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 Lease Variation Charge for going to two, three or four dwellings from the current Schedule — and a verdict on the asking price. Ten seconds, no cost, no sign-up.
Reading a document needs a free account — one email, no password.
Developer licensing is mandatory at 3 dwellings, and the trigger is the application, not the build. What it involves →
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.
RZ1 and RZ2 developments may get a 50% remission — if the charge was not already paid or deferred before 10 June 2026, the DA is approved by 30 June 2029, and every dwelling is finished by 31 December 2030. Where it holds, your share of the planning gain goes from 25% to 62.5%. Those last two are programme tests and this tool checks them against your dates.
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 →
Once you have a block — from the search above
- Model it. Your build cost, end value, contingency and finance — the residual moves as you type.
- Save the scheme and reopen it later.
- Compare six blocks side by side, on the same assumptions.
- Add the neighbours — assemble up to four adjoining blocks into one site, and model a larger development as a single parcel.
- Issue an assessment — short URL, printable PDF.
When you do not have one yet — 150,297 blocks
- Block reviews — specific ACT blocks on the market, screened and written up.
- Radar — filter the whole Territory by zone, area, value and constraint.
- Compare suburbs — charge, block size and approval rate in one table.
- DA intelligence — what gets approved, and how long it takes.
- Development activity — every application since 1999.
All of that is free and signed out. An account only adds memory: signed out, three watched blocks and one saved model live in a cookie a cleared browser takes. No password — enter an email, click the link.
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 →
More to come More datasets, improved calculations and monitoring tools are being added.