Apartment design standards add 9 per cent to delivery cost, study finds
Northbourne Architecture's four-state comparison quantifies the cost of divergent apartment standards for the first time.
A study by Northbourne Architecture comparing identical apartment layouts across four states finds delivery cost differences of between 4 and 13 per cent attributable solely to divergent design standards.
The largest single contributors are minimum ceiling heights, car parking ratios and communal open space requirements, in that order.
The authors stop short of recommending harmonisation downward, noting that several of the more expensive requirements produce measurably better long-run outcomes for occupants.
Sources
Related coverage
Australia's apartment shortage is becoming a construction problem
Builders are declining work that would have been taken without hesitation five years ago. Fixed-price contracts, insolvency risk and a thin subcontractor market are converting a planning problem into a delivery problem.
Build-to-rent reaches scale in Melbourne
The sector has moved from pilot to fixture, and is now large enough to influence advertised rents in the inner city.
Infrastructure spending shifts to Melbourne's outer west
Transport investment is moving to the growth corridors where population is already arriving, reversing a decade of inner-city concentration.
The suburbs where apartments now outperform houses
A data analysis of 1,240 suburbs identifies where the house-apartment relationship has inverted, and what those markets have in common.