. Your sibling sees the property module you’ve prepared for them — only when you’ve authorised release.

The boundary matters: the Digital Legacy Vault is not a financial product, not a custody service, and not a legal advice service. It’s an instructions register. That is what keeps it outside the AFSL regime under Corporations Act Part 7.6 and outside AUSTRAC reporting obligations — and it’s why a carer can set it up alongside a parent without engaging a licensed adviser.

How it works

  1. You sit down with your parent (or work from the file you already keep) and add each property to the vault — address, ownership structure, insurer, mortgagee, location of title, conveyancer.
  2. You name your sibling as the recipient for the property module. The vault records their acceptance, so consent is documented under Privacy Act expectations for handling third-party personal information.
  3. You set release rules — for example, on death certificate verification, or on an enduring power of attorney being activated for capacity loss.
  4. When the rule is triggered, your sibling is notified and sees only the property module. Other modules (super, banking, personal effects) stay closed unless you’ve released them too.
  5. Your sibling contacts the conveyancer, the insurer, and the managing agent directly using the details in the vault. The vault speeds up the finding step. The legal work — probate, transfer of title, dealing with Landgate — still goes through the proper channels.

Why this matters in Perth

Perth families often hold a more dispersed property footprint than the postcode suggests: the family home in the suburbs, an investment unit closer to the CBD or in a mining-rotation rental market, and frequently a south-west holiday property at Dunsborough, Yallingup, or Busselton. Add a self-managed super fund holding one of those properties and ownership gets complicated quickly. When a Perth parent loses capacity or dies, the executor — often a sibling juggling work and an interstate flight — can spend weeks just locating which property sits in which structure, and which Western Australian solicitor holds which title. A clear instruction set, prepared in advance by the carer who already knows the answers, removes that delay and lets the estate be administered on its merits rather than on guesswork.

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 organising a parent’s affairs in Perth can register their first property module. The Digital Legacy Vault holds instructions about what exists and how your sibling can find it — not the deeds, not the mortgage logins, and not the property itself.