Every other property developer has a war story about a council that turned a development into a slow ride through hell and back. Maybe it took multiple attempts and many months to have a development application approved. Maybe the conditions of approval were so onerous and so expensive to implement that profit was instantly eroded. Maybe the DA was rejected and an appeal failed. You can bet that in every instance, the developer cursed the council and wished they had taken a different path.
If you’d rather not join their ranks, you need to hunt down a council that is development friendly.
The government obviously determines regions that they're pushing people into – you might find they have three or four councils on their radar. But that doesn't mean that they’re necessarily ready for a whole bunch of new people.
So the first thing I do is go straight to their strategic plan and I have a look at when it was last updated. If the last time it was updated was 10 years ago, I check if there’s a draft plan out for public consultation.
As a rough guide, councils with plans that are between two and five years old tend to offer the most amount of flexibility, which means your DA has the best chance of being approved, however as we approach the five-year mark, the plan may become out of touch with what’s needed in an area. That’s why you’ll find councils will refresh their plans every eight to 15 years.
If it's two years ago it’s still fresh, but you may have already missed the wave because there’s usually a whole lot of early adopters. I'm talking about the property developers who are door-knocking before the ink is even dry on council plans.
An example is Woolloongabba in Brisbane, where two streets were rezoned from two storeys to 15 storeys. When council did that, every developer around tried to buy every property in those streets and it was a race to build effectively 20 years’ worth of supply in two years.
It went from no supply to, oh my God, look how much supply there is.
And so if you miss jumping aboard really early you can potentially miss a wave and all of a sudden your feasos don’t work and the market pulls back.
So while a council may be development-ready, you’ve got to ask the question is it commercially ready?
Just because it can be done doesn’t mean it should be done
A strategic plan with rezonings tells you an area is ready for new property development but it doesn't tell you if it’s profit-ready. Council might say yes, we’ll give you an approval, but buyer demand may either not yet exist or already be satisfied.
You have to have both DA approval and a healthy return on your property investment.
If you get in early you’ll be the early adopter and you’ll pick up that development wave and the profit that comes with it. If you miss that wave, you have to wait for the ripple to come back.
The suburb analysis process that I teach in our Property Development Formula course helps you to assess the profitability of a suburb by reverse engineering the entire suburb based on the evidence of other people doing what you are doing.
When you’re doing your due diligence to become an area expert, you’ll see a bell curve with early adopters and then a big drop-off in activity. You don’t want to be operating in an over-supplied market with little profit potential. Good property development due diligence means assessing both planning potential and market demand before committing to a site.
So if you get a green light on a particular council, the next step is to quantify the demand. If you discover an over-supply, that's where you put on the brakes.
If you'd like to learn the basics of how to assess councils, suburbs and development opportunities systematically, our free 7 Step Development FORMULA course is a great place to start.
How long for an approval?
It’s one thing for council to appear developer-friendly on paper, it’s another to see how long it actually takes for them to process development applications (DAs).
Time is money when developing property, especially if you’ve got holding costs, so you must factor approval timeframes into your feasibility.
Most councils will provide an estimate of DA turn-around times on their website, but we want to go a step further and look into the actual processing time of that council’s recent DA applications.
In Victoria you can find out quickly and easily on the website Know your Council. There’s a similar tool for NSW councils on the state government’s Planning Portal, which lists average determination days for DAs. For historical data on Brisbane DAs, go to Development.i.
A council that typically takes three months to generate an approval could be considered more development-friendly than a council that takes 12 months or more to turn around a DA.
This can be a good metric to narrow down your choice of councils – no one wants their project stalled indefinitely by a council operating in second gear.
Talk to local town planners
Your local town planner is one of the best people to talk to if you want to find out how development-ready and development-friendly a council is.
To optimise your property development outcomes, it makes sense to engage a town planner very early in your journey.
Yes, I know anyone can read the rules and figure out what can and can’t be done, but nothing beats someone who makes lots of successful applications to your council for your type of property development strategy. This person will deal with that one council all the time and knows the personalities within that council. They will know where council is flexible and where it’s not, they’ll have their finger firmly on that council’s pulse.
They’ll know when a strategic plan is about to be refreshed, when politicians are coming up to an election and looking for economic growth and the drivers they’re looking for.
Your Town Planner is going to be instrumental in not only assessing whether or not the development site you’ve found is developable, but assessing whether council will be on board and make short work of your DA.
Let’s be among the property developers who don’t have a council war story.
Let’s focus on finding a development-ready council.
If you’d rather not join their ranks, you need to hunt down a council that is development friendly.
The government obviously determines regions that they're pushing people into – you might find they have three or four councils on their radar. But that doesn't mean that they’re necessarily ready for a whole bunch of new people.
So the first thing I do is go straight to their strategic plan and I have a look at when it was last updated. If the last time it was updated was 10 years ago, I check if there’s a draft plan out for public consultation.
As a rough guide, councils with plans that are between two and five years old tend to offer the most amount of flexibility, which means your DA has the best chance of being approved, however as we approach the five-year mark, the plan may become out of touch with what’s needed in an area. That’s why you’ll find councils will refresh their plans every eight to 15 years.
If it's two years ago it’s still fresh, but you may have already missed the wave because there’s usually a whole lot of early adopters. I'm talking about the property developers who are door-knocking before the ink is even dry on council plans.
An example is Woolloongabba in Brisbane, where two streets were rezoned from two storeys to 15 storeys. When council did that, every developer around tried to buy every property in those streets and it was a race to build effectively 20 years’ worth of supply in two years.
It went from no supply to, oh my God, look how much supply there is.
And so if you miss jumping aboard really early you can potentially miss a wave and all of a sudden your feasos don’t work and the market pulls back.
So while a council may be development-ready, you’ve got to ask the question is it commercially ready?
Just because it can be done doesn’t mean it should be done
A strategic plan with rezonings tells you an area is ready for new property development but it doesn't tell you if it’s profit-ready. Council might say yes, we’ll give you an approval, but buyer demand may either not yet exist or already be satisfied.
You have to have both DA approval and a healthy return on your property investment.
If you get in early you’ll be the early adopter and you’ll pick up that development wave and the profit that comes with it. If you miss that wave, you have to wait for the ripple to come back.
The suburb analysis process that I teach in our Property Development Formula course helps you to assess the profitability of a suburb by reverse engineering the entire suburb based on the evidence of other people doing what you are doing.
When you’re doing your due diligence to become an area expert, you’ll see a bell curve with early adopters and then a big drop-off in activity. You don’t want to be operating in an over-supplied market with little profit potential. Good property development due diligence means assessing both planning potential and market demand before committing to a site.
So if you get a green light on a particular council, the next step is to quantify the demand. If you discover an over-supply, that's where you put on the brakes.
If you'd like to learn the basics of how to assess councils, suburbs and development opportunities systematically, our free 7 Step Development FORMULA course is a great place to start.
How long for an approval?
It’s one thing for council to appear developer-friendly on paper, it’s another to see how long it actually takes for them to process development applications (DAs).
Time is money when developing property, especially if you’ve got holding costs, so you must factor approval timeframes into your feasibility.
Most councils will provide an estimate of DA turn-around times on their website, but we want to go a step further and look into the actual processing time of that council’s recent DA applications.
In Victoria you can find out quickly and easily on the website Know your Council. There’s a similar tool for NSW councils on the state government’s Planning Portal, which lists average determination days for DAs. For historical data on Brisbane DAs, go to Development.i.
A council that typically takes three months to generate an approval could be considered more development-friendly than a council that takes 12 months or more to turn around a DA.
This can be a good metric to narrow down your choice of councils – no one wants their project stalled indefinitely by a council operating in second gear.
Talk to local town planners
Your local town planner is one of the best people to talk to if you want to find out how development-ready and development-friendly a council is.
To optimise your property development outcomes, it makes sense to engage a town planner very early in your journey.
Yes, I know anyone can read the rules and figure out what can and can’t be done, but nothing beats someone who makes lots of successful applications to your council for your type of property development strategy. This person will deal with that one council all the time and knows the personalities within that council. They will know where council is flexible and where it’s not, they’ll have their finger firmly on that council’s pulse.
They’ll know when a strategic plan is about to be refreshed, when politicians are coming up to an election and looking for economic growth and the drivers they’re looking for.
Your Town Planner is going to be instrumental in not only assessing whether or not the development site you’ve found is developable, but assessing whether council will be on board and make short work of your DA.
Let’s be among the property developers who don’t have a council war story.
Let’s focus on finding a development-ready council.
