Sometimes vendors or purchasers request that the sale price be kept confidential and not disclosed to the public.
The question arises: is this something a buyer/seller can legitimately request and, if so, can it actually be done?
The short answer is that it is not possible: the sale price of a property in NSW is ultimately public information.
It is feasible for an agent to initially withhold the sale price from an information broker like REI or Domain.com – but that would need to be on the explicit instructions of the vendor, not the purchaser. To be clear, the purchaser is not able to require any form of suppression of the price details unless there is an express confidentiality clause in the contract (which there usually isn’t).
The agent (who is the first conduit of price information) is the agent for the vendor and the vendor alone. The agent would require instructions from the vendor to not disclose transaction data to the usual information brokers.
For example, a buyer is looking to purchase a property in Castle Hill for a purchase price of $1,000,000 and asks their conveyancer to keep the purchase price confidential. The conveyancer would need to ask the other side's respresentative whether they would agree to that and if so to ensure the agent does not publish the usually weekly price runs.
However, even if the agent does suppress / withhold that information to the property data brokers, the purchase price will have to be publicized at settlement, in a document that is lodged with the Land Registry. That information is searchable (for a small fee) by anyone.
In our experience, it is probably futile to ask an agent to suppress the price information for a transaction. When a person is particularly adamant that the price be suppressed in the initial phase, it usually only draws attention to it by interested persons, who then only have to wait a few weeks to retrieve the information from the Land Registry.
Note however that the other terms outside of price and identity of purchaser can remain confidential - so things like the settlement period, the inclusions that were purchased and the size of the deposit.
If you have any questions about this, please do not hesitate to contact us on (02) 83153118.
