Density Takes Centre Stage in Perth’s Great Urban Reset

It’s early autumn in the Western Australian capital and like the green leaves on the city’s London plane trees that are about to turn golden, attendees at The Urban Developer ’s inaugural Perth Developer Symposium hear that change is on the way for Australia’s most isolated metropolis. Setting the scene at the symposium’s plenary session at the 45-storey Brookfield Place on St Georges Terrace, Perth-based Urbis partner David Cresp says the city reached its peak annual population growth of about 80,000 people in 2023. That was the highest annual population growth the metropolis had ever had. “We’re now down to about 60,000, which is still really high,” he says. “And when you look at what’s going to happen over the next 10 years, the expectations are that we stabilise at sort of 45,000 to 50,000 a year. “When you add all that up, it’s really quite scary; the next 10 years see 450,000 new people come into Perth, a 20 per cent population increase ... that’s staggering.” Cresp says that adding another City of Stirling (WA’s most populous municipality where 250,000 people live) and another City of Joondalup (the state’s fourth most populous local government area with 170,000 people) would not meet requirements of the projected growth. He says that urban consolidation is the key. “In Perth, we’re really ... great at building at the urban fringe and four and five-bedroom houses but unfortunately we’re getting to a pretty shocking situation when we compare to the rest of the country; 79 per cent of houses in Perth are single residential homes,” Cresp says. “If we have a look at Brisbane ... and fundamentally there’s no real reason why we shouldn’t be a similar sort of city to Brisbane ... 60 per cent of their homes are coming from single residential.” ▲ David Cresp with The Urban Developer founder and chief executive Adam Di Marco at the inaugural Perth Developer Symposium. Image: Chris Thomson Willing Property founding director Tim Willing, who specialises in projects around the affluent suburb of Mt Lawley, says that fitout and amenity are key to promoting higher density living in the WA capital. “Historically, people in Perth aren’t wandering around thinking: ‘ I want to live in an apartment’,” he says. “And it’s been our job to, I think, introduce something that entices people, that is intriguing for them. “And it’s only helped, [that] post-Covid and [with] the travel boom, people are staying in beautiful hotels, they’re going around the world more often and it’s opening them up to a different type of living, they’re wanting higher quality ... a finish, an amenity. “It’s very specific, ... when you talk [about] amenity, [in one project] we’ve got a marble-clad dogwash room, for example, with driers and so on, and areas for dogs to walk up—I mean, there’s more dogs in one building than people.” ▲ Tim Willing says it is his job to introduce amenity that entices Perth people into higher density housing. Image: Chris Thomson Sirona Urban project director Kate Stevenson says that, as elsewhere in Australia, it is very difficult to purchase a home in Perth and so rental accommodation is critical. “We do know there are a number of development applications approved in relation to student accommodation but we also know that most of them aren’t going to be built,” she tells her peers in Perth. Responding to speculation that build-to-rent may not stack up or that developers are merely piloting the asset class, Stevenson says build-to-rent in Perth is not viable unless critical mass can be achieved. “So, the work we’re doing with the operators over east that are really interested in coming into the market [indicates] that one build-to-rent at 200 homes isn’t enough,” she says. “They want three, four, five products in the market and that’s why we’re ... acquiring land and looking to cluster and group [build-to-rent buildings] together.” PBSA's big advantage She says PBSA works because developers do not need to build car parks . “Developers should know their market, should know their customer, so the fact we’re still talking with local government and state government about how many car bays we should be putting in build-to-rent, that we should be putting in build-to-sell, it kind of blows my mind ... because we’re going to be stuck with a product we can’t sell if we don’t get it right,” she says. “I’ve had a bit of an experience in the last couple of years where we had a local government and a state government disagreeing about car parking; one saying you haven’t got enough and another saying you’ve got too much. “If we can get to a point in relation to taxes [and] legislation and we can really simplify things then the difference between co-living, student accommodation and build-to-rent actually shouldn’t be a difference.” She says that as soon as developers are boxed into “talking about ratcheting different costs, taxes and really making it quite complex, we’ve lost sight of why we’re doing it, which is to provide homes for people to live in”. ▲ Kate Stevenson of Sirona Urban says WA developers should be freed to focus on providing homes for people. Image: Chris Thomson With regard to co-living units, H-U (Human Urban) director Kyle Jeavons says there is a lack of supply in Perth and that means there is potentially “another asset class that we haven’t seen before” in WA. “[Co-living] has to fit in with the rest of the precinct planning,” he says. “We’re doing it at the Woolstores ... at Fremantle . “It started as a full residential scheme [and] end[ed] up being 220 apartments—so over the past couple of years we’ve broken it down into co-living and a bit of high-end residential and we’ve got a fair bit of office space.” He says that, for H-U, co-living and build-to-rent only work in “three or four” very high amenity areas in Perth. ▲ Kyle Jeavons says co-living has to fit in with precinct planning. Image: Chris Thomson Picking up on some distinctive aspects of the WA development scene, GDI Property head of development and strategic communications Sally Ockenden says the company’s key-worker accommodation is a “great way to diversify our income streams, particularly post-Covid when there was so much uncertainty”. “The investment in resource accommodation is quite small and you are able to get really great gains, particularly if you’re well located, but the fundamentals have to be there because it’s highly sensitive to vacancies,” she says. “So, you really need to have big projects happening around them, you really need to make sure that you’re providing something that’s better than what the market’s providing so that you can be the first choice in that accommodation. “We’ve probably all heard in the media that there’s a lot of issues around mental health in mining, so it’s really about providing resource accommodation that provides additional amenity and is a better home away from home for the people that are going up to those villages and working there away from their families.” AI: No crystal ball Ockenden says GDI’s model has been to pick up low replacement value worker accommodation properties that have not been well looked after and to recreate them. “So it’s been much more about that adaptive re-use and providing that amenity back into it, so putting in restaurants, putting in great gyms and swimming pools and refurbishing those places completely,” she says. On a topic that is on everybody’s lips, Ockenden says she has no crystal ball when it comes to artificial intelligence but does feel it will add to productivity. “It’s a major disruptor, no doubt,” she says. “I think we will be slightly less impacted by AI here in Perth [because] our offices typically have a lot of mining businesses, engineering businesses [and] I think that they’re quite good early adopters of technology ... and as early adopters they’ve probably seen some of that disruption already and we’ll always need a human element to things. “I think the industries such as financial services and professional services will see a lot more disruption from AI and those services are more eastern states focused.” ▲ The Urban Developer’s Adam Di Marco and Sally Ockenden discuss distinctive aspects of WA’s development scene. Image: Chris Thomson Urbis director Megan Gammon tells the conference that major development opportunities in Perth fall roughly into four categories that are “really going to shift the dial”—station precincts, recently announced federal government disposal sites, strategic precincts managed by DevelopmentWA and activity centres. Metro-targeted precincts Gammon says that in November last year the WA government announced it would “extract” 800m catchments around 10 Perth train stations from local government planning schemes and prepare targeted schemes for each precinct. The relevant stations are Mosman Park, Cottesloe and Swanbourne in Perth’s affluent western suburbs; Claisebrook, Glendalough and Carlisle in Perth’s inner suburbs; Morley and Ballajura in the city’s north and Bassendean and Redcliffe in north-eastern Perth. “[With] western suburbs ones—Swanbourne, Cottesloe, Mosman Park—[there are] immediate opportunities there,” Gammon says. “The underlying land values in connection to amenity are really attractive for density in some of these locations but we need to be mindful that some other [locations] are a longer burn. “Places like Ballajura, Redcliffe, Morley are going to take some time.” She names two metropolitan Perth Barracks to be sold by the Federal Government in its national disposal of 68 defence estates, announced last month, as a major opportunity for developers. “Irwin Barracks, 60ha in our prime western suburbs, could you imagine a bigger and better opportunity? And then you’ve got Leeuwin Barracks, 14ha on the river in East Fremantle,” she says. “The other one I would throw in the mix would be King Eddies [Edward] Hospital. “ We’re building a new hospital , this hospital’s going to become redundant—it’s 3ha that is prime land [in inner western Subiaco]. “It’s going to be a great opportunity that’s going to come to market shortly.” ▲ Megan Gammon says station precincts, federal disposal sites, strategic precincts and activity centres are where the action is. Image: Twelfth Photography With regard to strategic precincts, Gammon nominates the former site of Edith Cowan University at Mt Lawley as a prime example. “The benefit of these precincts are they’re co-ordinated, they’re precinct scale but they have the luxury of time; so there’s a couple of years lead-in ...where we can really invest in community engagement, we can invest in master planning.” Gammon says that WA’s activity centres policy was amended more than a decade ago to create hubs that were not just focused on retail. “That set the scene to ... [say] let’s make these really diverse and mixed-use, let’s bring residential in, let’s have some targets around that,” she says. She says some of Urbis’s clients have a “huge appetite” for residential development in those centres, including build-to-sell, build-to-rent, retirement homes and in some cases PBSA.

Density Takes Centre Stage in Perth’s Great Urban Reset

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