Time is a cost

The programme input in the residual model looks like an administrative detail. It is one of the two or three assumptions that decides whether a scheme works.

Holding costs compound quietly

On a $3 million total development cost at 65% debt, 55% average drawn and 12% interest, every additional month costs around $16,000 — before rates, land tax, insurance and your own time. Twelve months of delay on a scheme with a $400,000 profit takes half of it.

The titling tail

Subdivision and unit titling generally cannot start until the build is complete and certified. That is two to four months of full debt carry after practical completion, during which nothing is happening, nothing is selling, and the interest clock is running at its maximum drawn balance.

Budget it explicitly. A programme that ends at practical completion is understating the finance cost by the most expensive months in the project.

Off-the-plan contracts do not pay you

This is the one that catches people. Signing three off-the-plan contracts feels like the project is de-risked. It is not, financially: contracts do not pay you, settlements do — and settlement waits on title registration, which waits on the titling tail above.

A contract is useful because it satisfies your lender's presale requirement and because it proves the price. It does not shorten the programme by a single day.

Where the time actually goes — and it is not where people say

Almost everything written about ACT development says a DA takes twelve to eighteen months, and people quote four to five years from purchase to approval. The planning register says something different. Across every decided application in the last ten years:

Application	Median	9 in 10 within	Approved
Lease variation	72 days	198 days	93%
Multi-dwelling	93 days	~220 days	~89%
Dual occupancy	51 days	~140 days	~91%
Single dwelling	39 days

Both stories are true, and reconciling them is the useful part. The assessment clock — lodgement to decision — is a median of about ten weeks. The four-to-five year figure is the whole journey: finding the site, settling, appointing consultants, designing, redesigning after pre-application advice, responding to objections, and often withdrawing and re-lodging. The assessment team is not the bottleneck. You are, and so is your consultant team.

This matters for the missing middle remission. If you assume the DA is an eighteen-month black box, the 30 June 2029 approval deadline looks frightening. It is not — provided you get to lodgement. Budget the design and documentation phase honestly and the deadline is comfortable; assume the register's median is your programme and you will miss it, because the median measures the part of the process you do not control.

Every property page on this site shows the observed assessment time for that kind of development in that suburb, and the activity page shows the whole distribution.

What to do about it

Attack the front end, not the back. Design and documentation is the long pole, not assessment, and the Canberra House Pattern Book removes both for eligible designs.