PEXA Product Releases

PEXA has reduced the amount of signing and resigning by implementing a new lodgement instructions rule. This new rule ensures that only the subscriber who is responsible for the workspace, as noted as Responsible Subscriber in the Lodgement Instructions, will be required to sign the Lodgement Instructions.

Benefits:

• Only the Responsible Subscriber will be required to sign
• Only the Responsible Subscriber will be required to resign when Lodgement Instructions are unsigned due to actions from other Subscribers in the Workspace

Changes:

• A reduced signature count is now displayed next to the Lodgement Instructions

• Only the Responsible subscriber will be presented with the Lodgement Instructions to sign in the signing screen

• Don’t forget even if you create the first document and are defaulted to Responsible Subscriber, it is easy to push or pull the role to other Subscribers within the Lodgement Instructions

Dealing Requirements in VIC: The only exception to the above rules is where a dealing requirement is added in Victoria. In this case, all participants in the Workspace will be required to sign the Lodgement Instructions as they do today.

PEXA now supports a standalone Survivorship Application in Victoria. If a joint tenant on a property title passes away, then the surviving proprietor should make an application to the Land Registry to have the deceased’s name removed, so that only the surviving proprietor’s name is on title.

For information on how to do this, please refer to the help article Standalone Survivorship Application. 

Note: For Release 7.0 the following scenarios are supported:

• Standalone Survivorship
• Survivorship with Discharge
• Survivorship with Caveat

In February 2018 (Release 7.1), Survivorship with a Transfer document in the same workspace will be supported. During the interim period, please complete a standalone survivorship workspace in advance of a transfer workspace.

Should you inadvertently create a transfer workspace that requires a Survivorship, create an additional workspace and lodge the Survivorship, and the request Land information resupply after successful registration of the Survivorship.

PEXA introduces the ability to lodge an Encumbrance and Discharge an Encumbrance in SA.

An encumbrance can be registered on a title as a restriction regarding the use of the land. It is an agreement creating various obligations on the parties, restricting or forbidding certain acts on the property.

When purchasing a property in a recently developed area, an encumbrance in favour of the developer often appears against the title of the property. Many encumbrances aim to maintain uniformity within the development and are applicable to each and every property in the area.  Encumbrances can be seen as a benefit, as they help maintain consistency with certain types of developments.

Other encumbrances can be ‘lifted and replaced’. As the terms specify, they do not run with the title.  The existing encumbrance is discharged as part of settlement (i.e., lifted) and a new encumbrance in the purchaser’s name in similar terms is registered at settlement (i.e., replaced).

Following the R7 release, you will see the new roles of Encumbrancee on Title and Incoming Encumbrancee when creating a new workspace in PEXA. This functionality also supports the uploading and attaching of supporting Covenants via the Files screen.

For information on how to do this, please refer to the help article Encumbrance and Discharge of Encumbrance.

This Dashboard includes a Lodgement Type column which classifies workspaces as having documents that can be lodged ‘Prior to Settlement’ (i.e. Priority Notices, Nominations etc.), at ‘Settlement’ or ‘Standalone’.

You can also select how many records you want displayed on the ‘Ready to Sign’ dashboard (i.e. 5, 10, 15, 20 or 25 workspaces can be displayed).

You can select the Workspaces you wish to sign (or select all workspaces on the page) and click on the ‘Sign Selected’ button to begin signing.

When you click on the Sign Selected button, you will be taken to the signing screen of the first selected workspace. From there you can:

• View additional identifying information (shown at the top of the below screen grab)
• View how many workpsaces you have to sign and how many have been signed
• View the rendered transfer
• Click the ‘Sign and Next’ button which will sign the You will them be directed to the next workspace that was selected from the Dashboard.
• ‘Skip’ signing of a workspace and navigate to the next Workspace that was selected from the Dashboard.

The ‘Ready to Sign’ Dashboard is the first screen in PEXA where filters are retained if you navigate away from the screen. This means that if you set a filter and navigate away from the screen, the filters will still be in place when you return to the screen. You can select Clear Filters to remove the filter and show all workspaces that are ready for signing.

A red triangle in the corner of the column header identifies if there is a filter on.

For example: If a Retail arm of a bank invites the Business/Commercial arm (who are masked from Subscriber searches) to join a workspace to provide source funds for a residential/commercial transaction.

Previously, Workspaces have been automatically assigned to a workgroup based on the Workspaces criteria and the user could change the workgroup via the workspace settings if required.

As shown below on the Workspace invitation screen, you can now select the relevant workgroup upon accepting the invitation.

Members in the role of the Incoming Mortgagee will be able to view the rendered Transfer document once it has a document status of Prepared.

This will allow the Mortgagee to view the consideration and ownership percentage that the solicitor included in the Transfer document. This will assist them in verifying that these details match that of the loan agreement.

Members in the role Mortgagee on Title, Incoming Mortgagee, Consentor, CT Controller and Source Funder will have the ability to change the Commercial transaction flag if they mark the workspace incorrectly when creating/joining a Workspace.

You can change this flag from the Workspace Settings. When the flag is changed the Category column of the ‘Your Dashboard’ is updated to either Retail or Commercial.

Please note that implementation of the Secondary Lodgement Verification functionality may be delayed and PEXA will advise once this functionality becomes available.

To mitigate issues when a Land Registry is unavailable and a final signature is applied on the day of settlement, PEXA will now perform a Secondary Lodgement Verification on each Document in the Lodgement Case. 
PEXA currently requires a successful Lodgement Verification to be performed against each Document in the Lodgement Case in order to progress the Lodgement Case Status to ‘Ready’. When there is an unexpected outage with the land titles office, PEXA is currently unable to progress any Lodgement Case Statuses to ‘Ready’ as a successful Lodgement Verification Result has not been received, resulting in documents remaining in ‘Verifying’ status:

Any outages with the Land Registry when final signatures are applied to documents on the day of financial settlement will stop these Workspaces from reaching ‘Ready’ status until such time that the Land Registry’s systems are available once again.

To mitigate issues when a Land Registry is unavailable and a final signature is applied on the day of settlement, PEXA will now perform a Secondary Lodgement Verification on each Document in the Lodgement Case.  Once PEXA determines that communications could not be established with the Land Titles Office, the new feature will allow a Lodgement Case to progress to ‘Ready’ where:

• The latest Lodgement Verification Result is successful for each Document in the Lodgement Case, and
• No Document data has changed since that last Lodgement Verification was performed.

When the Financial Settlement Schedule also reaches ‘Ready’ status, then the Workspace’s status will be ‘Ready/Ready’ and settlement will initiate once the Workspace reaches its scheduled Settlement Date and Time.  If the Land Registry’s systems are still unavailable at the time of Lodgement, PEXA will invoke Lodgement Override and proceed with settlement.  Lodgement will continually be re-attempted until such time that the Land Registry’s systems are available once again.

Where the Secondary Lodgement Verification has been successful, the Document Status will be updated to ‘Signed - Secondary Lodgement Verification’:

When a document is expanded, an informational message is also provided to indicate that a Secondary Lodgement Verification has been performed:

Other items to note:

• Where a successful Lodgement Verification Result is returned from the Land Registry after the Secondary Lodgement Verification has been performed, PEXA will update the Documents in the Lodgement Case accordingly with the result from the Land Registry.
• To ensure all Lodgement Cases have the latest successful Lodgement Verification Result captured, PEXA will run a Lodgement Verification the evening prior to the workspace’s scheduled settlement date where document data has changed. Lodgement Verification will only be performed on Lodgement Cases in ‘Prepared’ status only.

• Where a Mortgagee on Title creates a Discharge document, assuming they are the CT Controller, they will no longer be required to also provide a Nomination. This will apply to standalone Discharges, Refinances and Transfers. 
• Where a Panel Solicitor represents a Panel Master in a Workspace in the role of Mortgagee on Title (or any other role), and assuming the Panel Master has transferred CT Control to their Panel Solicitor, then the Panel Solicitor will no longer be required to provide a nomination. 
• Where a Conveyancer or Solicitor represents an owner of an unencumbered property, assuming the Conveyancer or Solicitor is the CT Controller, they will no longer be required to also provide a nomination. 

This will remove the need to either issue the CT to paper and maili it to the Panel Master, or issuing CT Control to the Panel Solicitor and then transferring that control to the Panel Master in a separate Workspace.

For example:

• Where a Panel Solicitor represents a Panel Master in a Mortgage transaction, the Panel Solicitor will be able to issue CT Control to the Panel Master at the end of the transaction by selecting the Panel Master in the "CT Issued to" field in the Lodgement Instructions.

In a Victorian workspace, you can add a new Land Title by either using the Title Reference or the Lot/ Plan details. You can now enter structured Plan details when workspaces are created on a Parent Title.

Using the lot on plan details, you can now trigger a land title verification with the Land Registry through PEXA.  The functionality allows workspace participants to add a title on the workspace using Lot on Plan details.

PEXA now supports titles held in capacity to be transacted (Transfer, Mortgage and Caveats) in QLD. Previously, only Discharges were supported.

The following capacities will now be returned in RIS and displayed in the Land Titles and Participant screens:

• Trustee
• Personal Representative

Where the Party Capacity is Trustee, the Trust Name will also be supplied to the QLD OSR as part of the Stamp Duty Verification process.