We recently received plan sealing approval from council for our Prospect project (2 into 3 land subdivision) and we are on our way to settlement for our blocks, so I thought it timely to write a blog post summarising this project, including some of the challenges we encountered and our pathway to creating a couple fantastic new blocks of land in Wynnum.
We secured this property on-market back in late May 2022, which was a 1470m2 Low Density Residential (LDR) zoned property, with a 20m frontage, on the elevated side of a great street in Wynnum North in Brisbane's bayside. The existing dwelling on this site was a dilapidated house which was home to a large pigeon population that had taken it up as their primary residence for a number of years. Needless to say, it was in a rather untidy and toxic state. We contemplated "renovating" this one for a whole 10 seconds before agreeing this was a knock-down situation. We knew we could achieve two large front lots from this site and saw an opportunity to try and unlock a 3rd block of land through one of the side neighbours, given we did not have the frontage to do a battle-axe.
Prospect Original Block
Pigeon Palace (Existing House)
Along with the frontage limitation, the key issue and constraint we had for this site was Significant Tree Overlay which was applied to this property to protect a very large mature Mango tree (NALL) at the rear of the property. The tree canopy is massive and whilst it is a beautiful tree, it's at the rear of the property and not visible from the street and has never produced a single mango!
The Mango Tree
Due Diligence (DD) and Development Application (DA) Stage
During our DD phase we spoke with several arborists, familiarizing ourselves with NALL and the ST overlay and quickly realised our chances of removing this tree were slim to absolutely none, and our best chance would be to plan it into our development. We had a couple of avenues to try with our side neighbours to see if there was an ability to acquire a portion of land from them for an easement driveway to unlock our 3rd block at the rear. After several conversations, it was evident this was not going to happen for us. Through conversations with one of our neighbours we put forward a proposal to sell a rear parcel of land (approx. 400m2) which contained the existing large shed and mango tree, which after some negotiation was accepted and we exchanged a contract. With this agreement in place, a revised subdivision plan was submitted with council as per the below design and we received our DA approval in Aug 22.
Approved Subdivision Plan (2 into 3)
Negotiated Decision
Upon receiving our DA from council, we had a couple of conditions that required negotiation, the main one being our requirement to supply an upstream stormwater connection for 4 properties to our north (we negotiated this to only 2). Due to the contours of the land, in BCC you must provide a connection for a developable property should they not be able to achieve lawful point of discharge to the street (Lesson Learned #1). We were aware of this council requirement, however had overlooked it as we assumed the property to our north could discharge to street without properly checking it was achievable. We therefore had to revise our project feasability (feaso) and plan for providing a 225mm stormwater connection down the full length of the property (75m) along the Lot 10 western boundary.
In addition to the upstream stormwater connection, we were also just outside of existing Fire Hydrant (FH) coverage on both streets, which required us to provide two new FH's. We had not included these in our original feaso numbers as we had only completed a rough check during our site inspection. This is something we will bring forward and ensure all our initial site checks and inspections include (accurate) FH measurements (Lesson Learned #2).
Operational Works
We then moved to Operational Works stage and had to evict our flying tenants and demo the existing house. The site and street looked instantly improved once we had dropped and removed the old house (no Pigeons were harmed). We then lodged our UU applications and engaged our Civil Contractor to complete the stormwater, water, and fire hydrants. We managed the concreting works separately. We were hopeful of getting our civil works completed before the end of the calendar year however due to contractor availability, and permits and approvals needed, this was not to be, and construction shifted into mid Jan 23.
Sales and Marketing
Whilst we awaited the civil construction to be completed, we launched our marketing on one of our blocks (Lot 11) and ended up getting this one under contract in late Nov 22. We are currently looking to finalise a contract of sale on Lot 10 soon. One lesson here is that Land is taking longer to sell on market than it used to due to several factors (builder availability, timeframes, interest rates etc) and a lot of buyers want an established house they can move straight into, which we can totally understand. Factoring this into your overall project timeframe is important to ensure you achieve the result you are looking for, and consideration for constructing and selling new homes is something we will look at next time for a site similar to this one. These blocks are larger than what are typically brought to market in Wynnum (and surrounding Brisbane suburbs) and in an ideal elevated location (see below), so we are very confident their future owners will be happily enjoying their decision to purchase and build new in the not-so-distant future.
Plan Sealing & Titles
Once construction and certification were all complete and we had compiled our evidence pack, we lodged our Plan Sealing application with council. This was a quick turn-around and we had one minor rectification to complete, which was a repair to existing asphalt out the front of our new driveway cross-over for Lot 10. Once we completed this, council issued our approval of the Survey Plan, and we are now in the process of registering with Titles QLD and we are approaching settlement for the rear parcel of land and Lot 11 in the coming weeks.
Thanks for reading this post, if you are interested in hearing more about our current and future projects please subscribe to our newsletter and follow us on our socials. We are progressing our Capalaba land subdivision project over the coming months, and we are also looking at taking on a couple new projects in the near future which we are busy working on. Look forward to sharing more with you soon.
Chris & Jon
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