Who is FirstLink for
Commercial real estate agencies in Australia, including sales and property management, need to reduce deal risk, move faster from listing to settlement, and prepare for expanding Anti-Money Laundering / Counter Terrorism Financing (AML/CTF) regulatory obligations (Tranche 2) without engaging in complex systems or long contracts. Residential real estate agencies can also benefit from any business supply chain checks from services and products supplied to their offices.
The challenge in a nutshell
Property transactions can include many counter-parties: Commercial vendors, commercial buyers, commercial landlord entities, developer Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs), overseas companies, and trusts. Identities and ownership can be opaque, especially when a party is an offshore company or a local business entity with cross-border controllers.
As an agent you must keep deals moving, yet more counter-parties mean greater exposure to domestic and international fraud, sanctions risk, reputational issues, and regulatory scrutiny.
To help mitigate these risks, verify that a business entity exists, understand who really controls it, screen for risk, and keep records. The key to success is to do all of this quickly and cost-effectively.
Where Know Your Business (‘KYB’) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) fits in real estate
Agencies frequently interact with business entities, not only individuals, for example:
- Vendor business entities: family trusts or companies selling a property, developer SPVs, overseas companies selling Australian assets.
- Buyer business entities: company purchasers, Self-Managed Super Funds (SMSFs) with corporate trustees, offshore companies or funds acquiring assets.
- Landlord business entities – Property Management (PM): companies or trusts putting an asset under management.
- Third parties: project marketing Joint Ventures (JVs), referral partners, deposit-holding entities, rent-roll acquisition targets.
FirstLink helps you focus on your Know Your Business (KYB) obligations for these business entities. It allows you to internationally validate the companies you are dealing with and find and then screen the directors and shareholders behind them, mapping beneficial owners and controllers, and capturing evidence you can cite.
A simple, universal workflow your team can adopt
Whether it’s a pre-listing commercial vendor verification, a commercial buyer entity check, property management onboarding or off-the-plan and project marketing, FirstLink makes it easy to do your customer due diligence (CDD).
- Search FirstLink and verify: Search for the company name and country.
- Select the right business entity and discover what reports are available for it.
- Request the required report:
- Entity Confirmation: Confirms the legal existence of a company through official registry checks. Ideal for quick, early-stage screening when onboarding new clients.
- Entity Verification: Validates key details including company information, directors, and shareholders to ensure accurate identification and ownership mapping.
- AML Compliance Check: Delivers real-time screening against global PEP, sanctions, and adverse media lists to meet anti-money laundering requirements.
- Entity Insight: Provides a more detailed global verification, including ownership and subsidiary structures, for thorough compliance reviews.
- Financial Crime: Offers a transparent view of ultimate beneficial owners (UBOs) and global corporate linkages, with a review of key data sets which may signal financial crime risk.
- Resilience Risk: Delivers a light-touch credit risk profile, where financial filings may be restricted or unavailable in a country, it uses available public and contextual data such as sector, jurisdiction, sanctions checks, age of business, and parent stability, helping identify vulnerabilities in volatile or high-risk environments. Includes a credit risk score and credit limit.
- Resilience Review: Pulls together an in-depth view of business verification and firmographic data but does not show a Credit Score or Credit Limit. Useful where a credit risk score is not required or restricted, but resilience business data indicators are still needed.
- Save your report: Download the report for your files.
- Request ‘as-filed’ registry documents: Where available, request ‘as-filed’ registry documents if you require stronger proof (e.g., registry extracts or certificates).
How it supports your business: These checks all go to support your business. Sales negotiators avoid late-stage surprises. Principals gain confidence that the instructing party has authority to sell. Get faster conditional approval by internal compliance and fewer last-minute hold-ups at settlement. Your project pipeline is protected from governance issues that can alarm purchasers or financiers. Helps you meet the regulatory compliance requirement, and so mitigates this risk.