BestFSBOGuide.com team
Priya Nair
Asia-Pacific research editor
Australia, China, India, Indonesia, Japan, New Zealand, the Philippines, Singapore and South Korea. Nine markets, and I source them one at a time.
I got Indonesia wrong the first time I wrote it up. I had assumed a lawyer could handle the deed, the way one can in Singapore, and a PPAT is not a lawyer, and there is no going around them. I rebuilt the guide out of the ministry’s own material. Ever since, the first question I put to any market is who is legally allowed to move a title.
Japan hands that to a judicial scrivener, which took me three sources to be sure of, because English-language sources usually render the role as “lawyer.” Australia says licensed conveyancer. India says the sub-registrar’s office, with a stamp duty bill that changes by state. Where a property is held jointly with a relative abroad, who signs as seller is a further question. China says, more or less, nobody, because what changes hands there is a long lease rather than the land.
What a seller waits on is just as local. In the Philippines it is the electronic certificate authorizing registration, without which the Registry of Deeds will not act. In New Zealand it is the bright-line test, which taxes a sale inside the window as an investment.
A little more about Priya
There is a wall map in my kitchen. It hung in my classroom before that, when I taught secondary geography. Chennai, then ten years in Singapore, then Auckland. My sister's children are eight and eleven and they are at my place most Sundays, which is how I know that the eight-year-old will eat anything and the eleven-year-old will not.
Areas of focus
- Who may lawfully lodge a transfer in each of the nine markets, and which authority records it
- I don't publish a regional figure. Stamp duty and seller-side tax come from each market's own revenue authority.
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