ArticlesI have a legal deed showing proof of partial ownership of some land in South Australia, and I was told by a conveyancer (which is a job title that means something like “Lawyer Lite (Property-Edition)”) to store it safely.
I treated it like a birth-certificate extract – a certified copy of a report on the contents of a carefully-controlled database, which would be a hassle to replace because I would need to pay some administration fee to re-run the report.
I asked “If I lose it, does it really matter? What will it cost? $50 to replace?”.
There was a nervous laugh at the other end of the phone. “Err… probably around $600.”
“Oh!”
I was going to go into a rant here questioning what century we are in, and how can we really have a system that depends on bits of paper that can be lost, damaged or stolen.
But then I did some research for this post.
It seems the “birth-certificate-like” concept for land has existed since the 1850s, when Torrens title was invented in, of all places, South Australia.
And that getting the South Australian government to issue you a new certificate costs… $18.
Which puts me in a quandrary.
I don’t trust the Internet enough over the advice of a trained and experienced professional to treat the document with a cavalier attitude.
But I do trust it enough not to rant and end up looking foolish.
So, please just ignore this post.
Comment by Richard Atkins on March 24, 2010
Maybe the conveyancer was a) working based on NSW pricing, or b) factoring in their own billable hours for the effort (it’d cost their flunky a good 5 mins to fill out the form and fax it to the SA govt), or c) thinking you wouldn’t have a way to check their price was… exaggerated.
Comment by Julian on March 24, 2010
a) Conveyancer was South Australian. NSW-pricing is similar.
b) I expect to be charged for their flunky at some exorbitant rate – say $100 per hour – to fill in a web-form. But I don’t expect to take 6 hours.
That just leaves c)… or some total misunderstanding on my behalf.
Comment by Chris on March 24, 2010
$600 probably takes into account time taken to express outrage on your blog, Facebook, Twitter, a graffiti wall, The Sydney Morning Herald Letters to the Editor and err… Youtube.
I’m also writing this comment because it says above that this post has three comments, and I feel compelled to make that true.
Comment by Julian on March 24, 2010
But now it says 4! (Err.. 5!) The pingback (a.k.a. Web Mention) below counts as a comment to WordPress.
More importantly, there is no whitespace between “Comments” and “Categories” which I noticed about 6 months ago, and decided I would fix later. It just needles me, but never enough to fix it.