Conveyancers and real estate agents in Australia generally need to keep emails that form part of a trust account record for six to seven years, depending on the state and the type of record. The emails that matter most are the ones that authorise, explain or confirm money moving through the trust account, and they are the first thing an auditor asks for.
The scene is familiar. A trust account auditor, or a client's lawyer, asks for the correspondence behind a 2022 settlement: who authorised the disbursement, which bank details were confirmed, and when. The person who handled that file has left, and the only copy is in their old mailbox or a PST file on a shared drive.
What the rules actually require
Trust account record-keeping is set by each state's property agents or conveyancing legislation, not by one national rule. In NSW it sits under the Property and Stock Agents Act 2002 and its regulation, with Fair Trading as the regulator. Victoria, Queensland and the other states each have their own Act and regulator, and the retention period, record definitions and audit powers all differ.
You will see "three years" quoted as the NSW minimum. We could not tie that figure to current NSW requirements, and we would not plan around it. Most states land at six or seven years, usually counted from the date of the transaction or the last entry on the record, not from when the file was opened. Confirm the exact period with your state regulator before setting a retention policy.
Two other things push the practical number towards seven years:
- Limitation periods. Claims in contract or negligence can generally be brought up to six years after the cause of action arises, so a file you destroyed at year four may be the one you need at year five.
- AML/CTF. Since 1 July 2026, the expanded AML/CTF regime applies to real estate professionals and conveyancers. Customer identification and transaction records carry a seven-year retention requirement, and correspondence that evidences those steps falls within it.
Penalties vary by state. They range from licence conditions and fines to disciplinary action, and in the worst cases the loss of the licence. For a small agency, losing the licence is the real exposure.
Which emails count as trust records
Not every email is a trust account record, and treating them all the same either wastes storage or leaves gaps.
Likely trust or transaction records: deposit receipt confirmations, payment and disbursement authorities from clients, emails confirming bank account details (and any change to them), settlement statements and adjustments, commission and fee disbursement instructions, and correspondence explaining why money was held, refunded or paid out.
General correspondence: inspection bookings, marketing, listing enquiries and routine updates. These still have a place in the file but carry less audit weight. Some of them become relevant if a dispute arises, so don't delete them on a short schedule.
The grey area is the email that does both jobs, such as a vendor replying "go ahead and pay the outstanding rates from the proceeds" at the bottom of a chatty thread. If you can't cleanly separate the two, keep the whole thread.
Why the settlement chain gets requested
The settlement email chain is the one that shows who said what, to whom, and when money moved. It captures the instruction, the confirmation and the exceptions, which is where problems appear. It is also where payment-redirection fraud happens: a spoofed "we've changed our bank details" email arrives in the middle of a legitimate thread. If funds go to the wrong account, that thread is the evidence of what you were told and what checks you did.
What most small agencies do
Typically, emails live in each person's mailbox, someone exports a PST at financial year-end, and the file notes say "see email." This works until a staff member leaves, a mailbox is deleted, or a laptop dies. PST exports also break down on the question of whether anyone can prove the contents weren't altered. See why PST files become a compliance liability, and what happens to a departed employee's mailbox.
What good looks like
An audit-ready archive has five properties:
- Continuous capture. Mail is copied as it is sent and received, not exported later from whatever survived.
- Sent mail included. Your outgoing payment confirmations are as important as incoming instructions.
- Tamper-evident storage. You can show a message hasn't changed since it was captured.
- Full metadata. Sender, recipients, timestamps and attachments are preserved with the message.
- Fast retrieval. Finding every email for a given property or client takes minutes, not a day of searching mailboxes. That matters when a request arrives with a short deadline.
AutoArchive Mail does this by capturing mail continuously into a searchable, tamper-evident archive, so staff turnover and mailbox clean-ups don't affect the record. You can Start Free Trial to see how it handles a sample mailbox.
The practical path forward
In the next 30 minutes: find out which state's rules apply to each licence you hold, and write down the retention period from your regulator's guidance. Check whether any staff mailboxes are set to auto-delete.
This month: make sure settlement emails are saved against the file, not only in a mailbox. Stop leavers' mailboxes being deleted. Collect the PSTs on shared drives and note what years they cover.
Ongoing: move to continuous archiving, and test retrieval once a quarter by asking for everything on one past settlement.
Talk to your trust account auditor or a solicitor if you've found gaps in older years, or if a regulator has already contacted you. Fixing records after a notice arrives is a different problem from setting up good ones beforehand.
What this article doesn't cover
This is general information, not legal advice, and it doesn't set out each state's exact retention period or definition of a trust record. Those differ, and some are changing as AML/CTF obligations bed in. If you hold licences in more than one state, or also act as a lawyer or accountant, additional rules apply on top of these.
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