Is this Canberra block worth developing?
Type an ACT street address. You get the zone, the unimproved value, whether it was a Mr Fluffy block, the exact Lease Variation Charge for going to two, three or four dwellings — and a verdict on the asking price. Ten seconds, no cost, no sign-up.
The ACT Lease Variation Charge captures 75% of the value uplift when you vary a lease to add dwellings. The developer keeps 25%. It is a codified schedule — knowable to the dollar before you bid — and it is why marginal density plays do not work here.
Until 2029, RZ1 and RZ2 developments get a 50% remission. Your share of the planning gain goes from 25% to 62.5% — a 2.5× improvement, and the largest change to ACT development economics in years. There are deadlines, and this tool tests them against your programme.
Gate 1 — is the asking price below what the site is worth once approved? Gate 2 — does the residual land value beat the unimproved value? If it does not, the scheme is wrong, not the price. How this works →
What is actually being built right now
Development activity →Every development application lodged in the ACT since 1999, from the planning register — 63,000 of them. It tells you three things nothing else will: how long approval actually takes for your kind of development in your suburb, what the assessment team has accepted on the street you are looking at, and where somebody is quietly assembling a site. That last one is the closest public trace of an off-market purchase there is.
Every property tool in Australia covers NSW, Victoria and Queensland and skips the ACT. But ACT development runs on Crown leases, not freehold: what you may build is governed by the lease purpose clause, and varying it is expensive in a way that is published, non-linear and different in every suburb. Every source and formula is documented →