Know if your project stacks up before you spend real money

You have a block, an idea, and a nagging question

Maybe it is a duplex on an old subdivision. A granny flat behind the family home. Or a block you have not bought yet that seems suspiciously cheap. The question is always the same. Can I actually build this here?

Most people answer it the expensive way. They commission a design, fall in love with it, and then discover the sewer main, the flood overlay or the setback that should have been found in week one. The design gets redrawn, the budget takes the hit, and sometimes the project quietly dies with thousands already spent.

There is a cheaper order of operations: find the blockers first, design second.

What a feasibility study gives you

We offer three levels, and each one includes everything below it.

Quick Check, $1,100. We run your block through Dial Before You Dig, the NSW Planning Portal, the land valuers website and Central Coast Council mapping, then flag every issue we find in a written summary. What that gives you is an early warning system. Easements, zoning conflicts, flood and bushfire overlays and service mains show up here, before they can ambush your project.

Quick Check + Site Plan, $2,200. Everything above, plus a measured site plan showing the legal setbacks, the building envelope and an indicative outline of where a future building could sit. This is the clearest way to answer the real question, which is not "can I build?" but "what can I fit?" It is the study most people choose.

Feasibility Plans, $5,500. Everything above, plus rough floor plans showing how the rooms could sit inside that envelope. This is the version you take to builders for early pricing, to your lender, or to council for a pre lodgement conversation. It turns a hunch into a documented, testable proposal.

Every study is done by us personally. Shea is a NSW Registered Architect (registration 9748) with a Master of Architecture, and the same person who would design the project if it goes ahead. So the study is not a box ticking report. It is the first hour of design thinking, applied to your block.

This is for you if

• You own a Central Coast block and want to know what it can hold before commissioning design work.
• You are about to buy land and want the blockers found before exchange, not after. Our land buying checklist covers what to look for; the study does the looking for you.
• You are weighing a duplex or dual occupancy and need to know if the numbers stack up on this specific block.

If you have already had plans drawn and want them reviewed instead, that is a different conversation. Get in touch and we will point you the right way.

Why we check before we draw

We have seen what happens when feasibility is skipped, and we have seen what happens when it is done well. When we designed the Lakeview seniors living apartments at Long Jetty, careful feasibility work on floor space ratio found room for twenty more apartments than the client thought the site could hold. The same discipline that finds blockers also finds opportunities.

That is the honest pitch for a feasibility study. Sometimes it saves you from a bad block. Sometimes it shows you the block is better than you thought. Either way you decide with facts instead of hope. We would rather tell you a hard truth for $1,100 than a comfortable one for $50,000, and we wrote about that approach in how to assess feasibility and before you build on the Central Coast.

How it works

1. Choose your study below and tell us about the block through the short form.
2. We run the research and, for the larger studies, prepare the drawings.
3. You receive the written summary and drawings, and we are available to talk them through.
4. If you go ahead with a project, the study becomes the foundation for the design brief. Nothing is wasted.

No lock in, no obligation to continue, and no pressure. The study is a complete piece of work on its own.