Regulated Trees and an Easement Cut This Site Into Fragments. Five Townhouses Were Still Approved.

Regulated Trees and an Easement Cut This Site Into Fragments. Five Townhouses Were Still Approved.

General information for South Australian landowners and small developers only. This is not planning, legal, arboricultural or engineering advice. This account is anonymised and simplified, and the fact that one proposal was approved is not an indication that any other will be — every application is assessed on its own merits against the Planning and Design Code by the relevant authority. Questions about trees on your own site belong with an arborist and your planning consultant; questions about an easement on your title belong with the authority or party that holds it and with your conveyancer or property lawyer; questions about what can be built belong with your own design and engineering consultants. Confirm the current position for your own site before relying on anything here.

The block that is smaller than the block

The parcel measured what the title said it measured. What it could actually carry was another matter entirely.

Several mature trees stood on the site, and the arboricultural assessment established each of them as regulated — which meant each carried a protection zone around it, within which what can be done is constrained. Running through the land was a service easement, registered on title, with tight limits on building over it. Neither constraint was hidden. Both were knowable on day one. And together they sliced the workable ground into fragments that bore very little resemblance to the neat rectangle on the certificate of title.

This is a recurring situation in Adelaide infill, and a routinely underestimated one. Site area is a number anyone can read. Developable area is a conclusion you have to assemble out of your consultants' advice and the interests registered on your title — and the gap between the two is where feasibility studies quietly go wrong. Owners who have not been through it tend to price the first number. The second is the one that governs the project.

Two constraints, two entirely different rulebooks

It is tempting to lump trees and easements together as "site restrictions" and move on. They behave nothing alike, and treating them as one category is how a scheme ends up being redrawn twice.

A regulated or significant tree is a planning matter. Whether a tree on your land falls into a protected category, how large a protection zone it carries, and what may or may not happen within that zone are all determined against the Code and the relevant regulations, informed by arboricultural evidence — we have set out the shape of that assessment separately in what regulated and significant trees mean for an SA subdivision. The practical consequence for planning is that, once established, the zone functions as an input to the layout rather than as something a persuasive submission moves around. It is scaled to the tree, which means two trees on the same site can constrain very differently — and what applies to the trees on your land is for your own arborist and planning consultant to establish, not for an article to assume.

An easement is a different kind of thing: a property right registered on the title in favour of somebody else, rather than a control created by the planning system. It can still bear on how a proposal is assessed, but the right itself comes from the title. Typically the authority or party holding it runs its own consent process for anything built over or near it, separate from the development application and with its own technical standards and timetable. What applies to a particular easement depends on its terms and its holder — which is a question for that holder and for your conveyancer or property lawyer, not one to assume from a general account. We have gone through that mechanic in what building over an SA Water easement actually involves. The risk is sequential. Holding a planning consent does not by itself resolve a separate consent that a registered interest may require, so a scheme that never anticipated the second one can find itself needing changes after the first is in hand. Whether that risk applies to your title is a question for the interest holder and your solicitor or conveyancer.

So the site carried two exclusions, governed by two bodies of rules, resolved by two different processes, on two different clocks. That is the real problem. Not either constraint on its own.

The expensive pattern: learning your site one piece at a time

On sites like this, the critical information almost always arrives piecemeal.

The concept comes back first, because it is the fastest thing to produce and the easiest thing to sell. Then the arborist's report lands and one of the protection zones turns out to be larger than assumed, so the scheme is redrawn. Then the easement holder's requirements arrive and a building footprint has to move off it, so the scheme is redrawn again. Then someone checks the driveway against the tree that is now closer to it than the earlier plan implied, and it is redrawn a third time.

Each loop costs consultant fees, but that is not the real damage. The real damage is that each redraw is a reaction. A scheme revised three times towards its constraints is not the same object as a scheme designed once around them — it accumulates compromises in the parts that were already settled, because nobody wants to reopen those. The dwellings get slightly worse in ways no single decision is responsible for. And every loop is time on a project that is carrying holding costs the whole while, which is a quieter cost than most owners price for and one we have set out separately in what a delay actually costs to hold.

The pattern is not caused by bad consultants. It is caused by nobody owning the order in which the site gets understood.

What was done instead: every exclusion on one plan, before concept design

The change here was one of sequence, and it was made before a single dwelling was drawn.

CPM assembled the full constraint picture up front — the arboricultural position on each tree and the protection zone it carried, the easement's registered extent and the holder's build-over requirements, and the other site facts that would bear on the layout — and brought them onto a single plan. Not a list in a report. One drawing showing what the consultants' advice and the registered interests left available to build on.

That plan then became the brief. The design team began concept design against that picture of the site on day one, with the fragments already defined. The masterplan was organised around the constraints once, rather than revised towards them three times. Coordinating that hand-off — making sure the arborist, the surveyor, the engineers and the design team were all working to the same picture of the site at the same moment — is the actual job, and it is the part that is invisible in the finished drawings. We have written about why that coordination sits upstream of good documentation in getting the engineering detail right before lodgement.

Note what CPM did not do. It did not design the townhouses; the design team did. It did not assess the trees; the arborist did. What it did was decide the order, hold the constraints in one place, and make sure nobody drew anything against a picture of the site that was already out of date.

Why a complete application is the whole strategy

When the application went in, it went in with the constraints already reconciled rather than explained away.

This matters more than it sounds. The relevant authority assesses what is in front of it against the Code. It is not a counterparty to be persuaded; it is an assessor doing a job, and the quality of the job it can do is bounded by the quality of the material it is given. An application that has already resolved its tree protection zones and already reflects the easement holder's requirements is an application that can be assessed on its merits. An application that leaves those questions open invites the authority to ask them — which is its proper function, and which is also how applications stall. How the stages fit together is set out in how the DA process works in South Australia.

The five townhouses were approved. The part worth noting about how the project ran is that the yield and the liveability of each home were worked on together at the front of the project, rather than the second being traded away late to protect the first.

What generalises, and what does not

The outcome does not generalise. Another site with regulated trees and an easement may support fewer dwellings, or a different form, or none — that depends on its own facts, its own zone, its own trees and its own easement, assessed by the relevant authority on its own merits. A result is not a method, and the two are easy to confuse.

What does generalise is narrower and more useful:

Find out what you are actually working with before you pay for a concept. Establishing the constraint picture is usually inexpensive relative to a design loop, so on a site carrying known constraints there is a strong case for buying it first. Whether that holds for your project depends on what the constraints are and what it costs to establish them.

Treat title-registered rights as a potential parallel approval track, not a footnote. Depending on their terms and who holds them, they can carry their own consent process on their own timetable — and where they do, the design has to anticipate that rather than discover it.

Make one party responsible for the sequence. Every consultant on a constrained site does their own scope well. The failures happen between scopes — which is exactly the gap a development manager exists to close, described in what a development manager actually does.

If you are looking at a block where the trees, an easement or an overlay are making the numbers look marginal, the question worth answering first is how much of the site is genuinely developable — not how many dwellings you would like it to hold. That question is the front end of property development feasibility. Start a conversation with us and we will tell you what we would need to establish before anyone starts drawing.