2031: a land odyssey – article in New Home Buyer

The bad news:
Prepare to leave the Bridge, Opera House, and CBD behind

At first, City of Cities seems full of promise for those who want to stick close to the city, but live in a new house. Sixty to seventy percent (or around 445,000) of the new dwellings built by 2031 will be in existing urban areas.

However, the meaning of the phrase “new dwelling” needs to be examined. Whilst the Metropolitan Strategy is keen to deny that it’s “a strategy which relies entirely on high rise”, it does encourage and forecast “increased density but with a lower scale”.

If you want to build a house of your own choosing on vacant land, rather than buying a unit, townhouse, or other form of medium density housing, then you will probably be building in a greenfield, or new release area. And that means living at least 40 minutes drive from Sydney’s CBD. There will be exceptions — last year there were small releases in densely populated areas of Lavender Bay to the North and the Prince Henry site in Little Bay to the South, but these releases matched extra-large price tickets with comparatively small lot sizes.

Not that the land released in greenfield areas is necessarily going to provide you with the quarter acre you always dreamed of. To get really large blocks, you may have to leave Metropolitan Sydney behind, and instead move into Greater Sydney. For example, the Clarendon Group is using the minimum 700m2 lot size to sell their Explorer’s Estate in Blaxland in the Blue Mountains, citing one new home buyer who claims “the large size of the lots was integral to his decision to purchase”.

The Good News:
A Brave New (sensible) World

According to City of Cities, between 2000-2005, 75% of new dwellings were built in established areas, 25% built in new release areas. This meant more high density dwellings, and less single, detached dwellings. The Metropolitan Strategy wants to ensure that 30-40% of new housing is in new release areas — that’s 195,000 new dwellings. And the new release areas are specifically designed to “ensure a continuing supply of new detached housing with some medium density housing”. This will result in more opportunities for new home buyers to build their dream home between now and 2031.

Exactly where this continuing supply will be was fleshed out with the release of the MDP 2007 in February this year. This document was specifically designed to provide updates on greenfield land and dwelling supply. However, it does much more than this, as it lists the location of each of the 107,554 potential dwellings that the Metropolitan Development Program has “in stock”, an then goes on to clarify which of these lots are zoned and serviced, an how many of them are seeking or have received subdivision approval from the local government area, giving new home buyers the clearest indication yet of when the land will be released to the public.