Why house-hunting quietly drains your deposit
The problem isn’t the review itself — it’s paying for one on every property you bid on, before you even know your offer will be accepted.
- Many agents won’t take an offer to the seller unless it’s on a signed contract, so you feel forced to get the contract checked before you’ve made an offer, not after.
- A Section 32 for a house is often 40-plus pages; for an apartment it comes bundled with the owners corporation certificate, financials and meeting minutes, which can push it well past a hundred. Most first-home buyers don’t know what to look for, so paying someone feels unavoidable.
- Reviews cost real money — buyers report anywhere from about $100 to $700 a contract, and some spend $1,200 or more before they’ve bought anything. It comes straight out of your deposit savings.
- Conveyancers who review for free can take two to three days — and in a fast market, that delay can cost you the property.
The workarounds buyers use — and the catch with each
There’s no perfect answer, and every shortcut has a trade-off. Here’s the honest version of each:
- Make a non-binding offer first, by email or phone, and only pay for a review once it’s accepted. The catch: some agents insist on a signed contract — though in most states an agent is generally required to pass on all genuine offers to the vendor unless the vendor has instructed otherwise in writing.
- Sign, then review during the cooling-off period. The catch: in Victoria, pulling out during cooling off costs a penalty of $100 or 0.2% of the price, whichever is greater — often more than a review fee — and buying at auction has no cooling-off period at all.
- Find a conveyancer who reviews for free or only bills at settlement. The catch: it usually ties you to using them for the purchase, “free” or “unlimited” can mean a quick skim rather than a proper read, and you’re still waiting days per review.
- Learn to read the contracts yourself. The catch: they do get more familiar after a few, but it’s a lot to gamble on your biggest-ever purchase when you don’t yet know what a red flag looks like.
What’s actually in a Section 32 and contract of sale
Most of the document is standard boilerplate. The risk lives in a handful of places — and knowing where they are is half the battle:
- Owners corporation (strata) records — a maintenance fund in the red, looming special levies, or unresolved building defects such as combustible cladding.
- Planning and heritage overlays, zoning, and easements or covenants that limit what you can build or do with the land.
- Outstanding notices or orders from the council or an authority — for example an order to fix or remove something.
- Special conditions added to the standard contract — this is where a seller quietly shifts costs or risk onto you, and they’re easy to miss.
- Deposit and settlement timing, and any sunset clause if you’re buying off the plan.
- A missing or materially deficient Section 32 can actually be your way out: under the Sale of Land Act 1962 (Vic) you can usually end the contract before settlement — but only if someone reads it closely enough to spot the gap.
A faster, cheaper way to screen every contract
This is the gap ReadMyContract fills. Upload the Section 32 or contract of sale and, in a couple of minutes, you get a plain-English summary, the key terms pulled out, and red flags ranked by how much they matter — for free, with no account and no lock-in to a firm. Your document stays private; it isn’t shared or reused.
- It’s instant, so you can screen a contract the moment the agent sends it — no two-to-three-day wait, no missing out.
- It’s free and there’s no retainer, so bidding on four properties doesn’t mean four review fees.
- It’s built for Australian contracts — it knows what a Section 32, an owners corporation certificate and a cooling-off clause are — so it’s a sharper first pass than pasting your contract into a general chatbot, and it keeps the document private.
- It tells you when something genuinely needs a professional, so you know which properties are worth paying a conveyancer to review properly.
How to house-hunt without the review bill
The buyers who spend the least tend to follow the same pattern:
- Screen every contract with ReadMyContract the moment you get it, so you understand what you’re looking at and can spot the obvious problems for nothing.
- Only make an offer on the properties that look clean and that you’re genuinely serious about.
- Once your offer is accepted, engage a licensed conveyancer or solicitor for the binding review and the conveyance itself — that’s when their fee is buying you something real.
Outside Victoria?
The documents have different names — a contract of sale and Section 32 in Victoria, a Form 1 in South Australia, a contract with a disclosure statement in Queensland and New South Wales — but the idea is the same everywhere: screen the contract before you spend money on it, and pay a professional for the one you actually buy. ReadMyContract is a fast first look, not a replacement for legal advice, and for the property you commit to you should get a licensed conveyancer or solicitor to review the contract before you’re bound.