Liverpool Chamber Issue 1 September 2014

New airport a magnet for buyers

Article from SMH Antony Lawes September 14, 2014 The first planes may not be touching down for at least a decade but land near the proposed airport at Badgerys Creek is fast becoming hot property. From Blacktown in the north to Campbelltown in the south, small investors through to large developers are scrambling to get a hold in an area that experts think has staggering potential. And this is before much of the land around the airport has been rezoned, or has services such as sewerage and water connected. “It was virtually overnight,” said Michael Cavagnino, licensee of LJ Hooker Leppington, of when interest in these areas started to take off, following the announcement of the airport in April. The property market in Sydney’s south-west, like much of the city, had been riding high since last year. But agents say the airport announcement charged already popular areas such as Liverpool, and opened up interest in new swathes of rural and semi-rural land for residential and commercial development. Local agent Joe Romeo, licensee of Country Lane Properties at Horsley

Park, close to Badgerys Creek, estimated that in February and March he had one or two buyers for these rural properties. Now there are about about 100. “We’ve had a lot of people wanting to buy since the airport announcement,” he said, adding that most of them were looking at this land for commercial use. Doug Driscoll, chief executive of Starr Partners, with a network of more than 20 agencies in western and south-western Sydney, estimated that interest had surged by 40 per cent, and there weren’t enough properties for sale to satisfy demand. “I would anticipate upward pressure on prices based on this investor demand,” he said. AndrewWilson, senior economist of the Fairfax Media-owned Domain Group, said demand for residential and commercial land around the proposed airport was about to go through “a revolution, not an evolution”. Over the past three months, the NSW government has announced the rezoning of land for more than 8000 homes in western Sydney and increased the area set aside for industrial and commercial use. A spokeswoman for the NSW Department of Planning and

Environment said further planning was being done to “maximise the opportunities around the second airport”. “It is smart to start planning for a growing western Sydney today by setting aside land for housing now,” she said. Yet evenbeforemuchof this rezoning has been done, there are already “big deals” being negotiated between landowners and developers. Ray White Projects director Peter Walsh said these ranged frommulti- unit developments close to the bigger centres, to housing projects further out, but many of them were in the early stages of negotiation. “People are definitely seeing [the airport] as a stimulus to that [local] economy, there’s no doubt about it,” he said. The western Sydney director of the Sydney Business Chamber, David Borger, has been a strong advocate of the airport’s ability to boost jobs and stimulate economic growth in a region where more than 200,000 people have to leave every day for work in other parts of the city. He said while little was known about the details of the new airport, the fact that “there’s going to be employment, road improvements andbuseswill allowmore residential development in the south-west growth centre”.