An influx of owner-occupiers is changing Perth’s multi-residential development market offering, with an increased focus on design and amenity providing significant opportunities for architects.
An influx of owner-occupiers is changing Perth’s multi-residential development market offering, with an increased focus on design and amenity providing significant opportunities for architects.
That’s the view of two principals and one director at Perth-based architecture firm JCY, which recently celebrated its 20th year in business.
JCY principal Will Thomson said Perth’s apartment market was still in its infancy compared with other Australian capitals, but was clearly starting to build momentum as a shift to smaller dwellings closer to the inner city got under way.
However, without a history of apartment development to build on, developers were still learning what worked and what didn’t in their projects.
“We’re getting to the point where we can’t keep expanding, everyone knows that and so now developers are looking at bringing things into the city,” Mr Thomson said.
“A lot of them are saying ‘ok now I’m in the city and everyone is in the city, I need to have a competitive edge’.
“They’re not just thinking in terms of having a gym and a pool, they’re really thinking about what they are actually selling to the market.”
That type of thought process on developers’ behalf was resulting in projects with a focus on amenity, with owner-occupiers increasingly catered for as the number of investors decreased, Mr Thomson told Business News.
“There’s a lot of people that are looking at integrated living and ageing gracefully in place, so you’re having a diversification of young professionals, young couples and young families living in the same building with older downsizers,” Mr Thomson said.
“The actual product is starting to get a lot more diverse and has a bigger picture to it, rather than developers just saying ‘I have a block of land and I can max it out with 100 apartments’.”
JCY director Scott McConn said he expected the next evolution of Perth’s apartment market to be around what could be done with older buildings, whether older stock built in the 1970s or vacant warehouses such as M/Group’s Heirloom redevelopment in Fremantle.
Mr McConn said older buildings gave architects and developers a real opportunity to create something unique and special.
“That’s when the real thought process has to happen, to develop what was there into something that reflects what it was, especially if it has heritage aspects as well,” he said.
While developers are strong believers in Perth’s apartment market, a significant challenge in the architectural arena, according to Mr McConn, is getting them on board with a design-led focus.
Mr McConn said a clear misconception among developers was that good design outcomes generally resulted in extra costs.
“A developer, depending on how they’ve started off, has got a mindset of what they want – it might be the last project they’ve done well with,” he said.
“We’ve got a project at the moment and we’re going through the process of showing the developer the alternatives of what we can get as per the brief, as opposed to what you can do if you push the boundaries, but still stay within the brief.
“That’s part of our job, to push the developers a little bit more as well, to make sure they’re not just churning something out that everybody else is churning out.”
JCY principal Glenn Russell said the key to pushing a developer was ensuring they put their trust in the architect.
“Part of that is being able to say, ‘this is an example, it came in under budget and on time’,” Mr Russell told Business News.
“That’s the key to it, as long as you have something built, it makes it easy to convince a developer.”
Mr Russell said he expected developers to continue to focus on design as the market evolved, particularly in respect to new construction techniques able to deliver significant cost savings.
Modular building techniques are gaining significant momentum in Perth’s hotel market, but Mr Russell said there was scope for apartments as well.
“Pre-fabricated buildings and modular is another thing we’re starting to look at – whether that can be adapted in apartment tower blocks to reduce construction time,” he said.
“There are a lot of opportunities starting to open up in that market.”
