Vendor disclosure before contracts are signed: what each Australian state requires of a conveyancing file

Pre-contract vendor disclosure is not one national rule. Victoria requires a signed section 32 statement, Queensland a Form 2 since 1 August 2025, South Australia a Form 1, New South Wales prescribed documents attached to the contract, and Western Australia none at all. MatterFirst, a legal practice management platform for Australian law firms, records matters in all eight jurisdictions.

A conveyancing practice therefore cannot run its pre-contract stage off one checklist. The obligation changes at the border, the trigger point changes with it, and in several jurisdictions the consequence of getting it wrong is a purchaser who can walk away. This guide sets out what each jurisdiction requires before the buyer signs, what the file has to prove afterwards, and which parts of that work a practice management system should carry.

What each jurisdiction requires before the buyer signs

Sources for the cooling off figures: Consumer Affairs Victoria on buying by private sale, NSW Government on contracts and deposits and the Queensland Government's cooling off page.

Victoria: a statement, signed, before signing

Consumer Affairs Victoria puts the obligation plainly: "A vendor under a contract for the sale of land must give to a purchaser, before the purchaser signs the contract, a statement signed by the vendor." The statement must cover title matters including "mortgages, covenants, easements, zoning, outgoings (for example, rates)" and a declaration if the land is in a bushfire-prone area.

Two operational points follow. The statement is dated and signed, so the file needs the version that was actually given, not the latest draft. And because its content comes from certificates with their own currency, a statement assembled six weeks before the campaign closes is a different document from the one the vendor signed.

New South Wales: the contract carries the disclosure

New South Wales does not use a separate vendor statement. The disclosure is the bundle prescribed by Schedule 1 of the Conveyancing (Sale of Land) Regulation 2022, attached to the contract before it is offered, with a planning certificate required unless the land sits outside a local government area. The contract package is the disclosure package, so version control lands on the contract itself.

Queensland: the newest regime, and the one most likely to catch a file

The seller disclosure scheme under the Property Law Act 2023 (Qld) commenced on 1 August 2025. The Queensland Government's guidance is that the seller must give the buyer a completed Form 2 together with the prescribed certificates before the buyer signs, and that the certificates can include a title search and survey plan, notices under environmental and building legislation, pool safety documents where relevant, and a community management statement and body corporate certificate for a scheme lot.

The enforcement edge is what matters for workflow design. A buyer may terminate where the seller did not give the disclosure documents. Where they were given but were inaccurate or incomplete, the buyer must show the issue was material, that they did not know of it, and that they would not have signed had they known. A missing certificate is a clean termination right; a wrong one is an argument. Both are avoidable with a gate in the workflow rather than a memory in a conveyancer's head.

South Australia: the clock starts with the statement, not the contract

South Australia is the jurisdiction where disclosure and cooling off are wired together most tightly. A Form 1 served before signing means cooling off starts when the contract is signed. Served afterwards, cooling off starts when the Form 1 is received. And where the Form 1 is inaccurate, the Law Handbook's position is that cooling off does not commence until the inaccuracy is corrected, with the purchaser able to rescind at any time before settlement where the Form 1 was never served or remains inaccurate.

A system that treats "cooling off expiry" as a fixed offset from contract date will therefore diarise the wrong date in South Australia more often than not. The date depends on a service event, and the service event has to be recorded.

Western Australia: nothing to serve, which is its own risk

Western Australia has no mandatory seller disclosure statement and no mandatory cooling off period, as WA Consumer Protection states directly. Pre-contract disclosure does exist for strata lots under the Strata Titles Act 1985 (WA), and an agent must disclose relevant facts if asked. For a firm working across borders, WA is where the checklist is shortest and the temptation to reuse an eastern states process is strongest.

The smaller jurisdictions

The ACT sits at the other extreme, with the seller responsible for a defined set of required documents including inspection reports and an energy efficiency rating statement. Tasmania has no statutory pre-contract statement: disclosure and cooling off are elections inside the standard form contract, so the file has to record which boxes were ticked. The Northern Territory has a four business day cooling off period for contracts not sold by auction, and no statutory vendor statement.

What the file has to be able to prove, months later

Disclosure disputes are argued later, when a purchaser wants out or a regulator asks what the firm did. The file needs to answer five questions without anyone reconstructing them from memory:

1. What was given. The exact version of the statement or bundle, as served, not the working copy.
2. When it was given, relative to signing. A date and a sequence, since in Victoria, Queensland and South Australia the sequence is the obligation.
3. How it was given, and to whom. Email, portal, registered post, or hand, with the address used.
4. What the certificates said on that date. A rates notice or planning certificate is a point-in-time document.
5. What changed afterwards, and what was done about it. The update, and the advice given about the update.

That is a records problem more than a legal one, which is why it is a reasonable thing to expect software to carry.

How MatterFirst handles this

MatterFirst is a legal practice management platform for Australian law firms, built by North Cape Technology in Melbourne. Matters can be recorded in all eight Australian jurisdictions, and a firm defines its own matter types with the custom fields a conveyancing file needs, so a Queensland purchase and a Western Australian purchase can carry different pre-contract requirements rather than sharing one lowest common denominator.

Disclosure documents come out of the document generation engine, where a firm builds its own document types from sections that are deterministic by default: merge fields, matter data projections, clause library entries and signature blocks, with AI used only where a section genuinely calls for synthesis. A disclosure statement is a data assembly job, and the same inputs should produce the same document every time. Output is branded PDF and Word with the firm's letterhead, and an existing Word precedent can be merged with matter data and kept whole. Generated documents file on the matter and can be emailed, shared to the client portal or routed for e-signature, which is where the record of what was sent and when comes from.

Incoming certificates go the other way. Document AI extracts key terms from uploaded documents and connects the result to the matter, and custom extraction rules let a firm define the fields that matter to its own documents, such as the issue date on a certificate. Automations then handle the sequencing with trigger, condition and action rules, including generating a document as a workflow step, and the obligations engine calculates key and limitation dates while citing the governing statute.

Two limits worth stating. MatterFirst does not ship a library of state conveyancing forms: a firm builds the document types it needs. And PEXA and InfoTrack are listed as coming soon rather than being connectors a firm can switch on today. What connects self-serve now is Xero, Stripe, Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace, with everything else through a documented REST API with webhooks. Pricing is from $199 per month per workspace, with users included.

How the main Australian platforms compare

Every cell below was taken from the vendor's own public pages this session. "Not published" means the vendor does not state it on the pages reviewed, not that the capability is absent.

If you run single-jurisdiction residential conveyancing and want the state forms maintained for you, the products with published form libraries are the obvious shortlist. If your constraint is that disclosure assembly has to be deterministic, auditable and shaped to your own precedents, the builder approach fits better. The evaluation checklist has the questions to put to any vendor.

Who this suits, and who it does not

MatterFirst suits Australian firms of roughly two to twenty fee earners that work across more than one state, need onshore hosting they can point to, and want disclosure assembly and date calculations in the same system as the matter. Its trust compliance review workflow covers NSW, VIC, QLD and WA, so a firm whose trust account is regulated in SA, Tasmania, the ACT or the NT should ask how that is handled first. A firm that wants PEXA workspace creation from inside its practice management system today should look elsewhere. Data residency and where AI inference runs is documented.

FAQ

Does MatterFirst generate a Victorian section 32 statement? It generates whatever document types your firm builds. The document builder assembles sections from merge fields, matter data projections and clause library entries, deterministically by default, and can merge your existing Word precedent with matter data. MatterFirst does not ship a maintained library of state conveyancing forms.

Which states does MatterFirst's trust accounting compliance review cover? NSW, VIC, QLD and WA. That is four jurisdictions, not all eight. Matters themselves can be recorded in any of the eight.

Can MatterFirst connect to PEXA? PEXA is listed as coming soon. The connectors a firm can set up itself today are Xero, Stripe, Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace. Anything else goes through a documented REST API with webhooks.

Does the cooling off period start when the contract is signed or when disclosure is served? It depends on the jurisdiction. In South Australia it runs from the later of the contract and service of an accurate Form 1. In New South Wales and Queensland it runs from the contract or its receipt. This is the single most common reason a diarised cooling off date is wrong.

What happens in Queensland if a prescribed certificate was left out of the Form 2 bundle? The Queensland Government's guidance is that a buyer may terminate where the seller failed to give the disclosure documents. Where documents were given but were inaccurate or incomplete, the buyer must show the issue was material, that they did not know of it, and that they would not have signed otherwise.

Where does MatterFirst store a firm's documents? Data and AI processing are hosted in the AWS region the firm chooses, Sydney by default for Australian firms.

The short version

Disclosure is a sequencing obligation, not a document. Several jurisdictions tie a termination or rescission right to whether the right bundle reached the buyer before they signed, South Australia ties the cooling off clock to service of the statement rather than the contract, and Western Australia requires no statement at all. Build the pre-contract stage as a gate the file has to pass through, record what was served and when, and keep the certificates' own dates on the matter. Then the question asked in four months is a search, not an investigation.