Western Australia's official property tools: titles, alerts, values

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Kooky

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In Western Australia, almost every official fact about a piece of land passes through one body. The map that shows the lot, the register that names the owner, the report on interests that never reach the title, the alert that says somebody has lodged a document, and the valuation that sits behind a rates notice are all published by Landgate, the Western Australian Land Information Authority.

That makes the state's tools simple to find and easy to misread. Each one answers a single question and stops there. A title search is silent on heritage listings. An interest report is described by Landgate's own procedure guide as a guide only. An alert service reports a change without stopping it. A valuation extract holds a value for rating and no sales. This guide takes the tools in turn, using Landgate's pages and its published guide to searching the register, and sets out what each shows, what it costs in the 2026-27 year and what its publisher says it does not do. Where those pages are silent, the guide says so.

Landgate: land transaction fees effective 1 July 2026; TitleWatch page dated 16 February 2023; valuation extract reports page, undated. All read on 10 October 2026.

One authority, several front doors

Landgate's pages cover three roles: land registry, valuation and mapping. The register of titles is kept under the Transfer of Land Act 1893. Valuations are made under the Valuation of Land Act 1978, to standards and policies that Landgate's valuation pages say are set by the Valuer-General for the assessment of land in the state. The maps and aerial photographs come from the same authority.

The public reaches these records through a small number of doors. The first is Map Viewer Plus, an interactive map. The second is Land Enquiry Services, the online ordering system that Landgate's guide to searching the register says can be searched by name, address, parcel identifier, Crown allotment, volume and folio, or reserve. The third is a MyLandgate account, which the guide says is needed for certain indexes. The fourth is a Landgate office: the guide says offices are open for inspection of the register from 8:30am to 4:30pm, Monday to Friday, under section 239(1) of the Transfer of Land Act.

One rule applies across all of them. According to the guide, information that requires a fee cannot be given verbally or by email. A phone call will not produce the name on a title; an order will.

Map Viewer Plus: the map that leads to the products

Landgate describes Map Viewer Plus as an interactive online mapping application for finding land and property information and for buying related products. Its coverage is Western Australia together with the Cocos (Keeling) Islands and Christmas Island.

The page lists what the map shows in broad terms: property boundaries and administrative boundaries, geodetic marks and survey information, and what Landgate calls a bird's eye view of the state. Aerial imagery is part of it, and the page says the imagery covers a large part of Western Australia from 1948 to the present. For anyone looking at how a block or a street has changed, that is a span of more than seven decades of photographs held by one custodian.

The second half of the description matters as much as the first. Map Viewer Plus is a shopfront as well as a map. The page names the products that can be bought through it: titles, documents, surveys, sales reports and aerial imagery. Ordering needs a debit or credit card and an email address. Landgate adds a practical condition for imagery: it can support an imagery purchase only when the customer can provide evidence of that purchase.

The page says the viewer works in the Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Edge browsers and on tablets and smartphones. It does not state whether viewing the map carries a charge or needs a login. On Landgate's own description, the map locates a property and the paid products hold the detail. For location and dimensions, the guide to searching the register points elsewhere again: to the survey, which may be a diagram, a plan, a deposited plan, a strata plan or a survey-strata plan.

What a title search shows

The core product is the copy of a certificate of title. Landgate's guide to searching the register, version 3 dated 30 May 2024, says that searching the register confirms registered ownership and shows other registered and lodged interests. A search of an original title produces a copy noted as a "Record of Certificate of Title".

The Transfer of Land Act 1893 is the reason those interests are there. Landgate's interest dictionary page says the Act requires registered interests to appear on the certificate of title, and gives easements, restrictive covenants, caveats and notifications as examples.

The guide recommends obtaining a current version of the title. It also gives a specific warning about strata property. For a strata lot, the guide says both the strata lot title and the strata plan or survey-strata plan should be searched, since not all encumbrances appear on the title. A buyer of an apartment who reads only the lot title has, on the guide's own account, read part of the record.

The register is wider than current titles. The guide lists what can be searched: titles, Crown leases, surveys, and documents such as transfers, mortgages, easements and caveats, both current and historical.

Search fees from 1 July 2026

Landgate's land transaction fees page sets out the search fees that took effect on 1 July 2026. The page says that on that date the previous regulations ceased and new regulations came into force, and it refers readers to the state's legislation website for the current regulations without naming them. It also states that all regulated fees are not subject to GST.

The flat A$33.90 makes the cost of a file easy to compute. As a worked example, assume a strata apartment where the reader follows the guide and orders the lot title and the strata plan: two searches at A$33.90 come to A$67.80. Assume the title then shows an easement and the reader orders that one document: a third A$33.90 brings the total to A$101.70. The figures are illustrative; the number of documents on a real title varies with the property.

Certification is a separate layer. The fees page says the A$80.00 certification fee must be bought together with the copy, which gives the A$113.90 total. The guide to searching the register adds the procedure: certified copies are requested in writing on a form, and at least four working days should be allowed.

Check searches, dealings in progress and history

A title search is a snapshot, and the register moves. Landgate offers three ways to deal with that.

The first is the check search. The guide describes it as a search that shows whether any action has occurred on a title within a three-month window, counted from the date the title was first obtained as a full search. It costs less than a full search: A$16.95, exactly half of A$33.90. The guide says it is available online to account holders or by order form. Its limit is stated plainly: if the check search shows action, further searches are needed to confirm the current information. As a worked example, a full search followed by one check search inside the three months costs A$50.85, against A$67.80 for two full searches, a difference of A$16.95. If the check search shows action, a further full search adds A$33.90, for A$84.75 in all.

The second is the "subject to dealing" notation. Where a title is waiting to be updated, the guide says search copies carry those words, and a dealing search covers the documents behind the notation, at A$33.90 per document copied. The guide attaches a caution: documents obtained this way may yet be rejected, withdrawn, or registered in an amended form. A lodged transfer is not a registered one.

The third looks backwards. The guide says historic titles from 1875 can be obtained for a fee. Paper titles list previous title numbers at the top left. Digital titles keep no images of their earlier versions, so a digital history list is needed to follow them back, and cancelled digital titles can be viewed.

The guide also describes a formal instrument. Under sections 146 and 147 of the Transfer of Land Act, a search certificate can be obtained showing caveats, lodged instruments, orders or injunctions not noted on the title, on the prescribed form and for the prescribed fee.

Who may search, and the rules on owner names

Landgate's guide calls the register "an open, public searchable register". The guide names two exceptions that need the prior consent of a Landgate officer, the Principal Consultant Title Dealings: applications to bring land under the Transfer of Land Act, and documents in Registrars Packets that are subject to court injunctions.

Searching in the other direction, from a person's name to the land they own, is controlled. The guide says owner-name searches require the searcher to be identified with 100 points of identification, and can be made only by registered online users or in person at a Landgate office. The Name Index is available only to MyLandgate account holders, as is the Crown Allotment Index.

An owner can also step out of that index. The guide says an owner may apply to have their name suppressed from name-search indexes and from dataset extracts. Suppression does not change the register. What suppression prevents, in the guide's words, is an enquirer using the name alone as the starting point for a property search.

There are physical limits too. Original paper documents are stored offsite, the guide says; they are searched only on request and only when necessary, and walk-in customers cannot access them. Online searching through Land Enquiry Services is described as generally available around the clock.

The Property Interest Report: what sits off the title

The title holds registered interests. A second category never reaches it, and that is the job of the Property Interest Report. Landgate's page says the report lists all known unregistered property interests and complements the certificate of title.

The page gives the kinds of answer the report holds: whether a property is heritage-listed, whether it is on or near a contaminated site, and whether land use restrictions may affect its use or development. More generally it covers interests that, in Landgate's words, may impact the use and enjoyment of any property within Western Australia. For each interest, the report directs the reader to the relevant authority for further information. Landgate collects and presents; the agency that administers the interest remains the place to confirm it.

Ordering follows the pattern of the other products. The report is ordered online through Land Enquiry Services and sent to an email address the customer provides. The customer needs a street address, a title number (volume and folio) or a lot on plan number, plus a debit or credit card and an email address.

The limits are set out in three places. The word "known" on the report page is the first. The interest dictionary page narrows it further: the dictionary covers only the known unregistered interests identified as having the most importance for due diligence, and only where the related data has been given to Landgate. The third comes from the guide to searching the register, which states that the Property Interest Report is only a guide and is not comprehensive.

Two things a reader would expect to find were not on the pages read for this guide. Neither the report page nor the interest dictionary page stated the price of the report, and neither gave a count of the interests covered or a list naming them.

TitleWatch: an alert service and its limits

TitleWatch is Landgate's monitoring service for changes to a certificate of title. The page, dated 16 February 2023, gives the price as A$37.00 per title per annum; the figure does not appear on the fees page effective 1 July 2026. A subscription runs for 12 months and comes with quarterly updates and two renewal reminders. It can be placed on any title, the page says, and is not confined to the subscriber's own; Landgate mentions businesses and government bodies that manage large registers of titles among its users. One title or several can be ordered at once through Land Enquiry Services.

Two events trigger an alert. The first is an electronic advice of sale, which the page describes as the notice used by conveyancers and legal professionals to tell the Water Corporation, RevenueWA and local government of a pending settlement. The second is a dealing lodged against the title, such as a change of proprietor, of address, of mortgage details or of encumbrances.

The stages reported are submitted, lodged, registered, withdrawn, rejected, not required and cancelled. The page calls these "six notifiable states" while listing seven; the list is reproduced here as it stands.

The page states the two check times and nothing more about timing. This guide's own reading of that schedule, which the page does not spell out, is that a dealing lodged after the 4pm check would wait for the next check at 12 noon. TitleWatch is periodic rather than instant.

Landgate presents the service as a help with identity fraud prevention and as early warning of a settlement. Its page describes notifications only. It does not say that TitleWatch blocks a dealing or stops a transaction, and the documents themselves are not part of the subscription: dealing or action documents must be bought separately, at the search fees above.

On cost, a worked example: a subscriber watching three titles pays three times A$37.00, or A$111.00 for the year. For one title, the A$37.00 is a little more than two check searches at A$16.95 each, which come to A$33.90. The two products are not equivalent, though. A check search looks once, within three months of a full search. TitleWatch looks twice daily for 12 months.

The Valuer-General's values

The values that drive rates in Western Australia are made under the Valuation of Land Act 1978. There are two: gross rental value, known as GRV, and unimproved value, known as UV. Landgate's pages for this guide gave the detail for GRV.

GRV is defined on Landgate's page as the total annual rent a property might reasonably be expected to earn each year if it was rented out. The figure includes associated rates, taxes, charges, insurances and other outgoings, and for non-residential properties it includes GST as well. It is a rent, not a price, and it is a gross rent.

The Valuer-General determines GRV for all rateable and leviable properties in the state. All properties in one local government are assessed at a single date of valuation. Landgate's valuers analyse rental evidence from that date and take account of each property's attributes, such as location, age, size and construction.

The cycle differs by region. In metropolitan areas, GRVs are redetermined every three years. In regional areas the interval is three to six years, depending on the local government. There is also a lag: Landgate's page says metropolitan GRVs take effect 23 months after the date of valuation. As this guide's own illustration, not Landgate's, a date of valuation of 1 August in one year gives values in force from 1 July two calendar years later. On that arithmetic, the rent in a GRV is a rent of nearly two years earlier on the day it first applies, and of nearly five years earlier by the end of a three-year metropolitan cycle.

Three kinds of bill rest on it. Local councils use GRV for rates and for levies such as rubbish collection. Water providers such as the Water Corporation use it for water and sewerage rates. The Department of Fire and Emergency Services uses it for the emergency services levy, which is collected on the council rates notice.

Looking up a value and ordering an extract

The free route to a property's GRV is the bill itself. Landgate's page says the notice shows the GRV and the rate in the dollar. Questions divide by subject: a query about the rate or the levy goes to the local council or other rating authority, and a query about the GRV goes to Landgate's customer service team. The Valuation Services Client Portal named on Landgate's valuation pages is for local governments and State government agencies, not for the public.

For a person who does not hold the bill, or who needs the history, Landgate sells valuation extract reports. These are individual property reports taken from the Valuer-General's official valuation rolls, in two types: a GRV extract and a UV extract. Each shows building details where known, the land area, the certificate of title number by volume and folio, the land identifier (Landgate's example is 10P11223, for Lot 10 on Plan 11223), the local government authority, and the latest three GRVs or UVs with their valuation dates.

A standard extract costs A$10.20 per report and is emailed; the page that gives these prices carries no date and they are not on the fees page effective 1 July 2026. A certified copy costs A$22.00 and requires a visit to a Landgate office. Ordering both a GRV extract and a UV extract for one property in standard form comes to A$20.40.

The extract page lists its own limits. Landgate can provide only information that has been gazetted. Some reports differ in format from the published samples, because certain information may need to be collated by hand. And the extract carries no sales evidence, rental evidence or market data.

Sales evidence, and what the pages leave open

That last limit marks the edge of this guide's verified ground. Landgate does sell sales information: its Map Viewer Plus page lists sales reports among the products that can be ordered through the map, and its valuation extract page directs readers to a separate property sales and trends page for sales evidence. The names of those reports, what each contains and what each costs could not be confirmed from Landgate's pages on 10 October 2026, so they are not described here.

Other points stayed open as well. The pages read gave no definition of unimproved value, no cycle for it and no list of the bodies that use it. They gave no time limit for objecting to a valuation and no current dates of valuation. The TitleWatch and valuation extract pages did not say whether their prices include GST, where the fees page says only that regulated fees do not attract it.

Each tool answers one question. The title names the owner, the report lists what never reached the title, the alert says something moved, and the extract gives a value for rating.

Kooky, from Shaka

Kooky edits Agents Estate and builds Shaka, the payment router he made for real estate professionals. One payment comes in, and every agent, agency and party in the deal receives their signed share on closing date.

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