Pre-Exchange Planning Due Diligence: What a 10.7 Certificate Doesn't Tell You

Every NSW conveyance includes a section 10.7 planning certificate. It's the document that tells a purchaser the zoning of the land and whether certain matters — flood controls, bushfire prone land, heritage, road widening — apply to it. It's mandatory, it's authoritative, and it's the right starting point.

It's also, by design, a list of flags. A 10.7 will tell you the land is flood control lot land. It won't show you where on the lot, or what the mapping around it looks like. It will tell you the zone is R2. It won't tell you what the council's development controls say about setbacks or landscaping, what's been lodged three doors down, or that the "garage" in the listing photos doesn't appear in any approval. Those questions land on the conveyancer — usually between contract issue and a purchaser who wants to exchange this week.

The gap between the certificate and the questions

The questions purchasers actually ask sit one layer below the certificate:

• The certificate says flood — how much of the lot, and which part?
• The zone is R2 — what does that mean for the extension they're planning?
• Is there development activity next door that changes the outlook — literally?
• What's physically on the site, and does it match what's being sold?

Answering them means the Planning Portal, the council's DCP, the DA register and often aerial imagery — assembled by hand, under time pressure, for every matter.

What the Conveyancer report does

The Conveyancer report runs that assembly for one address and returns it as one document:

• Zoning and standards — zone, height, FSR and minimum lot size, live from the NSW Planning Portal at the time the report runs.
• Hazards and overlays — flood, bushfire, heritage, acid sulfate, coastal and other overlays affecting use of the land.
• The site itself — structures, vegetation and site conditions read from satellite imagery, plus nearby development applications and their status.
• Sources on every item — each value carries the instrument, layer or dataset it came from and the date it was retrieved, so it can be checked against the original.

The sourcing matters more in conveyancing than anywhere else. A conveyancer's advice rests on what the documents say — so a due diligence tool has to show its documents. Every item in the report is traceable to the government dataset or council instrument it came from, and where a source isn't available for an address, the report says so plainly instead of presenting a blank as a clean result.

A supplement, not a substitute

To be direct about the boundary: the Conveyancer report supplements a section 10.7 certificate. It does not replace it, and it isn't legal advice. The certificate remains the statutory document; the report is the working picture behind it — the context that turns a flag into an explanation a purchaser can follow.

It's built on the same engine as the Intelligence Brief — the same cited planning data and satellite reading, arranged around the questions that matter before contracts are exchanged.