Live Near a Train Station? TOD Rezoning May Have Changed What Your Land Is Worth

A developer's letter lands in the mailbox of a modest three-bedroom house near a suburban station. The owner assumes it's the usual junk, the same we-buy-houses flyer everyone gets, and bins it. What they've actually thrown away is the first sign that the ground under their home was rezoned, and that a builder somewhere has already run the numbers on their block and liked what they saw.

This is happening across NSW right now because of two state planning programs aimed at putting more homes near transport. If you live near a train station or a town centre, there's a real chance the rules governing your land changed without you doing anything, and without much of a knock on the door to tell you. We develop these sites, so we spend our days looking at exactly which blocks moved. Here's what's going on.

The TOD program: six storeys within 400 metres

The Transport Oriented Development program targets land within roughly 400 metres of a set of specific stations. Inside that ring, the planning controls were lifted to allow residential flat buildings and shop-top housing up to around six storeys, with extra height or floor space available where a project includes affordable housing.

Stations named under the TOD program include the likes of Adamstown, Corrimal, Gordon, Killara and Kogarah, among others. The list matters because the effect is dramatic and local. A house that could previously support one dwelling, or maybe a dual occupancy, might sit on land where a developer can now put an apartment building. That is not a small change to what the land is worth. It's a step change, and it's why the letters arrive.

Accelerated precincts: bigger again

Alongside the 400-metre TOD stations sits a smaller set of accelerated precincts, places the government singled out for state-led rezoning to higher density across a wider radius, sometimes out to around 1,200 metres. These include Hornsby, Macquarie Park, Kellyville, Bella Vista, Bankstown, Crows Nest and Homebush.

In these precincts the uplift is larger and the affected area is bigger, so more homes fall inside the ring and the permitted scale runs higher. If you own in one of these, the gap between what your property is worth as a house and what it's worth as a development site can be very wide indeed. This is precisely the situation where the way a developer values your land diverges completely from what a real estate agent will tell you, because the agent is pricing a house and the developer is pricing an apartment project.

The Low and Mid-Rise policy: 800 metres around 171 centres

The third and broadest program is the Low and Mid-Rise Housing policy. Its second stage commenced on 28 February 2025 and it reaches within 800 metres walking distance of 171 stations and town centres across Greater Sydney, the Central Coast, the Illawarra and Shoalhaven, and the Hunter.

Within those 800-metre bands the policy permits a graduated menu of housing depending on how close you are: terraces, townhouses, manor houses, and three to six storey residential flat buildings in the closer bands. It was amended in June 2025 and state-led rezonings have kept rolling through into 2026, with further centres like Edgecliff and Woollahra coming through. The upshot is that a huge number of ordinary blocks, many of them in the R2 low-density areas where dual occupancy also became permissible, now sit inside a walking-distance ring that allows more than the single house standing on them today.

Why the developer letters keep coming

Developers run mapping over these precincts the moment they're gazetted. They can see, sometimes before the owners do, which individual lots now support a bigger project and which combinations of adjoining lots could be amalgamated into something larger still. A block on its own might support a townhouse project; the same block combined with the two beside it might support a flat building. That's why owners in these rings get approached, and why neighbours sometimes get approached by the same buyer at the same time.

None of that makes the first offer a good one. An early, unsolicited offer is usually pitched off a conservative read of what the site can do, and it's betting you don't know your land was rezoned. The letter is a signal that your land has value you may not have priced. It is not a valuation you should trust.

How to check whether you're in a ring

You don't have to wait for a letter. The NSW Planning Portal has a spatial viewer where you can enter your address and see the planning controls that apply to your land: the zone, the height and floor space limits, and the overlays. If a rezoning has lifted your permitted height or density, that's where it shows up. It's worth cross-checking your distance to the nearest station or town centre against the programs above, because a hundred metres can be the difference between sitting inside a ring and sitting just outside it.

If the viewer shows controls that look far more generous than the house next door would suggest, that's your cue to get a proper feasibility done rather than guess. The numbers on a rezoned site are not intuitive, and they're easy to under- or over-read from the raw controls alone.

Sell, or share in the upside

Say you check, and you're in. Your land supports considerably more than the house on it. Now what?

Broadly, you have two good routes and one poor one. The poor one is taking the first developer offer that lands, because it's almost certainly pitched below what the site is worth to someone pricing it properly.

The first good route is selling to a developer, but doing it as an informed seller who knows the site's development value and can judge whether an offer is fair or a lowball. A rezoned site sold well can clear far more than the same house sold as a house.

The second good route, and often the more lucrative one, is not selling the uplift at all but sharing in it. In a joint venture you contribute the land and a developer partner funds and builds the project, and you take an agreed share of the finished profit. On a site that's just been rezoned to allow real density, that share can beat today's sale price by a wide margin, because you're capturing the uplift instead of handing it to the buyer. It takes longer and you carry some project risk, but for owners who aren't in a hurry, it's frequently where the biggest number lives.

The decision between them turns on your timeline, your appetite for risk, and one figure above all: what your land is genuinely worth now that the rules have changed.

That figure is what PropertyThrive works out for you. We check what your block was rezoned to allow, run the full feasibility on it, and show you the real numbers for selling versus partnering, whether or not you ever work with us. It's free and there's no obligation attached. Book a free assessment and you'll have your answer within 24 hours.