Why Does it Take so Long? Apartment Development Timelines. Evidence from Melbourne, Australia

Australia is experiencing a housing supply crisis. In response, the federal government has set an ambitious target of delivering 1.2 million new homes over five years, underpinned by a significant expansion in apartment construction. This paper adopts a novel empirical approach to assessing apartment development timelines across three apartment building typologies, disaggregating development timeline total duration into planning approval, presales and construction phases. Drawing on data from an online project sales platform and other publicly available sources, the study analyses 37 apartment projects completed in Melbourne, Australia between 2015 and 2023. Findings reveal that, irrespective of scale, apartment developments typically require five years from planning application to completion. Notably, smaller medium-density projects take as long as large inner-city towers, highlighting systemic inefficiencies in small-scale delivery and challenging assumptions that project size determines delivery speed. This is the first study to quantify the time consumed by the presales process, an often-overlooked stage between planning approval and construction start. The findings offer critical insights for policymakers advocating medium-density solutions to Australia’s housing crisis, often without distinguishing between medium and high-density delivery dynamics.