SAILIS is the database of digitised South Australian land title records post the Real Property (Torrens Title) Act of 1858.
The database was created largely for internal use by the South Australian Land Titles Office, which was sold to a private company in 2018.
Searching is free and copies of most original land title documents for the period 1858-1992 may be viewed, copied and downloaded for personal study and research.
If you are interested in researching the history of your home or property, the State Library has created a guide to assist you with this process. Our Tracing the history of a house library guide, provides some great information and resources to help you explore and trace the history of your home. Whether you are interested in a brief search or a detailed search regarding the history of your home, this guide will provide valuable information on how to get started.
Using this guide, you will be able to search amongst a wide range of physical and digital resources that are available at the State Library of South Australia, to uncover interesting facts about your home and previous owners or tenants. Using the information you have gathered from SAILIS can be a great starting point to uncovering more information about the history of your home and the people that lived there. There are some other useful library guides that may also be useful for this type of research:
For detailed instructions on how to use and search the SAILIS database and access historic certificates of title at no cost, see the PDF document below. For further information and to see what other products can be accessed, see their SAILIS Access and Support page, which includes several Fact Sheets and tutorials, or contact Land Services SA.
If you prefer a visual step-by-step tutorial, there are two YouTube videos below created by SAILIS.
The first video shows you how to conduct a historical name index. This tutorial is most useful for when you already know the name of a previous landowner, and a rough idea of when they owned the property.
The second video shows you how to search for a title history in the database. It shows you the different ways the SAILIS database can be searched to find information on the title history of a property. If you only have the street address for the property, and no other information, this video will show you how to use that information in their database to find information relating to the certificate of title and the title history.
If you are interested in exploring some more content related to SAILIS, they have created a playlist of tutorials available on their YouTube channel. Like the two videos featured above, these videos provide step-by-step instructions on how to search, find documents and information using the SAILIS database.
SAILIS have also compiled a list of their frequently asked questions, which may provide useful information about using the database and their resources.