Property Instructions for Your Adult Children: A Perth Plan for the House, the Investment Unit, and the Title Documents

You’re planning your own affairs. No spouse in the picture — just you, the Perth home you’ve owned for twenty-odd years, possibly an investment property in Vic Park or down the coast, and adult children who would be the ones answering the door to the conveyancer if something happened. They don’t know who insures the rental. They don’t know where the title documents are kept. They probably don’t even know whether the home is held in your name, a family trust, or as tenants-in-common with someone from a long time ago. The plan is to leave them a clear instruction set so they can act — during a capacity event or after death — without spending months reconstructing what you owned.

The problem

Property is the most valuable thing in most Australian estates and the slowest to administer. ASIC’s MoneySmart estate planning guidance is blunt about why: assets only move cleanly when the executor knows what exists, where the paperwork lives, and who the professional contacts are. When an adult child is named executor for a solo parent, they typically inherit a problem with no map. The conveyancer who handled the 2003 purchase has retired. The insurer changed three times. The property manager for the rental is a name on an old email. The original certificate of title is “somewhere in the study, probably.”

Probate doesn’t fail in these cases — it just drags. Months pass. Insurance lapses or doesn’t get transferred. Tenants stop paying because no one tells them where to send rent. The estate carries holding costs the whole time. Your children are grieving and also chasing a paper trail you could have left them in an afternoon.

What the Asset Instruction 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, ownership structure (sole name, joint tenants, tenants-in-common, family trust, company), the mortgagee and loan reference if applicable, the current insurer and policy number, where the certificate of title or duplicate is physically kept, the conveyancer or solicitor who acted on purchase, the property manager for any tenanted property, and your preferences about whether the property should be retained, sold, or transferred to a specific child.

The Digital Legacy Vault does NOT hold the title deed itself, does NOT hold mortgage login credentials, and does NOT give financial advice on what to do with the property. It’s an instructions register — what exists, where it lives, who to call. That boundary is what keeps the Digital Legacy Vault outside the AFSL regime (Corporations Act Part 7.6) and outside AUSTRAC reporting. It also means it can be a simple subscription rather than a regulated financial product.

How it works

  1. You add each property to your vault — address, ownership structure, mortgagee, insurer, property manager, where the title document is physically stored.
  2. You record professional contacts: the conveyancer who acted, your accountant, the agent who manages the rental, the strata manager for any apartment.
  3. You name your adult children (one or several) as recipients for the property module. They accept the nomination and the vault records their consent.
  4. If you lose capacity or die, 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 that instruction set to your executor, solicitor, or attorney under enduring power of attorney. The probate or capacity process still happens through the normal channels — the vault just removes the detective work.

Why this matters in Perth

Perth households frequently mix a long-held family home with one or two investment properties — often a unit closer to the city or a holiday place down south near Dunsborough or Busselton. Ownership structures accumulate over decades: a property bought solo in the eighties, one held jointly with a former partner, one transferred into a family trust during a restructure in the 2010s. Landgate handles WA title transfers, but the executor still has to know which structure governs each property before they can lodge anything. For a solo parent leaving instructions to adult children who may live in Sydney, Melbourne, or overseas, a clear per-property instruction set is the difference between a six-week administration and a six-month one.

Sources

Join the waitlist

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

We’re opening waitlist access in tranches. Sign up to be notified when solo adults in Perth 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 your property itself.