How To See The Development Applications For An Area

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How do you see the development applications for a given area? Microburbs.com.au displays them in an easy to read list.

If you are interested in investing in an area or you own a property in an area, you may from time to time want to see the development applications for that area. Traditionally, you need to go to council in order to do this. However I have discovered how to see the development applications for an area for free, online, using a great free tool.

So we are going to be using a free tool that is called Microburb, which you can check out at Microburbs.com.au. Now, this tool gives you a whole bunch of different information on the demographics of the area, commute times, like rankings of schools and all that sort of stuff. But one of the things that it also does is it gives you development proposals for the area. So let us go ahead and have a look at Lindfield in New South Wales, which is the suburb they recommend, and it is going to bring up a lot of different reports. There is affluence score, where we can go in and see the public housing for the area; family schools, you can see the schooling in the area; you can see so many different things. But we want to go to the investor data section.

Now we want to go to the planning applications section, and if we click here we can see 14 more. And so now we can see all the planning applications for the area, and we can see when those planning applications were submitted. We can see a more recent one here, alterations and additions to an existing dwelling on the 22nd of January, 2016. We can see them all the way back to one in 2010, in May 2010; alterations and additions including a kitchen-laundry bi-fold doors, deck, garage, front fence and gates.

So you can see the planning proposals that are here, you can see what they are. We can see one here: addition to the first story, dwelling development, internal changes. You can see a brief overview of what they are about. So you can see all the planning applications that are there, and also they have another section down the bottom – if we go to local government area statistics and we go to development, there we can see a breakdown of the different development applications or developments that have happened in the area. So we can see alterations that have happened, we can see new houses, we can see commercial properties, new multi-units and some other sections as well.

If we go down we can see them ranked by price; how much did they cost to do. Obviously, multi-units are going to be $1 million to $5 million, or $5 million plus, whereas alterations to your house will be less than $100,000. And something that is really interesting is you can see the residential development intent, this line graph here, so you can see how many developments have been happening. And so we can see single houses: 17, 23, 16, 14; so we can see the graph there. We can see attached houses – the ones there; and we can see units as well.

And so given that these graphs are showing 225 to 10, even in houses 22, single houses 18, obviously this report for the planning applications for the area is not going to cover everything. But this graph is really cool because you get to see the trends in the area, so for something like Lindfield, this goes back to 2013 by the looks of it. And so we can see back in mid-2014 that there was a lot of unit applications, and so what we would then do – we can see the drop off here, is then kind of track that and see how is that affecting the area, when are these units going to be released and how is that going to affect the supply and demand of the area.

Let us go and have a quick look at Cronulla in New South Wales. For Conulla planning applications, we can see 95 more, so there is a lot of different planning applications in Cronulla. So you can go through and you can have a look at all of those if you want. What I want to look at is the government area statistics, and I want to show you something. We can see here that back in 2013, there was a bunch of units but then it was basically really low in early 2014. We can see this consistent trend in terms of growth of units in Cronulla.

Now, I do know that in this area there used to be a cap on the size that you can build your units, so years ago maximum of 3 stories. I think the council has now changed that. I think you can now go up to 6 stories, and I think this has happened in the last couple of years. Do not quote me on it, but from my family living there and stuff like that; I think that is the case. And so we can see that this trend in unit development is going up, and I would predict that that would probably continue to go up as houses are sold and turned into units and stuff like that.

A lot of developers are looking to get into Cronulla and to build 6-stories high or whatever they can do; so that would be something to track and think about for Cronulla, whether the demand is going to outstrip the new supply of units. There are a lot of blocks of units in Cronulla already. Some larger ones, some 3-stories, so I do not think there is going to be an intense amount of unit growth but definitely something to track.

So there is one way on how to see the development applications for an area. Again, you just go to Microburbs.com.au and you simply type in your suburb. So like we did, we will type in Cronulla, New South Wales, and you then go to the planning application section, and you can see your snapshot there, or you can click the more button to see all of the applications in the area. So we can see there are a lot of different applications in Cronulla, so if you are really interested in an area I would suggest going through this development applications to see what is happening in the area. When people are opening up new shops, when they are improving their houses, they are all great signs. When people are releasing large blocks of units, that is going to cause an influx of properties into the market; that might be something to be concerned about. But areas like Cronulla are completely boxed in, but areas where there is room to expand like regional areas and things like that, that might be a consideration as well because if they can continue to expand outward then that could cap the growth of whatever suburb you are looking at investing in.

So I hope that this has helped you on how to see the development applications for an area; you can always also contact council as well and talk to them about what is happening in the area. You can talk to real estate agents as well, but they will probably not going to know as much. And I hope that this has been helpful.

If you need some help understanding how to do area research, so you are looking at investing in property but you do not know how to research an area, how to understand capital growth trends, population trends, all of these sort of stuff, then I do have an in-depth course where I go through, I think it is about 18 different things to look at in a suburb, how to analyze them, what do the things mean. So if you want to know how to analyze suburbs yourself, go ahead and check out my course on Advance Suburb Research. Just go to OnProperty.com.au/suburb and you can get access to that over there.

Or if you want personalized help and you want a buyer’s agent to help you identify good areas and help you purchase a property, then I have partnered with Ben Everingham from Pumped On Property and we are offering listeners to On Property a free strategy session with him to talk through your goals, to see if his services are going to be a good fit for you, and to see how you can move forward in your property investment career. So go to OnProperty.com.au/session, if that is something that you are interested in.

Alright, that completes the episode today. Hope you guys have learned a bit about how to see the development applications for an area just to help you understand an area more, help you to overcome the fear of what if there is some big development that is going to ruin the area; or maybe there is a development that is going to improve the area. So I hope that this has helped you; until next time, stay positive!