Priya Nair, Asia-Pacific research editor

A judicial scrivener in Japan. A PPAT in Indonesia. A conveyancing lawyer in Singapore, a licensed conveyancer in Australia, a notary public in the Philippines, and in China no single professional who is universally required at all. Nine markets, nine different answers to the question of who actually moves a title, which is why Priya edits the Asia-Pacific guides one market at a time and treats any regional generalization as a bug.

The region has no shared template, so the useful work is figuring out what a seller in one specific market is waiting on. In the Philippines that is the electronic certificate authorizing registration, which the Registry of Deeds will not move without. In India it is state stamp duty plus the encumbrance certificate from the sub-registrar. In New Zealand a quick resale can be caught by the bright-line test, which surprises people who thought of the property as a home rather than an investment.

Priya’s rule of thumb is that a familiar Western model is the least trustworthy guide here. Whether a notary is involved, whether the buyer or the seller carries a given tax, and whether registration is electronic or over a counter all vary market to market, and none of it can be inferred from the country next door.

Australia gets treated as several jurisdictions rather than one, since the Torrens registries and the duty rules are state matters, and a national summary would be wrong almost everywhere it was read.

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