Today the changes to the Transfer of Land Act 1893 (TLA) introduced by the Transfer of Land Amendment Act 2022 (TLAA), come into effect
These three key changes include:
- Removal of Duplicate Certificates of Title
- Enabling the issuing of statutory notices under the TLA electronically;
- Clarification of the definition of counterpart documents.
These changes bring efficiencies for our customers and for Landgate, simplifying and modernising all land conveyancing processes in an electronic land titles Register whilst at the same time supporting the integrity of the Western Australian land Titles Register.
Removal of Duplicate Certificates of Title
Please note, from today, any paper Duplicate Certificates of Title (Duplicate Titles) have no legal effect. They have been removed from the Western Australian land titles system and are not required when registering a land transaction in Western Australia. A Duplicate Title can no longer be created or issued by Landgate. If you or your customers have a paper Duplicate Title, it can be retained as a keepsake, it does not need to be returned to Landgate.
There is no other change to the way Registered Proprietors (owners), registered encumbrances and other interests in land are registered, recorded and searched on Certificates of Title in the State’s land titles Register.
The removal of Duplicate Titles does not require property owners to take any action to prove they own their property. Find out more information about the removal of the Duplicate Certificates of Title in the Frequently Asked Questions on our website.
A number of other Acts have been amended consequential on removal of Duplicate Certificates of Title in the TLA.
Electronic service of statutory notices
Effective today, under the TLA, the Registrar of Titles and the Commissioner of Titles can now formally serve statutory notices electronically. Requisition notices to document lodging parties will now be issued via email where an email address for this purpose has been provided. For documents lodged from today, there will no longer be an option to send the Requisition notice to a fax number.
Requisitions will be emailed from a no-reply email address, notice@landgate.wa.gov.au. Contact details for the Land Titles Officer will be found in the Requisition Notice which will include an email address to respond to.
An email address field for lodgement correspondence for electronically lodged documents is not yet enabled. If you lodge documents electronically and have not previously provided an email address for Requisition correspondence, please send in your preferred email address for this purpose to Dealings@landgate.wa.gov.au with a subject line of “Requisition Email address” and the name of your subscriber entity in the email.
Effective today, Caveators must have an address for service of notices, nominated in the caveat document that is lodged, which is an email address or a postal address in Australia. From today, a caveator will no longer be able to provide a fax number as an address for service of notice. For more information, caveators are encouraged to refer to CIB 411.
Notices will continue to be served on caveators to the fax number nominated for service in caveats already lodged.
Counterpart documents
From today, changes have been made to clarify the definition of counterpart documents to account for the subtle, unavoidable differences between a paper and electronic version of the same document. This change is consistent with the legislation in other Australian jurisdictions.
Transfer of Land Regulations 2004
The Transfer of Land Regulations 2004 have been amended and are available on www.legislation.wa.gov.au. The provisions for service of notices enabled by the head power in the TLA are prescribed by the Regulations.
Residual Documents
26 new Residual document types have been made available for electronic lodgement in PEXA. The use of residual documents is highly encouraged and enables Landgate to use their additional functionality to register these documents faster than those lodged in paper.
For a full list of Residual documents, including the documents that are included in this release, please refer to the Residual Document Table.
For more information on Residual documents please refer to ELE-04 – Residual Documents in the Land Titles Registration Policy and Procedure Guides.
If you need further information or clarification, please email TLA.Amendments@landgate.wa.gov.au.
