Garden Area is a killer

The recent planning requirements in Victoria introduced the mandatory Garden Area(GA) for most residential land. It excludes Growth zones.

Depending on the size of the land, we have to dedicate 25-35% of the property to Garden Area. That is a huge impost for mum and dad developers. In many instances we found that the development was reduced by ONE whole dwelling in townhouse projects or in a dual occ the floor area got reduced.

Th GA has to be a minimum 1m wide.

The trade off, in theory, was to allow building height to 3 levels. Three storeys cost more to build and most Councils will not encourage that, as it will go against their neighbourhood character policy.