Selling property in Victoria.

Selling in Victoria is a disclosure exercise before it is anything else. Under the Sale of Land Act 1962, a vendor must give the purchaser a section 32 statement before the contract is signed. It covers the title and anything registered on it, mortgages and caveats, easements and covenants, planning controls, rates and outgoings, owners corporation information, building permits from recent years and the services connected to the land.

The obligation sits with you as the seller, not with your agent. The certificates behind it come from the council, the water authority, the State Revenue Office, the planning authority and the owners corporation manager, and each has its own timing.

Getting the statement ready early is the single easiest way to keep a campaign on schedule. Agents cannot take offers without it, and buyers' lawyers read it closely.

A vendor statement that is incomplete or inaccurate is not a paperwork problem. It can give the purchaser a right to rescind the contract before settlement, which means a sale lost at the worst possible moment, usually after you have committed to a purchase of your own.

The common failures are ordinary rather than exotic: an old statement recycled from a previous sale, a certificate that has gone stale, an owners corporation with a special levy that was never mentioned, works completed without a permit, or a notice from council that nobody thought was relevant.

It is also the document a buyer's lawyer is paid to attack. Preparing it properly is a modest cost against the risk of a purchaser walking away with their deposit and you starting the campaign again.

The contract is the seller's document, and that is an advantage worth using. The settlement period, the deposit and when it can be released, the inclusions, whether the buyer gets access before settlement, how a tenancy is dealt with and what happens if either party is late are all set by the contract you put out.

Special conditions matter most where the sale is not a standard house on a standard title: a subdivision that is not yet registered, a rent back while you find your next home, a sale from an estate, a development site, or a purchaser who wants a long settlement.

If you are selling and buying at once, the two contracts have to be looked at together. Dates that do not line up are the reason people end up needing bridging finance they did not plan for.

The agency agreement you sign is a contract too. Commission, marketing spend, the exclusive period and what happens if you withdraw or sell privately are all negotiable, and the estimated selling price range has its own rules under the Estate Agents Act 1980. It is worth reading before signing, not after the campaign.

Auction sales need the contract and section 32 finalised well before auction day, because a successful bidder signs on the spot. Off market and private sales carry the opposite risk: informal negotiations, agreements reached by text message, and terms that were never written down properly.

A conveyancing lawyer works alongside your agent throughout, takes the legal enquiries directly, and keeps the campaign moving without you having to relay messages between two professionals.

Tax decides how much of the price you keep, and several of the decisions are locked in by the contract rather than by your tax return. Whether GST applies, whether the margin scheme is used, and whether the purchaser has to pay part of the price to the Australian Taxation Office under the withholding rules for new residential premises all depend on what the contract says.

Foreign resident capital gains withholding is the one that surprises sellers most often. For sales at or above the threshold, the purchaser must withhold and remit a percentage of the price unless a clearance certificate is provided before settlement. Australian residents are not exempt from the process, only from the outcome, and only if the certificate is obtained in time.

These positions are cheap to get right at the drafting stage and expensive to fix once the contract is signed. They are worth raising at the start, working with your accountant.

The deposit is normally held in the agent's trust account until settlement. Early release is possible in some circumstances, but only where the contract and the statutory requirements allow it, and releasing money before that point exposes the seller if the sale later falls over.

In the lead up to settlement the discharge of your mortgage is coordinated with the bank, the adjustments for rates, land tax, water and owners corporation fees checked, and the figures confirmed with the purchaser's representative. Where the property is tenanted, the bond and rent are dealt with as part of the same process.

Settlement completes through PEXA. You do not attend, the mortgage is discharged, and the net proceeds are paid to your account with a statement showing exactly how the figure was reached.

A buyer who cannot settle on the due date is in default, and a seller has real remedies: penalty interest for the delay, recovery of costs, a default notice requiring the purchaser to complete, and if that is not answered, ending the contract and keeping the deposit while claiming any shortfall on a resale.

Those remedies depend on the steps being taken in the right order, in the right form and at the right time. Agreeing to an open ended extension, or waiting to see what happens, can weaken a position that was strong on the day settlement was missed.

What each option realistically achieves can be assessed, and the step taken that gets you to a completed sale or a clean exit rather than to a long argument.