About

What this website is

My Conveyancing Lawyer publishes general information about conveyancing and property transactions in New South Wales. This page sets out what it is, what it is not, and how to check everything on it for yourself.

General information, not legal advice. This page sets out how the law generally applies. It does not take account of your circumstances, and you should get advice about your own situation before acting on it. The official sources this page is written from are listed on it; where they differ from anything here, they are the authority.

Last updated: 23 September 2026

There is a great deal of property advice online and much of it does not say where it came from. This page says. It is deliberately short on adjectives, because the things worth knowing are checkable facts rather than claims.

My Conveyancing Lawyer provides information about conveyancing in New South Wales. Legal services are provided by Jameson Law. Our terms of use and complaints pages explain the relevant terms and how to raise a concern.

What this site covers

Conveyancing in New South Wales: buying, selling, and the parts of a property transaction that most often go wrong. The pages are organised by transaction rather than by topic, because that is how people arrive.

The guides take one part of the process each and explain how it actually works, with the legislation or the government’s own page cited so you can read the source.

Residential purchase, for houses, units and townhouses, including auction purchases
Residential sale, including the contract that has to exist before marketing
Off the plan, including disclosure statements and sunset clauses
Strata purchases, and what the scheme's own records reveal
Duty and exemptions, and where to check the current position with Revenue NSW
First home buyers, and the order the steps actually happen in

The Jameson Law team is shown below. If you want to know which solicitor would have carriage of your matter, ask before you engage anybody.

A lawyer or a licensed conveyancer

Both an Australian legal practitioner and a licensed conveyancer may carry out conveyancing in New South Wales, and a residential contract for sale has to be prepared by one of them before a property can be marketed. They are not the same thing, and it is worth knowing which you are dealing with.

A licensed conveyancer’s work is confined to the transaction. A lawyer can also advise where a matter sits outside it: a dispute with the other party, a deceased estate, a trust or self-managed superannuation fund, a family arrangement, a company structure, a caveat or a boundary problem.

If your transaction is straightforward, either may suit you perfectly well. If anything about it is unusual, the difference matters, and it matters most at the moment something goes wrong rather than at the moment you engage somebody.

How a law practice is regulated in New South Wales

Solicitors in New South Wales practise under the Legal Profession Uniform Law, as applied in this State by the Legal Profession Uniform Law Application Act 2014 (NSW). A solicitor may only practise while holding a current practising certificate, and the Law Society of NSW issues and enforces those certificates.

A practising certificate is not simply permission to trade. It carries obligations that run to you as the client: the conduct rules for solicitors, the duty of confidentiality, the duty of honesty to the court, cost disclosure rules, rules about how client and trust money is held, and the requirement to be covered by professional indemnity insurance. Trust money matters particularly in conveyancing, where deposits and settlement funds pass through other people’s hands.

Complaints about a lawyer in New South Wales go to the Office of the NSW Legal Services Commissioner, which receives all complaints about lawyers in the State and deals with them under the Legal Profession Uniform Law. It is independent. Our complaints page explains how to raise something first and where to take it afterwards.

How to check a practising certificate

You do not have to take any of this on trust. The Law Society of NSW publishes a Register of Solicitors, an online directory of New South Wales practices and solicitors who hold a current practising certificate. Search a name and you can see whether the certificate is current.

Two things are worth knowing about the register. The type of practising certificate a solicitor holds does not necessarily reflect the position that solicitor occupies at their principal place of practice, so it is not a guide to seniority. And it covers solicitors: a licensed conveyancer is licensed under a different scheme and appears on a different register, which is searchable through the NSW Government’s property professionals pages.

If you cannot find a solicitor or a practice on the register, the Law Society Registry can help on (02) 9926 0333.

Do this for anyone you are considering engaging for a conveyance, including anyone you find through this website.

What this website is not

Everything on this site is general information about conveyancing and property law in New South Wales. It is not legal advice and it cannot be, because it knows nothing about your contract. Reading it does not make you a client, and sending an enquiry does not either.

Some things are missing from this site on purpose.

Fees. No figures, not even a range. What a conveyance costs depends on the property, the contract and what is attached to it, so a number published here would tell you nothing reliable about your own transaction. You get it in writing before substantive work begins.
Deadlines and rates. No cooling-off period in days, no duty rate, no first home buyer threshold and no percentage forfeited on rescission. Those are set by legislation and by Revenue NSW and they are changed. We link to the page that carries the current figure instead.
Outcomes. No success rates, no case studies, no guarantees. Whether a vendor agrees to an amendment, or a lender approves, or a valuation holds, is not within anybody's control.
Reviews and testimonials. None are published here.
People and places. Office addresses are still not published on this page.

Each page carries the date it was last updated and the official sources it relies on. If a page here and an official source disagree, the official source is right, and we would like to know: tell us.

Where the information comes from

The legal content on this site is written from primary sources and from the publications of the bodies that administer them. In practice that means five places.

NSW legislation, for the law itself — principally the Conveyancing Act 1919 (NSW) and the Conveyancing (Sale of Land) Regulation 2022 (NSW), with the Real Property Act 1900 (NSW) for Torrens title, the Environmental Planning and Assessment Act 1979 (NSW) for planning certificates, the strata and community land legislation for schemes, and the Duties Act 1997 (NSW) for duty.

Then the administering bodies: Revenue NSW for transfer duty and the first home buyer schemes, NSW Land Registry Services for the title register, the NSW Registrar General for off-the-plan disclosure, and the NSW Government’s own property pages for how a transaction runs in practice.

No commercial site, comparison service or other law firm is used as a source anywhere on this website.

Privacy, terms and accessibility

Our privacy policy sets out what personal information is collected through this site, how it is handled and how to ask for access to it, under the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) and the Australian Privacy Principles. The terms of use cover the website itself and name the practice that provides the legal services offered through it.

Our accessibility page sets out the standard this site works to, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, what has been built in for it, what has not been tested, and how to ask for the same information in another format if any part of the site is hard for you to use.

How to make contact

Use the enquiry form on the contact page, or the telephone number and email address below. Keep a first message short and say which property it is about.

Enquiries

Through the form on our contact page.

Phone

(02) 8806 0866

[email protected]

Who you are contacting

My Conveyancing Lawyer is an informational website about conveyancing in New South Wales. It is not a law practice. Our terms of use and complaints pages set out who provides the legal services offered through it.