In its 2023 election campaign – NSW Labor promised  $30 million for a pilot ‘Build to Rent’ program on the South Coast to be delivered by the Government’s Land and property development organisation – Landcom.

In recent weeks, additional funding has been committed to the Bomaderry Build-to-Rent project on the South Coast, delivering a total of 60 dwellings. We decided to take a look under the hood to see what this project will deliver in terms of a) affordability, b) typology/tenure diversity, and c) universally accessible design.

Landcom’s Housing Policy includes targets a) to c) for all projects commenced since July 2021.

In short, these targets are:

• For regional areas, at least 20% of all new homes will meet Landcom’s definition of Affordable Housing, with at least 10% being Affordable Rental Housing
• For metropolitan areas, at least 10% of all new homes will meet Landcom’s definition of Affordable Housing, with at least 5% being Affordable Rental Housing
• At least 15% of all new homes will be diverse housing in terms of typology and tenure-type
• At least 30% of new medium and high density homes will be universally accessible housing.

We have heard from Landcom that specifically for the Bomaderry build-to-rent site, there is an intention to have these targets overlap, so at least 20% of all units will be simultaneously a) affordable, b) diverse, and c) universally accessible.

Obviously we would like to see higher targets for government-owned land and government-run projects but considering around this time last year there were no regional percentage targets for affordable dwellings, it’s a start.