If you found the site on a portal, so did forty other developers. The margin is already gone.
What a listed site costs you
A development site that reaches realestate.com.au has been priced by an agent who knows what it can hold. It is photographed, marketed and auctioned. Every developer within 20 km runs the same feasibility and bids the same number. The winner is whoever accepts the thinnest margin. On the Beaches, that is a losing game. The land is the single biggest line in the feasibility, and the auction has just maximised it.
Where sites actually come from
Most of the sites we buy or secure for clients never had a sign out the front. They come from:
- Agents, before listing. Fifteen years of buying on the Beaches means the local agents call before they list. They know we settle, they know we do not waste their time, and they know a quiet sale suits a vendor who does not want a campaign.
- Direct approaches. We write to owners of blocks that pass the LMR check. Some have been thinking about it for years. A letter from someone who can show them the numbers is the push.
- Deceased estates and downsizers. Executors and families often prefer a clean private sale to a public campaign.
- Neighbours of our own sites. When a slab goes down next door, the phone rings.
Every site, whatever its source, goes through the same hour test before anyone on the list hears about it.
Within the hour
When a site comes through, we know within an hour whether the numbers work. LMR ring, zoning, width, slope, trees, stormwater, likely yield, likely end values, likely build cost. If it does not stack, we say so and move on. If it does, you hear about it before anyone else.
What we look for
- Inside one of the nine Northern Beaches LMR rings, or a beachside Central Coast equivalent
- R2 or R3, 600 m² and up, 15 m+ frontage
- Fall to the street for stormwater, or a workable OSD solution
- No significant trees in the building footprint
- Not mapped bushfire where it kills a CDC, or if it is, a DA inside the ring that still works
- A vendor who will consider terms, not just price
Terms are where the deal is made
Buying off-market lets you negotiate what an auction never allows: a longer settlement, a due-diligence period, a deposit that does not strangle your cash. More on that in a separate post. The short version: a site bought on terms at a fair price beats a site bought at auction for 5% less.
How to get on the list
We run a short off-market list. Not a newsletter. When a site passes the hour test, the people on the list hear first, with the feasibility attached. To be on it we need three things: what you want to build, what you can fund, and how fast you can move.