Privatisation of the SA Lands Titles Office

[stumpjumper]

Any views?

A basic title search currently costs $27.25. The process is fully electronic and apart from the costs of setting up and maintaining the electronic system, it doesn't cost a lot to send an electronic title to a customer. The LTO provides a lot of other information as well.

I'm wondering what the effects of privatisation might be - on cost of use, security of information etc. for all I know, the LTO might currently outsource some of its operations anyway.

I thought that there might be a few informed people here who could comment.

[eKwatee]

I believe once Conveyancing goes electronic, Pexa will be processing the transactions https://www.pexa.com.au/

I believe Pexa is a Privately held company with the banks being the shareholders.

[rev]

I don't know how all their operations run, but like you said a title search is done in house by government employees/public servants.
In other words, they have access to personal information. A government database.

It's absolutely insane to hand over a government database on private citizens to a private corporation.
Not that it really matters in this day and age, because private corporations especially offshore ones have a lot of data on all of us already anyway. Now they'll just have access to what land/property we own and the value of said land/property.

The cost isn't the issue imo, it's peoples privacy that's the issue.

Once it's sold off to one private corporation, they might sell it to another one.
Whose to say all these free trade agreements wont prevent our governments from blocking any sale, say to a Chinese government corporation, or some Saudi Arabian or Qatari corporation with direct links back to their royal dictatorships famous for their terrorist sponsorship?

And what's going to happen to the government employees at the LTO? Will they be "privatized" as well?

Most of you who are the 'older' generation voted in the idiot politicians who brought us globalization. I blame you for all this country's woes.

[stumpjumper]

Most of the information held by the LTO relates to property ownership and transfer, and the information is publicly available piece by piece for a fee - $27.25 in the case of a simple certificate of title search. So privacy is perhaps not an issue in relation to specific information, but I think there is a concern that it could be aggregated, or searched in various ways, to create a saleable product which a private database owner might be tempted to do to offset costs of operating the system. Some aggregated data are available now, eg lists of all unit sales in a price range in a suburb, but a private operator might put together for example a list of all people who own a property other than the one registered as their home address etc.

There's also the question of duplicate titles, which I understand will no longer be produced. Duplicates have a use - they are held by mortgagees, for example, and must be produced to effect a legal transfer. That's part of the inherent security of the Torrens system.

There is also the matter of government guarantee of indefeasibility (ie paramount accuracy) of title. With the integrity of the system in private hands, who will guarantee indefeasibility, and at what cost to the title holder?

At present, government bodies have access at no charge to the LTO's information. Will a private data holder charge the government bodies, in other words the taxpayer, for the extensive use three bodies make of the LTO's data?

It looks to me like an attempt by the government to get a one-off cash injection, without much concern for the cost of use in the future.

[Vee]

Summary by The Law Society via @LawSocietySA of proposed changes to the Real Property Act in SA.

http://www.lawsocietysa.asn.au/bulletin ... ty_Act.pdf

[stumpjumper]

Thanks, Vee. That article from the Law Society describes the changes, but doesn't take a position on whether they are bad or good.

It seems to me that the present system, which is based on 'indefeasibility of title', ie that the information on the physical (and now electronic) title is the ultimate authority, works well, provided that the physical (electronic) title itself is very securely held and cannot be altered without the consent of the party to a transaction on it and the duplicate holder, and noting the change on the duplicate. Consider the trouble you go through if you cannot locate the duplicate.

The fully electronic system proposed recognises this need for ultimate authority by including a number of additional documents or instruments around the title itself - the 'Title Watch', 'Client Authorisations' etc. It doesn't need to be mentioned that every time they even look at a document, let alone handle or process it in any way, lawyers charge a fee, so I wonder what the effect will be of the change to a fully electoronic system will be on the cost of conveyancing and other dealings with property.