Property Instructions for Your Adult Children: A Brisbane Parent’s Plan for the Family Home and Beyond

You’re on your own — single, divorced, or widowed — living in Brisbane, and the property questions sit with you alone. There’s the house in Brisbane, maybe a unit on the Gold Coast you rent out, possibly a small share in a holiday place at the Sunshine Coast. Your adult children are scattered between Brisbane, Sydney, and overseas. The plan is to leave them a clear inventory of what you own, who insures it, who manages the tenants, and where the title documents physically live — without asking them to ransack your filing cabinet during the worst week of their lives.

The problem

Property is the slowest-moving asset in most Australian estates. ASIC’s MoneySmart guidance on wills and estate planning notes that an executor’s first job is to identify what the deceased owned — and for property, that means tracking down certificates of title, mortgage statements, insurance policies, rates notices, and property manager contracts. When a sole owner dies in Brisbane, the executor (often one of your adult children) has to reconstruct all of this from scratch: who is the mortgagee, who is the insurer, which agent manages the Gold Coast tenants, where is the original title deed, and is the property held solely, as tenants in common, or through a family trust.

Without that map, probate stalls. Insurance lapses on a vacant house. A tenant’s bond gets returned to the wrong party. The estate pays for months of holding costs because the executor doesn’t know who to call. Your children spend their grief leave on phone hold to land registries instead of with each other.

What the Asset Instruction Vault does

The Digital Legacy Vault is an asset-instruction register: you record what you own, where the documents are, and who you’ve nominated to receive the instructions. The simplified version (built for individuals and families) records, per property: the street address, the ownership structure (sole, joint tenants, tenants in common, trust), the title reference, the mortgagee and loan account identifier, the insurer and policy number, the property manager or agent contact, and the physical location of the certificate of title or trust deed. It does NOT hold the title document itself, the deed, or any login credential for your banking or land registry portal. Your adult children see the inventory you’ve prepared for them, only when you’ve released it.

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’s what keeps it outside the AFSL regime under Corporations Act Part 7.6 — and it’s also why it can be a simple subscription rather than a regulated product. Personal information about your nominated children and your professional contacts is held under the Australian Privacy Principles.

How it works

  1. You add each property to your vault — address, ownership structure, title reference, and a note on where the physical title document is stored (solicitor’s safe, home file, bank deposit box).
  2. You record the mortgagee, insurer, property manager, conveyancer, and accountant for each property, with direct phone numbers.
  3. You name your adult children as recipients for the property module and they accept (the vault records their consent under the Privacy Act).
  4. If something happens — death or a capacity event — your children are notified per your release rules and see only the property instructions module, not your other modules unless you’ve released them too.
  5. Your children contact each insurer, mortgagee, and property manager directly using the instructions. The vault accelerates the finding step, not the legal process of transmission or sale.

Why this matters in Brisbane

Brisbane sole owners often hold a mix of Queensland property and interstate or coastal investment property — a Brisbane home, a Gold Coast or Sunshine Coast investment, sometimes a unit interstate held from a previous life. Queensland uses an electronic Torrens title system, but the certificate of title, trust deeds, and original loan documents are frequently held by a solicitor or accountant whose name your children have never heard. When the executor is a child living in Sydney or overseas, the search for “which Brisbane solicitor has Mum’s title?” can add weeks to probate. A clear instruction set — what exists, where the documents physically live, who to call — typically saves a Brisbane family weeks of executor detective work and prevents insurance, rates, and body-corporate fees from quietly defaulting.

Sources

Join the waitlist

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

We’re opening waitlist access in tranches. Sign up to be notified when individuals in Brisbane 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 bank logins, and not your money.