Wagga Wagga Blog

 

Your home is one of the most important and biggest assets you own. If you're thinking about selling, ensuring you have covered all the legal obligations that are required of you is crucial in making the sale process as smooth and easy as possible.

There are a number of steps before your property can be listed for sale.  A solicitor will need to be engaged to draw up the contract for sale for your property before any marketing can happen.

A contract is a legal requirement an agent must obtain before they can list and market residential property.

STEP 1 - Preparing the contract for sale

Upon receiving instructions to list a property for sale from an agent, the solicitor will then get in touch with you the vendor.  As the vendor, you are the solicitor’s client and they need to ensure you are happy to go ahead with listing your property for sale. 

The vendor's disclosure is the sharing of information and “Material fact” about property between the vendor and buyer that would not ordinarily be known. The compiling of all these documents is called the Vendor statement and incurs a fee from the solicitor. This fee is due to the cost required to buy these documents from different public authorities to prepare the contract.

Below is a list of documents that are used to compile the contract and why they are important:

Property Certificate or a title search sets out details about the property.

Planning Certificate sets out the relevant planning information.

Sewer Diagram contains the property diagram of sewerage service.

Deposited Plan obtained from the New South Wales Government this document ensures that the house is where it is meant to be, we are selling the right property and Identifying the property boundaries and any easements that the property may have.

The solicitor can now prepare the contract once all the above documents are obtained and forward to the agent.

The agent can now market and list the property for sale.

 

STEP 2 - Receiving the sales advice (notice of offer) from the agent

Once the agent has negotiated the sale of the property, the agent will then send the solicitor sales advice.

The sales advice is sent to the solicitor from the agent which includes the following information:

Sale price
Special conditions of the sale
Purchaser details
Purchase solicitor details
Vendor details
Vendor solicitor details
Deposit amount
Settlement date
Agent details

At this stage, the solicitor will contact the vendor to go through all the details in the sale advice and to receive instructions to update the contract to reflect that sale. Once the contract of sale reflects the sale details, we have a period of negotiation.

During this period the final details of the sale are negotiated. For example, there might be clauses that deal with finance or inspections of the property or obtaining approvals or other circumstances that arise that there needs to be a condition within the contract to allow for those things to happen.

 

STEP 3 - EXCHANGE of contracts

Once all terms have been agreed the solicitor can now finalise the contact and issue for ‘Exchange’.

When the purchaser's signed contracted is sent to the vendor and the vendor's signed contract is sent to the purchaser's solicitor Exchange has taken place. There is now a five-day cooling-off period unless that's been waived within the terms of the contract.

 

STEP 4 - Settlement

The settlement period or completion period is usually 28 days. During this period, the solicitor acting for the vendor and purchaser need to check titles allowing the property to be transferred free of encumbrances. There is also work behind the scenes with the banks. The vendor's bank ensures that any security on the property can be removed at settlement. The purchases bank ensures the money required to buy the property is available at settlement.

At settlement, the purchaser is entitled to a pre-settlement inspection right up until before the settlement date. This is to ensure that the property is in the same condition as when the purchaser decided to buy it.

During this period of sale, the purchaser is not made aware of what is happening behind the scenes. Their solicitor and their bank or broker and the agent are all working together to make sure the necessary actions are taken by each party.

On settlement day, the property moves from the vendor's name to purchaser's name, cash moves from the purchaser's name to the vendor's name, and the agent will hand over the keys to the new owner.

Now the sale is complete and the new owner can move into their new home or in the case of an investment property they will now receive rent.

For any further questions on the process of sale call one of your agents today or contact solicitor Rhys at Bowerwood.