Residential · medium density
Ten to twenty dwelling developments at one or two storeys, and everything down to a dual occupancy, across South Australia and Victoria. Party wall construction, separate services to every dwelling, and a staging plan built around settlement rather than convenience.
The scope
This is a real and growing market in both Adelaide and Melbourne, and it is squarely inside what our registrations permit.
Attached Class 1a dwellings, which is to say townhouses, terraces, row dwellings and dual occupancy, on infill and greenfield sites. Anything from a pair up to around twenty dwellings on a single site, at one or two storeys.
It is a genuinely awkward size of project. Large enough that the party walls, the separate services and the staging all behave like commercial work, and low enough that the contract and the consumer protections are domestic. That combination is exactly what a commercial builder holding a domestic registration is built for.
One boundary worth stating plainly: apartment buildings are Class 2 under the National Construction Code, and Class 2 sits outside our residential registrations, as does any residential work above two storeys. We do not tender that work and we will say so on the first call.
Where the money is decided
On an infill site, the number that matters is how many dwellings the block will carry. Everything else is consequence.
What makes it different
The wall between two dwellings has to do several jobs at once: structure, fire separation and acoustic separation, and it has to be built and inspected in a sequence that lets both sides proceed. Get the detail wrong and it is discovered at handover, when it is behind everything else.
Each dwelling needs its own water, sewer, power, gas where used, and data, metered separately, plus its own stormwater path. The connections and the authority applications are a bigger part of the programme than most clients expect.
On a development you are usually selling or refinancing as you go, so the order the dwellings complete in has a cash flow attached to it. That belongs in the programme from the beginning rather than being negotiated once the slab is down.
The thing nobody draws. Once the first dwelling is framed, the crane, the deliveries and the trades all have less room than they had on day one. On a tight infill site this decides the build sequence, and it is best decided before the design is fixed.
Established suburbs mean established residents. Dilapidation surveys, protection works where they are required, hours, dust, noise and parking. Being a good neighbour is partly courtesy and substantially risk management.
How we run it
Where the site is not yet designed, we would rather price the options than the drawings. It is a small piece of work and it changes the whole project.
Trades tendered openly on the documentation, so the cost per dwelling is visible and the decisions about where to spend are yours to make with real numbers.
A build order that accounts for access, services connections and the settlement dates, agreed before the first unit goes up rather than discovered around it.
Each dwelling handed over on its own list, so the last one finished does not hold up the first one settled.
Questions
No. Apartments are Class 2 and sit outside our residential registrations, as does any residential work above two storeys. We will tell you on the first call.
From a pair up to around twenty on a single site. The constraint is the two storey limit on our registrations and our single-contract capacity of $20 million, not the number of dwellings as such. Twenty single-storey dwellings is well inside both.
That is when we are most useful. What the site will carry, and what each option does to the cost per dwelling, is a cheaper question to answer before there are drawings.
Yes, and usually that is the better arrangement on an infill site, because the planning outcome and the build cost are the same conversation.
South Australia and Victoria, where we hold residential registrations. Not New South Wales, where we build commercial and industrial work only.
On an infill site the address tells us the zone, the frontage, the fall and the neighbours, which between them decide most of the project.
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