Anyone had any success with getting 4 townhouses on a 15m frontage block? Ive seen a few in my area of Brisbane, seems they have 3 stories with two 3x2x2 and two 3x2x1 mix. The 20m frontage blocks zoned for townhouses are hard to come by these days. Any thoughts appreciated. Cheers
Commonly do 3 down my way (diff councils of course) and can get 3x2x2 on 700sqm with FSR of 0.75 but the car turning/parking restrictions plus private open space requirements are making it harder to comply on anything less than 15.2 (which is common in our area) There is not much diff between 3 and 4 (or more) on same frontage as long as the block is physically deep enough for the extra units. Driveways 3-5m pending local rules, usually want 900mm of garden or landscaping beside at least at the front and then house can use rest of site width to 900mm from fence. Leaves you with around 8-10m footprint pending your driveway width but you have to find room to turn the cars around so sometimes we step the footprint in and out a bit. Bris council likely to have diff rules but same principles.
Thanks Buyersagent. What does it do for your feasibility only having 3 TH? I’m struggling to get it to work on my spreadsheet. In Brisbane there are mostly 607sqm so 3 is definitely doable but 4 is tricky on 15m frontage unless you go 3 stories.
We have a DA for four on a 15m wide block. I'm told by a developer that if we applied now (apparently the rules have changed since we got approval), that we would only be approved for three. (Developer said if we had approval for three, we'd likely only get two now, etc.)
In every area it is hard to find sites that are cheap enough to buy but will have good margins at the end. Most 2 dwelling projects work better if you can retain the existing dwelling. Buying 1 to knock down build two needs premium end sales to make work with any margin, adding a 3rd and 4th dwelling makes it more viable but only if you can keep build costs down. I think about 9 out of 10 possible development sites have no or little profit in them. I run a lot that have no profit despite looking fine on first glance. We just walk away unless there is another reason to buy it. Its the 1 in 10 that are worth looking more closely at. You need a market with vendors (or at least 1) who aren't too greedy, don't want to develop themselves and a hungry buyers market for newer homes.
What kind of profit are you looking at to make that 1 out of 10 worth pursuing? Are you looking at a dollar number or a percentage ROI? I have a comprehensive spreadsheet from a developer friend of mine which I regularly run numbers on.
Yes we have one of those too we use and give our clients. The answer to profit levels is "it depends" - a buy and hold investor who just wants a little extra potential could justify buying a home on a good looking dual occ site with a 7-15% profit margin as they were going to buy an investment in the same area anyway, so why not get something with a little extra upside? They typically buy a slightly better house so they can rent it out immediately hence slightly lower dev returns and plan to do DA for 2nd dwelling later on. The dev is the cream not the main course in those cases. A larger scale developer doing 10-20 units/blocks or more on each project typically wants 25% or better or else they may struggle to get finance. Small projects but getting serious plenty of folk ask for the magic 20% but this is harder to do under $1m than over, ie the more money you have the more options in terms of markets, development product etc. Going cheap reduces risk but compresses the returns slightly due to larger number of investor/competitors who can buy the sites - not always true but my general observations. If a site has fewer risks I see some folk take them on down to 15-17% but at that return there isn't much margin for error if you have any cost blowouts. The key is to look for arbitrage in the purchase (ie a motivated seller at a time not many buyers are around for that particular product) and several different exit options if possible.
Interested in indicative build costs for 4 x 3-level townhouses. Although my ideas are for 2-bedders. Long way from proceeding but useful to get an idea of build costs ( QLD, Moreton Bay ).
