How much does hiring a lawyer cost when buying an apartment?

The minimum spend without due diligence will cost you around $1000 and with due diligence done on your purchase you will need to add on $2500 to this cost. This is a wise decision to make to ensure you are making a good purchase.

SUMMARY:

The minimum fee that will be charged if there is no mortgage involved will be around $1000 and if there is a mortgage it will be a few hundred more.

There is an extra cost when doing your due diligence on the building and we recommend you do pay the extra money for this. This will come at a cost of around $2500.

Spending this money is worthwhile in the long term to ensure you are making a well-informed decision with your purchase.

TRANSCRIPTION:

Good day. Andrew Murray here from the Apartment Specialists. How much does a lawyer cost when buying an apartment?

The bare minimum is $800 to $1,000, if there's no mortgage involved. If there's a mortgage involved, probably add another $150 to almost $200 to that. You're looking at probably around about $1,200. If you're spending this money, and you're doing the bare minimum, it's your own fault if the building has issues. This is because you've got to understand that this industry has risks and you have to do your due diligence.

You need an expert to do that due diligence for you. Yes, you can obviously listen to a real estate agent, but you need to be doing it yourself. A lot of real estate agents out there don't actually even understand unit titles, body corporates, or financials, to be able to give you that information you need. If you're spending around that $1,000 mark on a lawyer when you're purchasing, it's telling me one or two things.

Either you know the builder extremely well, or you know the market and know how to read financials very, very well. If not, you're not doing your due diligence. Having an unconditional offer in this market is far too risky. You've got 15% of all the buildings out there that have had issues or may have issues moving forward, and that's why you really need to do your due diligence.

You've got to get a lawyer that's still going to look through those body corporate minutes, look through those financials, look through that monetary maintenance plan and make sure it's being followed. Getting a building report is really, really important. When you're looking at doing a proper due diligence on an apartment when you purchase it, you're looking at around about $2,500 and that's what you should be paying.

Think about it as spending money to make money, because the money you spend now to make sure that purchase of yours is a good purchase, is worth 10, 20, 30 times that, and if you don't do it, it's going to cost you 10, 20, 30 times that. Anyway, I know that this has come across quite stern in the podcast, but that's because I feel very strongly about it and I see purchasers - where I declare everything.

I see purchasers buying stuff, buy apartments off agents all the time, not doing their due diligence, and they're getting caught out down the track. So, it's really important.

Andrew Murray, Apartment Specialists and I Hope this has been helpful.

If you have any questions, flick me an email at [email protected] or call +6421 424 892 and I’ll be happy to answer your queries.

Cheers. Bye.