The six dates every deal runs on
Every Australian property deal runs on six dates. Knowing them was never the problem — you could recite all six. The problem is that five of them live in someone else's head, and the one most likely to slip is the one nobody thinks to remind you about.
Nobody misses a settlement
Settlement sits in the client's calendar, the solicitor's calendar and yours. Three people are watching it. That's precisely why it isn't the date that hurts you.
The finance date is different. Your broker owns it, your client half-remembers it, and it falls three weeks before anything visibly goes wrong. You find out it slipped on the day the cooling-off runs out — which is also the day your options close.
The six
- Contract date — everything else counts from here.
- Inspection date — building and pest, and anything specialist.
- Finance date — the one your broker owns, and the one clients forget.
- Cooling-off expiry — the shortest fuse on the list.
- Due diligence deadline — your own. Nobody chases you for it.
- Settlement — the only one the client has in their calendar.
Five of these live in someone else's head.
A date that only tells you the morning it's due is a calendar, not a system
The useful question isn't whether a date is written down. It's what the date does in the fortnight before it arrives.
In Trace all six are tracked together on the deal's overview, each labelled with who actually owns it — you, the broker, the client, or the solicitor. A date turns amber inside a week and red inside three days. Anything due within five days raises an upcoming-deadlines banner on the page you land on, and the deal's next-action line will push an overdue or soon-due date in front of you ahead of almost everything else on the file.
Nothing disappears once a date passes, either. A deal is marked settled, withdrawn or paused because you said so. Trace never infers it from a date going by — a date that slid past is exactly the thing you need still sitting there in red.
Who owns the date matters more than it sounds
The finance date isn't yours. It belongs to your broker, which is why chasing it feels like work that shouldn't be yours — because it isn't. In a deal room the broker sets their own finance status from their own lane, and the date stops being something you extract from someone by text message.
The dates aren't the work
One deal's six dates fit on a sticky note. Four deals is twenty-four dates across four different sets of owners, and what you actually need at eight in the morning isn't the list. It's which one is closest, and whose it is.
One rough edge worth knowing before you set a deal up: five of the six are editable from the overview, but the due diligence deadline is fixed when the deal is created and there's no edit control for it yet. Worth getting right at creation rather than discovering on a Friday.
We're building this with a small first group of buyer's agents. If you've ever found out about a finance date from the cooling-off clock, we'd like to talk to you.
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