Property Records in Western Australia: How to Search a Land Title, Fees and Caveats

Western Australia's land title register is run by Landgate, a government statutory authority, under the Transfer of Land Act 1893, and while the register itself is open to anyone under section 239, an owner-name search is free but restricted to a MyLandgate billing account or a 100-point ID check in person.

Who runs Western Australia's title register

Landgate, the Western Australian Land Information Authority, is a statutory authority: a public agency, not a privatised operator. It holds and maintains WA's digital land titles Register under the Transfer of Land Act 1893, and the Registrar of Titles and Commissioner of Titles are statutory offices under that Act.

Section 239 sets the public's searchability right: a person may, on payment of the prescribed fee and during prescribed times, inspect a registered certificate of title, a plan or diagram, a registered instrument, a caveat, a power of attorney or discharge of mortgage, or an application made under the Act. No ID and no stated reason is required by section 239 for a document-based search; a name-based search is separately restricted, covered below. Landgate's own FAQ describes WA's land titles Register as, and as always having been, an open, publicly searchable Register. See Property Records in Australia for how this compares with the other states and territories.

What a title search shows and does not

A Certificate of Title, ordered as a Record of Certificate of Title, shows current ownership details, the volume and folio number, the survey plan number and type, document numbers for encumbrances and notifications, and whether a caveat sits against the title. Older paper-era titles carried a title sketch; digital titles do not.

It does not show sale price or consideration; that lives in a separate property sales report product, covered below, or on the transfer or dealing document itself. It does not show occupancy. Where the owner is a company, the certificate shows only the company name, not individual directors or shareholders; Landgate directs a searcher wanting that information to ASIC instead.

How to search: Land Enquiry Services and search keys

Landgate's official portal is Land Enquiry Services, reached from landgate.wa.gov.au. Guest checkout is available for some documents with no login required; a free MyLandgate account unlocks further products. Search keys are a street address, a volume and folio number, or a lot-on-plan number, together with a debit or credit card and an email address. A certificate of title is typically emailed as a PDF within about 30 minutes of ordering.

An owner-name search is available but is not a simple self-serve online lookup the way an address or folio search is; it carries the identity-gating described in the privacy section below.

Fees (Transfer of Land Regulations 2004, Schedule 1, as at 1 July 2026)

The $421.10 figure is expressly tied in the regulation itself to serving a section 138A caveator with notice under section 138B of the Act (Schedule 1, Division 4, item 5).

Certificates of title: duplicate abolition on 7 August 2023

Duplicate certificates of title were abolished on 7 August 2023, not 7 August 2021 as sometimes circulated. Two independent primary sources agree on the 2023 date: the Transfer of Land Act 1893's own compilation table records the Transfer of Land Amendment Act 2022's Part 2 as commencing 7 August 2023, and Landgate's own Changes to the WA Transfer of Land Act page states the same date repeatedly.

The mechanism is the Transfer of Land Amendment Act 2022, which inserted section 48B, providing that the Registrar must not issue a duplicate certificate of title, and a transitional section 248(2), providing that a duplicate certificate of title in effect immediately before the commencement day has no legal effect on and after that day. Existing duplicates are not required to be surrendered or destroyed, but they carry no legal effect from 7 August 2023 onward, and duplicates never showed caveats, memorials, notifications or property seizure-and-sale orders in the first place.

What proves ownership now is the original certificate of title, the computer record held in Landgate's digital Register. A Record of Certificate of Title search, the $33.90 LES product, is how a searcher views current ownership and interests.

Caveats and priority mechanisms

Sections 137 to 142 of the Transfer of Land Act 1893, Part V, govern caveats. Section 137 lets a beneficiary or a person claiming an estate or interest in the land, whether under a registered or unregistered instrument, an equitable mortgage or charge, or devolution by law, lodge a caveat with the Registrar, stating the caveator's name and address and specifying an address in Australia, or a prescribed electronic means, for service, an option added by the 2022 amending Act and also effective 7 August 2023. If the Registrar requires a supporting statutory declaration and it is not lodged within seven days, the caveat is void.

Section 138 requires notice to the party against whom the caveat is lodged, who can summon the caveator to the Supreme Court to show cause; with exceptions, a caveat lapses 14 days after notice of an application to register a dealing, unless withdrawn or a judge orders otherwise. Sections 138A to 138D add a separate sunset mechanism for most caveats, excluding will, settlement and court-ordered caveats: the proprietor or a judgment creditor can apply for a 21-day lapsing notice, and the caveator must get a Supreme Court order extending it or the caveat lapses.

Section 140 sets compensation for a caveat lodged without reasonable cause: the caveator is liable to compensate anyone who sustained damage, in an amount a judge on a summons in chambers deems just. That is unliquidated, judge-assessed compensation tied to actual damage, not a fixed statutory penalty figure, and this page does not assign it a dollar cap. Section 141A lets the Commissioner, where satisfied a claimed interest has ceased to exist, serve the caveator with 14 days' notice to withdraw or commence proceedings to substantiate the claim.

Other public property data: sales reports and valuations

A property sales report, a distinct Landgate LES product from the certificate of title, shows the sale price and date sold, land area, and property attributes such as bedrooms, bathrooms and construction type. A single sale report costs $7.60; a street or strata report starts at $25.20; a suburb report starts at $44.10; a local-government report is $213.40 per authority. This is where consideration or price data lives, not on the certificate of title itself.

Landgate also houses the Valuer-General function, producing Gross Rental Value and Unimproved Value figures used for local-government rates and land tax, with an objection process. Strata and community-title records are handled under the Strata Titles Act 1985 and Community Titles Act 2018, both referenced directly inside section 239 of the Transfer of Land Act as inspectable Register items; see Strata Titles in Western Australia for that separate system.

Privacy limits: the owner-name search gate

A current ownership name search, run by a person's name rather than by address or folio, is free but structurally restricted, confirmed by Landgate's own current ownership name search report page. It can only be done two ways: online through Land Enquiry Services, but only for a MyLandgate account holder with billing-account status, which is a different, higher tier than an ordinary registered account, whose holder must instead search in person; or in person at Landgate's Midland or Perth offices, completing a 100-points-of-ID form required under the NAM-02 Name Suppression guidelines.

By contrast, searching by address, parcel or lot-plan identifier, or certificate of title volume and folio, requires no 100-point ID check and no in-person visit. Under the NAM-02 policy, some individuals can apply to have their name suppressed from name-search results; this page did not open the full NAM-02 policy document, so the exact categories of eligible individuals were not confirmed. Whether someone else has searched your name is not part of the public Register and is released only to certain government agencies, such as law enforcement, on formal request. No specific offence provision for misusing register search data was located in the sections of the Act reviewed for this page.

What a Western Australia property record is not

A title search is not a strata or community titles record; that separate scheme runs through Strata Titles in Western Australia, not Landgate's land title register. It is also not a court file: a caveat dispute or a boundary or contract-of-sale dispute runs through the courts, covered on Court Records in Western Australia. And it is not a probate or deceased-estate record; see Wills and Probate in Australia for how ownership passes on death before a transfer reaches the register.