Four doors, no counter: how a document reaches Queensland's land register

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Kooky

Builder of Shaka, the payment router that pays every agent their commission on closing date.

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Since Monday 7 September 2026 there has been no way to hand a document to the Queensland land registry in person. The lodger boxes went on 31 July, the drop box in the Brisbane office after 4:00pm on 4 September, and the office doors closed to the public the following Monday. Every instrument that changes the freehold register now arrives by one of four routes: through an electronic lodgment network, through the registry's own eLodgement web application, through the Titles Electronic Drop Box, or in an envelope.

The individual steps of that change were reported as they happened. This guide does something different: it lays the four channels side by side as Titles Queensland describes them in October 2026, and looks at each from the lodger's chair. Who is allowed in, what the channel will and will not take, when it is open, how the fee is paid and what the lodger gets back. The sources are the registry's lodgement channels page, its pages on online lodgement, eLodgement and the electronic drop box, its lodgement service evolution page and its alerts of 14 August, 4 September and 7 September 2026.

Titles Queensland lodgement channel pages and alerts, read in October 2026.

The map at a glance

Titles Queensland sorts its channels by the kind of lodger. Its lodgement channels page has a heading for professional lodgers, under which sit eConveyancing and eLodgement; a heading for self-represented individuals, under which sits the Titles Electronic Drop Box, known as TED; a heading for requisitions; and a heading for post, with the instruction to use paper only if the other channels are unavailable.

The registry's online lodgement page gives a sense of scale. It says eConveyancing carries 85% of lodgements and eLodgement 10%.

Together the two professional channels account for 95% of what the registry receives, on those figures. Everything discussed in the rest of this guide about TED and the post concerns what is left. That proportion explains why the registry could close a counter without touching the way a sale settles: the counter had long since stopped being where the work arrived.

eConveyancing: the channel a sale already uses

The first channel is not run by the registry. Titles Queensland's online lodgement page describes eConveyancing as digital conveyancing lodgement that runs through an electronic lodgment network operator, is open to professional lodgers only, and is intended for high-volume transactions. The page refers to the operators generically and names none.

For the instruments the registry calls required instruments, a professional has no choice of channel. The drop box page restates the rule in one line: professional lodgers must use eConveyancing for mandated instruments unless a valid exemption applies. The list of those instruments, the exemptions and the form that claims them are set out on separate registry pages and are the subject of their own guide in this magazine. What matters for the map is the direction of the rule. It sends the documents of an ordinary sale into the network channel and leaves the registry's own channels for the rest.

Nothing about the 2026 changes altered this channel. The alert of 7 September, announcing the end of public access, deals with professional work in a single sentence: professional titling uses eLodgement or eConveyancing.

eLodgement: the registry's own professional channel

The second channel is the one the 2026 changes brought forward. Until this year a practice with a paper dealing that fell outside electronic conveyancing could have it carried to the Brisbane office. That option has gone, and the registry's evolution page names what replaces it: documents already prepared for drop-off can be lodged through eLodgement, by professionals only, through TED, or by post.

Titles Queensland describes eLodgement as a web application that lets industry professionals and organisations lodge land registry forms from their own business location, and says its dealings are lodged directly in the registry. The evolution page adds two points of comparison: eLodgement accepts more dealing types than TED, and it lets a professional manage dealings after signing up. The registry's requisition material also treats it as a channel through which a registered user answers a requisition.

It is not open to anyone who asks. The eLodgement page sets out an onboarding sequence that begins with a scanning test.

The test is specific. The A4 test image, required of every applicant, is a single multi-page TIFF file at 200 by 200 dots per inch, black and white, portrait, with Group 4 compression. A firm that lodges survey plans also submits an A3 test image at 300 by 300 dots per inch. Only TIFF files are accepted for the test. The point of it is that the registry will be registering from the image the firm produces, so the firm's scanner becomes part of the register's supply chain.

Using the service costs nothing beyond the lodgement fees. The page lists multifactor authentication and instant notifications among its features, and tells users to keep their original documents within the firm.

A working day on eLodgement

The practical detail that distinguishes eLodgement from the counter it replaces is its clock. The page gives two sets of hours, both in Australian Eastern Standard Time. A lodgement can be prepared from 6:00am to 11:30pm, Monday to Saturday. It can be confirmed, which is the act that lodges it, only from 8:30am to 4:30pm, Monday to Friday, excluding Queensland public holidays. A clerk can therefore build a lodgement on a Saturday, but it enters the registry on a business day.

Payment follows lodgement instead of accompanying it. Overnight, the service produces an Account Transaction List showing the total owed for the day's lodgements and a breakdown of each transaction. The firm then pays by one of the methods the page lists:

• direct debit, which the page calls generally preferred, taken from the nominated account on the business day after lodgement;
• credit card, Visa or MasterCard only, through a payment link sent by email, by 11:30am on the business day after lodgement;
• direct deposit or electronic funds transfer by the same 11:30am deadline, for the exact amount on the Account Transaction List, quoting the receipt number as the reference and emailing a remittance as proof.

What comes back is immediate. The page says that once a lodgement is confirmed the user receives a receipt and a lodgement summary through eLodgement, the same as for a lodgement made over the counter. For a practice manager that sentence is the answer to the question the counter closure raised: the receipt a clerk used to bring back from the city now appears on a screen in the office.

TED: a web page for eight single-party dealings

The third channel opened on Monday 20 July 2026 and is aimed at people without a lawyer. The alert of 7 September describes TED as introduced for a selection of common single-party dealings, for self-representing individuals. The drop box page lists eight: the Form 4 request to record a death; the Form 5 or 5A transmission by death where a grant has been issued; and six uses of Form 14, covering a change of name of an individual or of a company, a correction of owner details or of a company name, the appointment of an administrator and a change of a body corporate's address.

The mechanics are deliberately light. There is no account. The user gives an email address, receives a verification code and enters it, and does so again each time. Files are PDF or TIFF, no larger than 15 megabytes each, and the page recommends a scanner over a photograph. At most three dealings go in one session. The service is open from 8:30am to 4:30pm on weekdays, excluding Queensland public holidays. The evolution page notes that TED runs on the Automated Titling System, in use since 1994.

Three limits are worth stating plainly, because they are where a self-lodged dealing goes wrong:

• TED does not check a submission for missing items. The user is prompted to review it before finalising, and an incomplete lodgement is discovered afterwards.
• TED calculates a base fee only. The page tells users to confirm the amount with the registry's fee calculator before paying, because an incorrect fee leads to a requisition and delay.
• TED does not shorten processing. The page says processing times are unchanged.

The registry receives images, so the paper stays with the lodger. All original documents, including supporting evidence, must be kept after submission, and Titles Queensland says it will never ask for identity or supporting documents to be destroyed.

One overlap between channels is easy to misread. A transmission by death appears on TED's list for a person acting for themselves, while the registry's rule for professionals sends mandated instruments through eConveyancing. The channel is set by who lodges as well as by what is lodged.

Post: the channel of last resort

The fourth channel is the oldest. The lodgement channels page says paper lodgement is for use only if other channels are unavailable, and gives the address: Titles Queensland, GPO Box 1401, Brisbane QLD 4001.

Two warnings come with it. All mail is security screened before it is delivered to the registry. And registered post may take a further 24 to 48 hours to be processed even after Australia Post has confirmed delivery. The evolution page adds a reminder to allow for Australia Post's own delivery times. A tracking record showing "delivered" is therefore not the moment of lodgement, a point that matters to anyone working back from a settlement date or the due date on a requisition.

A professional may still use the post for a required instrument, but only inside the mandate's exemptions: the lodgement channels page says industry professionals can lodge required instruments on paper if an exemption applies and a completed Exemption Request Form is enclosed.

Who is left in this channel, then? On the registry's own description, three groups: a self-represented person whose dealing is not one of TED's eight, which includes a party to a sale acting without a lawyer; a professional with an exemption; and anyone told to use it by a requisition notice.

The registry's paper lodgement information, as read for this guide, also lists a cheque or money order payable to Titles Queensland and still describes a card form. On the card form the alert is the later and more specific statement. Customers lodging through TED, searching through the online title and image search service or using Fast Track pay inside those services and are outside the gateway rule.

Which channel for which lodger

Put together, the four channels sort lodgers as follows.

The email in the TED row comes from the evolution page, which says lodgement receipt is confirmed by email. The two cells marked as not described are left that way on purpose. The registry pages read for this guide say what a lodger receives from eLodgement and from TED and are silent on the acknowledgement of a posted dealing. Nor do they describe the acknowledgement given inside an electronic lodgment network.

What changed in 2026, in order

The dates below are the ones Titles Queensland's own notices give.

On 13 March 2026 the owners of lodger boxes were told the boxes would close. On 30 June the registry issued its first general advice of the service and facility changes. On 20 July TED opened, and returning a requisition online became possible for requisitions issued from that date. On 31 July the lodger boxes closed. On 14 August a Titles Alert reminded customers that the drop box service would cease after Friday 4 September.

The evolution page explains a distinction that the dates otherwise blur. Lodger boxes had owners, who were given notice in March. The drop box was something else: it was opened in 2020 as a COVID-safe point for leaving paper dealings, and was never the same thing as a lodger box. Both are now gone, on different days.

On Friday 4 September three things happened together. The drop box closed after 4:00pm. A Titles Alert announced the payment gateway rule for posted lodgements, effective the following Monday. And the registry published an update to the Land Title Practice Manual, which the alert says was made to reflect the changes to lodgement channels. The alert does not list the parts that changed.

On Monday 7 September a customer alert recorded that access to the Brisbane office was no longer available and that all lodgements must be made online or by post. Two functions that used to need a visit survive by appointment: the evolution page says that viewing an original will, or booking the registry's settlement space, can be arranged only by prior arrangement with Titles Queensland, and that no access is allowed without it.

The registry's stated reason, on the same page, is to give all customers the same lodging experience and to reduce paper-based lodgement.

What comes back, and when

Whatever the channel, the registry's clock is the same. The drop box page gives the standard client service timeline for correctly lodged instruments as five business days, and both that page and the evolution page say the 2026 changes leave processing times unchanged. The lodgement channels page also lists a dealing status page among the registry's services, and names the ability to track progress as one of the benefits of lodging online.

If the examiner finds a problem, what comes back is a requisition notice, and here the channels cross. The lodgement channels page says the notice states which channel to use for the reply. The drop box page adds that where the return method differs from the way the dealing was first lodged, the notice says so; that a reply through TED needs access to the same email address used at lodgement; and that only requisitions received after TED's launch can be returned through it. Enquiries about a requisition, and requests for more time, are a separate matter: they go by email on the registry's requisition enquiry template, not through TED.

The channel of entry, in other words, does not fix the channel of reply.

Reading the map from outside the profession

For a buyer or seller with a solicitor, none of this is visible. The transfer, the release of the old mortgage and the new mortgage are required instruments lodged through eConveyancing as the sale settles, and the 2026 changes did not reach that channel.

The map matters to three other readers. The first is the owner putting a title in order alone, after a death or a change of name, who now starts with TED's list of eight and falls back on the post only if the dealing is not on it. The second is the small practice or organisation that used to send paper to the counter a few times a year, and for which eLodgement, with its scanning test, its two sets of hours and its next-day payment, is the real replacement for that walk into the city. The third is anyone who lodges by post, for whom the order of work has changed: fee first, receipt in the envelope, and time allowed for screening.

The counter closed, but the register did not get harder to reach. It got more particular about which door each lodger uses.

Titles Queensland's notices send anyone unsure of the right channel to its lodgement channels page, and it publishes its changes through the alerts list on its website. Both are revised without notice, the practice manual was last updated on 4 September 2026, and the channel rules described here are the ones those sources showed in early October.

Kooky, from Shaka

Kooky edits Queensland Estate and builds Shaka, the payment router he made for Queensland property professionals. One payment comes in, and every agent, agency and party in the deal receives their signed share on closing date.

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