Bondi Junction's Old Telstra Exchange Was Approved With a $1.8m Affordable Housing Condition. The Argument Over It Ended a Year Earlier.
Seven dwellings, a $7.48 million build, and a contribution equal to almost a quarter of the cost of works. The number was set at rezoning, not at the panel, and the owner's attempt to remove it went to the Independent Planning Commission and lost.
The site
50 Botany Street, Bondi Junction was a Telstra telephone exchange, zoned SP2 Infrastructure where housing is not permitted, part of it carrying a heritage listing for a lattice communications tower since demolished. Bondi Exchange Pty Ltd bought the site from Telstra in 2023.
Getting from an exchange to seven dwellings took three decisions, by three different bodies, over a little more than two years. The one that set the price came first.
Step one: rezoning, and a rate
In January 2024 the owner, through Willowtree Planning, lodged a planning proposal to rezone the site from SP2 to R3 Medium Density Residential, remove the redundant heritage listing and set a minimum lot size. Waverley Council supported it in August 2024, and the Department of Planning, Housing and Infrastructure issued a Gateway determination in October 2024 allowing it to proceed.
The proposal as it went to Gateway carried an extra local provision: an affordable housing contribution for the site, at a rate of 9.27% of gross floor area.
Waverley collects these two ways. New residential flat buildings, shop-top housing and multi-dwelling developments pay 1% of gross floor area under clause 6.17 of the Waverley LEP. Sites gaining development uplift through a planning proposal can be levied at a site-specific rate under clause 6.18, targeted at up to 10%, and a change from a non-residential zone to a residential one counts as uplift.
Step two: the review
The owner objected. In November 2024 it asked for the Gateway determination to be reviewed and the affordable housing provision removed altogether, arguing that any rate would make the development financially unviable. The Department referred the request to the Independent Planning Commission.
The Commission's advice, issued on 10 July 2025, went against the owner. It noted that the owner's own feasibility study found the project unviable at 10%, 5% or 0%, while the owner was at the same time offering $100,000 through a voluntary planning agreement on top of the standard 1% levy. That contradiction, the Commission said, limited the weight the valuation could bear. It found the mechanism appropriate, observed that financial objections would have been better raised while the policy was being made, and advised that the determination stand unchanged.
Step three: the DA
DA-578/2025 was lodged on 12 November 2025: demolition of the exchange building and construction of seven two-storey terrace-style dwellings with attics over a basement car park, designed by Smith & Tzannes, at an estimated cost of $7,480,482. It went to the Waverley Local Planning Panel for two reasons. It sought a 17.4% departure from the floor space ratio standard, which the assessing officers attributed entirely to floor space inside the attic roof forms, and it drew ten submissions.
On 22 April 2026, 161 days after lodgement, the panel approved it unanimously, in line with the officer's recommendation. Four objectors and two representatives of the applicant addressed it. The resolution lists three conditions the panel included or modified. Two protect trees. The third is condition 7: an affordable housing contribution of $1,816,271.10, payable before any occupation certificate is issued.
What the assessment was actually about
Our compliance record for this application holds seven departures from Waverley's development control plan, and every one was resolved rather than refused. Ceiling heights of 2.65 metres against a 2.7 metre minimum, conditioned upward. Communal open space at 8% against a 15% requirement, accepted because each dwelling has at least 34 square metres of private open space. A deep soil shortfall, offset by retaining fifteen mature trees. Rear setback, excavation, fencing and storage, each conditioned or explained.
That is what a contested application looks like at panel stage: an argument about design detail and one development standard. The panel's record names a single principal issue, floor space ratio, and the referral reason names the same thing. Willowtree Planning's public account of the approval describes the clause 4.6 variation as a key element of its work, and says the scheme drew praise from Waverley's Design Excellence Advisory Panel.
None of it touched the contribution. The panel added condition 7 unanimously, as a figure to be applied rather than a question to be argued.
The arithmetic
The condition shows its working. It is calculated on 933 square metres of market residential floor space. At 9.27%, that is 86.49 square metres. At Waverley's published rate for Bondi Junction of $21,000 per square metre, it comes to $1,816,271.10, to the cent.
Against the project, that is 24.3% of the estimated cost of works, or roughly $259,000 for each of the seven dwellings. On the same floor space and rate, the standard 1% levy would have been about $196,000.
The same panel's record supplies the comparison. In December 2024 it approved 100–102 Ramsgate Avenue, Bondi Beach, at an almost identical $7,008,880, carrying a contribution of $171,846 under the 1% clause. Across the five new consents in our Waverley panel record whose conditions cite clause 6.17, the contribution runs between 2.1% and 5.7% of the cost of works. 50 Botany Street is 24.3%, the largest in a record that runs from 2017. The next largest is $869,903.
What to take from it
By the time DA-578/2025 was lodged, the rate had been fixed at rezoning, confirmed at Gateway, exhibited, and defended before the Commission. The panel's job was to apply it.
That is the practical lesson, and the Commission stated it directly: the time to contest a site-specific affordable housing rate is while the planning proposal and the policy behind it are being made, not at DA stage. For a Waverley site moving from a non-residential zone into a residential one, the contribution is a rezoning-stage cost, and it belongs in the feasibility model from the first day. Here the difference between the 1% levy and the rate that applied was roughly $1.6 million.
One file is not a pattern. This is, as far as our record shows, the only consent so far to carry a clause 6.18 rate, and a single valuation dispute says nothing about whether 9.27% is right. What it does show is where the number was decided, and that it was not in the room where most applicants expect the argument to happen.
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