Special conditions, read and summarised

The problem with reading them by hand

Special conditions are where a contract for sale of land does its real work — and where the surprises hide. They sit at the back of the contract, they are drafted differently by every firm, and a single clause can shift a settlement date, add a subject-to condition, or quietly move risk onto your client. Reading every one closely, on every contract, is slow and unforgiving work. Miss one and it surfaces at the worst possible time.

The volume is the issue. A contract might carry a handful of special conditions or several dozen, scattered through annexures and additional pages. Skim-reading is how things slip past; reading carefully is how the afternoon disappears.

How Torri handles special conditions

• 1

  Find every condition

  Torri reads the whole contract — standard form, annexures and additional clauses — and pulls out each special condition individually, so the count you review is the count that exists.

• 2

  Summarise the effect

  Each condition gets a short, plain-English summary of what it actually does — the obligation, the trigger, the party it falls on — so you can scan the substance without re-reading the clause from scratch.

• 3

  Hand it to the report

  The conditions and their summaries flow straight into the review, ready to include in the client report under your firm's name.

Built for NSW and Victorian conveyancing

Special conditions in a NSW contract routinely touch the things that decide a matter — finance and building-and-pest clauses, the cooling-off and Section 66W position, deposit and settlement terms, subject-to-sale arrangements and off-the-plan provisions. In Victoria, Torri reads each condition against the standard LIV/REIV general conditions, so the routine clauses stay quiet and the genuine departures surface — a nomination fee outside the usual band, a sunset clause drafted in the vendor's favour, or a clause adjusting land tax against the purchaser, which the Sale of Land Act has prohibited for most contracts since 1 January 2024. Either way, the conditions that change your client's exposure are surfaced rather than buried among the boilerplate.

Where it fits your review

Special conditions are usually the slowest part of the first read, so this is where the time comes back. Torri does the extraction and the draft summary; you bring the judgement on what each condition means and whether it is acceptable. The clause is always one click away, and you sign the report. It is a second pair of eyes that has actually read every condition — not a replacement for yours.