PEXA, sympli unstoppable

Australia's residential property market is one of the largest, most liquid and most efficient in the developed world, with more than 600,000 dwellings worth hundreds of billions changing hands each year and a transaction failure rate too small to calculate. The foundation stones of the Torrens Title registration system and a national electronic title transfer delivers transaction speeds and certainty that are the best in the world.

The only problem with this picture is that the original vision for a competitive market in electronic title transfers – with multiple competing property exchanges – has run into a brick wall. That brick wall is a company called PEXA Group Ltd, which now accounts for more than 90 per cent of all property transfers in Australia and 100 per cent of all electronic transfers.

PEXA is a monopoly. Over the past few years it has done an excellent job of using lobbying, cajoling and lawfare to prevent any other player from cracking into the electronic transfer market. By any other player, I refer to the only potential challenger, Sympli, which is owned by Christian Beck's legal software company ATI Group (50.1 per cent) and the ASX (49.9 per cent).

Since it started in 2018, Sympli has racked up losses of more than $120 million and has yet to execute more than a few small trial transactions. The property conveyancing industry desperately wants a viable competitor to PEXA as they fear that, over time, the monopolist will nickel and dime away their already slender profit margins one fee increase at a time.