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

You’re planning your own affairs in Melbourne — no current partner — and the people who will eventually deal with your property are your adult children. There’s the house in the inner north, maybe a unit you rented out for a decade, possibly a share in a holiday place down the peninsula. Title documents are with the solicitor who did the last refinance. The insurer changed two years ago. The kids know the address of where you live and nothing else. The plan is to fix that — without handing them a folder of passwords they don’t need.

The problem

Property is the slowest moving piece of most Australian estates. ASIC’s MoneySmart guidance on wills and estate planning notes that an executor has to identify what the deceased owned, locate the relevant documents, and deal with each asset before the estate can be distributed. For property, that means addresses, ownership structure (sole name, tenants in common, held via a trust), the current mortgagee, the current insurer, the conveyancer who last touched the title, and any property manager looking after tenants.

When that information lives in your head, your solicitor’s filing system, and your accountant’s archive — but nowhere in one place — your adult children spend the first months reconstructing it. Probate stalls. Insurance premiums lapse on an empty house. Tenants stop hearing from anyone. None of that is what you wanted to leave them.

What the Digital Legacy Vault does

The Digital Legacy Vault is an asset-instruction register: you record what you own, where to find it, and who you’ve nominated to receive the instructions. The simplified version (built for individuals and families) records, per property: the full address, the ownership structure, the title reference, where the title document is physically held, the current mortgagee and loan account reference, the current insurer and policy number, the managing agent’s contact, and the conveyancer or solicitor who last acted on the property. It does NOT hold the title deed, the mortgage discharge authority, or any login. Your adult children see only the property module 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 an advice service. It’s an instructions register. That’s what keeps it outside the AFSL regime and outside AUSTRAC reporting — and it’s also why it can be a simple subscription rather than a regulated product.

How it works

  1. You add each property to your vault — address, ownership structure, title reference, and where the actual title document is held (your solicitor’s safe, the bank, your filing cabinet).
  2. You record the insurer, the mortgagee (if any), the managing agent (if tenanted), and your conveyancer.
  3. You name your adult children as the recipients for the property module and they accept (the vault records their consent under your release rules).
  4. If you lose capacity or pass away, 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 take the instruction set to your solicitor and the executor. The vault accelerates the finding step — what exists, where the documents live, who to call — not the legal transfer itself.

Why this matters in Melbourne

Melbourne property estates are unusually layered. Many older owners hold the family home in sole name, an investment property in a discretionary trust set up in the eighties or nineties, and a share in a holiday house held as tenants in common with siblings. Each structure has a different paper trail, a different professional adviser, and a different path through probate. Under the Privacy Act 1988 and the Australian Privacy Principles, the personal information about each of those parties — your conveyancer, your accountant, your co-owners — has to be handled carefully. A clear, recipient-scoped instruction set means your adult children get exactly the contacts they need to act, and nothing they don’t.

Sources

Join the waitlist

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

We’re opening waitlist access in tranches. Sign up to be notified when individuals in Melbourne 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 property itself.