Property Instructions for Your Adult Children: An Adelaide Plan for the Family Home and Anything Else You Own

You’re on your own now — single, divorced, or widowed — living in Adelaide, and the property side of your affairs is the part your adult children will have to deal with first. Maybe it’s just the house in Unley or Prospect. Maybe there’s an investment unit in the city and a shack down at Goolwa. Your kids are capable adults, but right now none of them could tell a solicitor who insures the shack, who holds the title for the unit, or whether the rental managing agent has your current contact details. The plan is to fix that without handing over a single password.

The problem

Property is one of the slowest things to administer in an Australian estate. ASIC’s MoneySmart guidance on wills and estate planning notes that an executor has to identify every asset, locate the documents that prove ownership, and deal with each institution separately before anything can be distributed. For property, that means tracking down certificates of title, mortgage statements, building insurance policies, rates notices, and — if there are tenants — the managing agent and the current lease.

When you’re the only person who knows where all that lives, your adult children inherit a treasure hunt. They ring the solicitor who did the conveyancing in 2009 and find out she’s retired. They don’t know which of the three banks held the mortgage that was paid out years ago. The shack’s insurance renewal goes unpaid because no one knew which insurer it was with. None of this is dramatic; it’s just slow, and it costs the estate in legal fees, missed renewals, and weeks of avoidable stress.

What the Asset Instruction Vault does

The Digital Legacy Vault is an asset-instruction register: you record what you own, where the paperwork sits, and who you’ve nominated to receive the instructions. For property, the simplified version (built for individuals and families) records, per address: the property’s full address, the ownership structure (sole, joint tenants, tenants in common, or held through a trust), where the certificate of title is physically kept, the mortgagee’s contact details if there’s still a loan, the building and landlord insurer plus policy numbers, the managing agent for any tenanted property, and the conveyancer or solicitor who last acted on the title. It does NOT hold the title deed itself, the mortgage password, or any login.

The boundary matters: the Digital Legacy Vault is not a financial product, not a custody service, and not an advice service. It records who to call and where to look. That’s what keeps it outside the AFSL regime and outside AUSTRAC reporting obligations — and it’s why your personal information stays governed by the Privacy Act 1988 and the Australian Privacy Principles rather than financial services law.

How it works

  1. You add each property to your vault — address, ownership structure, where the title sits, mortgagee, insurer, managing agent, conveyancer.
  2. You name your adult children (one, several, or all of them) as recipients for the property module and they accept. The vault records their consent, as the Privacy Act requires for handling their personal information.
  3. You add notes that matter: which child you’d like to inherit the shack, whether the family home should be sold or kept, who has a key, when the insurance renews.
  4. If something happens — death or a capacity event — your adult children are notified per your release rules and see only the property instructions module.
  5. They walk into the solicitor’s office with a complete list: every property you own, who insures it, who managed it, and where the title lives. The executor’s first month becomes a process, not an investigation.

Why this matters in Adelaide

Adelaide property holdings often span a lifetime in one city — the family home held for thirty years, perhaps a unit bought as an investment, sometimes a holiday place on the Fleurieu or in the Adelaide Hills. South Australian titles are now electronic through the Lands Titles Office, but the paper trail of insurers, conveyancers, and managing agents still lives in filing cabinets and inboxes that only you can navigate. For a solo adult planning ahead, the gift to your adult children is a single, current map of all of it — so the property side of your estate moves through probate in weeks, not months.

Sources

Join the waitlist

Join the waitlist — first access when the Digital Legacy Vault opens for Adelaide individuals

We’re opening waitlist access in tranches. Sign up to be notified when solo adults in Adelaide can register their first property module. The Digital Legacy Vault holds instructions about what exists and how your adult children can find it — not your title deeds, not your mortgage logins, and not the assets themselves.