A duplex on a block you already own doesn't make you slightly better off. It replaces a decade of income in about eighteen months.
The maths nobody shows you
Take a household on $150,000 take-home. A disciplined 20% savings rate puts away $30,000 a year. To accumulate $1.25 million at that rate takes 42 years. If you started today, you'd get there in 2068.
On our Northern Beaches projects, a duplex has typically returned around $1.25 million. A triplex, around $1.5 million. The project runs 14 to 20 months.
That is 8.3 years of full take-home pay, delivered inside two.
Why the land is the engine
The reason the numbers are this large is simple. You already own the most expensive input. A developer buying your block today pays Northern Beaches land prices, stamp duty, holding costs and agent fees before they lift a shovel. You skip all of it. Your margin starts where theirs ends.
The second reason is the LMR policy. Blocks that could only ever hold one house can now hold two or three. The land was always worth more as a site. The rules just caught up.
Where the $1.25 million comes from
Roughly, on a duplex:
- Two new four-bedroom homes sell for more than one old three-bedroom house plus the cost to build two. That gap is the profit.
- Torrens title on each. Buyers pay a premium for land they own outright.
- New build, new finishes, new warranty. The buyer pool is families who want to move in, not renovate.
- Local agents know the product. A new duplex in Frenchs Forest or Forestville is not a hard sell.
What the number doesn't include
We show the gross development profit before tax and before finance costs, because both depend on your structure and your lender. Development carries real risk. Build costs move. Markets move. Approvals take longer than anyone promises. We will show you the downside case next to this one, every time, because the people who get hurt in this game are the ones who only ever saw the upside.
The question that changes the decision
Most owners come to us thinking about a renovation. New kitchen, new bathroom, maybe a second storey. Three or four hundred thousand dollars that mostly doesn't come back at sale.
Before you spend a cent on that kitchen, ask the other question. Is the land under the house worth more as two homes? If the answer is yes, the kitchen can wait. You might end up with a brand new one, in a brand new home, with the mortgage gone.
Move the slider yourself
The escape-plan calculator on our site lets you put in your own income, your own savings rate and your own expectation of profit. Be conservative. The result is still hard to argue with.