Property Instructions for Your Partner: An Adelaide Parent’s Plan for the Family Home and What Else You Own

You’re raising kids in Adelaide, you co-own the family home with your partner, and somewhere between school runs and work there’s also the investment unit at Glenelg, the holiday shack down at Victor Harbor, or the half-share in your late mother’s place at Prospect that still hasn’t been formally sorted. The plan is to leave your partner a clear list of every property, who insures it, who holds the title, and who the conveyancer is — so that if something happens to you, the kids’ housing doesn’t become a six-month administrative problem.

The problem

Property is one of the slowest assets to administer in an Australian estate. ASIC’s MoneySmart guidance on wills and estate planning makes the point plainly: assets pass under your will (or under intestacy rules if there isn’t one), and the executor has to identify what you owned, prove it, and deal with it before anything reaches a beneficiary. For property, that means tracking down certificates of title, current rates notices, building insurance policies, mortgage statements, and — if it’s tenanted — the property manager who’s collecting the rent.

Your partner doesn’t need your MyGov login or your bank password to do any of that. They need to know: the addresses of every property you jointly or separately own, how each is held (joint tenants, tenants in common, in a family trust, in your sole name), which insurer covers each one and the policy number, who the mortgagee is, where the title documents are physically kept, and who your conveyancer or property lawyer is. Without that list, the first months after a death go to paperwork archaeology — and for a parent with dependants, that’s months the kids’ housing stability sits in limbo.

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 address, the ownership structure, the insurer and policy number, the mortgagee and loan reference, where the title document lives, the conveyancer or property lawyer’s contact details, and any property manager or tenancy notes. It does NOT hold the certificate of title itself, the deed, or any banking credential. Your partner sees 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 an advice service. It’s an instructions register. That’s what keeps it outside the AFSL regime (Corporations Act Part 7.6) and outside AUSTRAC reporting — and it’s also what keeps it a simple subscription rather than a regulated product. Under the Privacy Act and the Australian Privacy Principles, the personal information you record (about yourself, your partner, your conveyancer) is held under a defined privacy regime.

How it works

  1. You add each property to your vault — address, ownership structure, insurer, mortgagee, where the title is kept, conveyancer contact.
  2. You name your partner as the recipient for the property module and they accept (the vault records their consent).
  3. You record any notes that change over time — a new insurance policy, a refinance, a switch in property manager — and update the entry when they do.
  4. If something happens, your partner is notified per your release rules and sees only the property instructions module — not your other modules unless you’ve released them too.
  5. Your partner takes the inventory to the executor and the conveyancer. The executor still has to do the legal work of administering the estate; the vault just removes the detective phase.

Why this matters in Adelaide

Adelaide families often hold property in patterns that are slow to untangle — a family home in the inner suburbs, an inherited share of a parent’s house in the northern or western suburbs, sometimes a coastal or Riverland holiday property, occasionally a small commercial holding through a family trust. South Australian property transfers go through Land Services SA, and an executor without a clear inventory ends up paying a conveyancer to first work out what exists before they can do anything with it. A vault entry per property — addresses, insurers, mortgagees, conveyancer — typically saves an Adelaide family weeks of preliminary work and reduces the risk that a property (especially a half-share in something inherited) is simply missed.

Sources

Join the waitlist

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

We’re opening waitlist access in tranches. Sign up to be notified when parents with dependants in Adelaide can register their first property module. The Digital Legacy Vault holds instructions about what exists and how your partner can find it — not your title deeds, not your bank logins, and not the properties themselves.