Question for Developer - What are your council challengers?

[bumblegoodie]

Hello,

Two more weeks of annual leave then back to my 9-5 work....... Yes something to look forward to right?

During this time, i have been reading many development forums and found many developers had bad and/or challenging experiences with Council.

The first thing that comes to mind is council provides a set of rules that a builder/ developer need to comply.

As such, a developer will hire an architect, engineer, etc to ensure plans have met council's rules and regs.

With all the competent bodies working for the developer then why is it so hard to deal with the council ?

May i ask the developers here in this forum give me your examples of specific council requests? could it the rules are mis-interpreted ?

love to hear all your stories!!!

 

[A Jeremy]

Not all developers quash their profit margins by hiring a team of professionals. Many do their own design and town planning and utilise professionals to sign off on documents which require credentials however by doing as much work as possible they lower the outgoings of a project.

Some arguments with Council come about from developers wishing to bend the rules in exchange for exceeding requirements in other areas. The requirement for private open spaces for a particular development may be 16 square metres per dwelling with no dimension less than 4m. A developer may argue that although for one of the dwellings they could only achieve a dimension of 3.5m in one direction, it is 9m in the other direction which means it has almost double(31.5sq. m) the minimum size of a private open space.

Of course you also get the people who submit crazy requests but it's usually not hard to convince the Council to approve an application as long as you can justify your expectations and show precedent.

 

[ulvit]

Hello,

Two more weeks of annual leave then back to my 9-5 work....... Yes something to look forward to right?

During this time, i have been reading many development forums and found many developers had bad and/or challenging experiences with Council.

The first thing that comes to mind is council provides a set of rules that a builder/ developer need to comply.

As such, a developer will hire an architect, engineer, etc to ensure plans have met council's rules and regs.

With all the competent bodies working for the developer then why is it so hard to deal with the council ?

May i ask the developers here in this forum give me your examples of specific council requests? could it the rules are mis-interpreted ?

love to hear all your stories!!!

Unfortunately, Council rules are not black and white - With even professionals hired to assist with a smooth transition to approval, Council town planners can form different opinions of the rules and can cause headaches.

In my case, building 3 on a 1000sqm block was too big of a project to be skimmed over by council town planners taking upto 2 years to finally get approval (through VCAT), although they do support and easily approve dual developments where I had one property approved within 1 month of lodging, no issues.

 

[MRO]

As mentioned above - the rules arent always black and white and this is where the problems arise from.

I think one of the inherent problems with council planning people is there is no reward for positive discretionary decisions. If the outcome is generally positive for the Council but is a bit out of the norm it is easier for them to say no. Saying 'Yes' means there decision may be questioned later and why would they want to risk this. If there is any chance of them saying yes you may need to provide thousands of dollars of expert reports to allow them to justify their decision in the future. I am having this exact issue with the expert report costing me $11,000 to prove something that is very obvious and could be easily observed with a 10 minute site visit.

Sorry for the ramble but this is my experience from small land development projects where the councils first response is always NO.