Harley Dykstra: town planning in Albany WA
We are a land development consultancy of town planners, surveyors and project managers, and our Great Southern office is at 31 Albany Highway, Albany. We handle town planning in Albany and across the region, from the first look at whether a site can be developed through to the approvals that let it happen. Denmark clients are seen by appointment. Our other offices are at Forrestdale for Perth-Peel and Bunbury for the South West, but the Great Southern is where the firm started.
Seventy years of land development work, starting in the Great Southern
Harley Dykstra was established in 1954 by Eric Harley here in the Great Southern, and merged with Dykstra Planning in 2014 to become the firm you deal with today. That gives us more than seventy years of supporting land development and infrastructure projects across Western Australia. We are certified to ISO 9001 and ISO 45001, and we hold memberships with the UDIA, Master Builders and regional chambers of commerce.
Our executive directors are Sebastian Bolhuis, a licensed surveyor with over 30 years in land development who is from Albany and oversees the Perth, Albany and Bunbury offices, and Henry Dykstra, a town planner with over 25 years in planning and land development. Dale Johnson, a licensed surveyor who joined as a graduate in 1995, is our third director. Our clients include land developers, government agencies and mining corporations, among them Fulton Hogan, Western Power, Main Roads Western Australia, Iluka Resources and Development WA.
The town planning services we provide
What our planners do
- Planning investigations: the preliminary work that establishes what a site can realistically support before money is committed.
- Rezoning of land: changing the classification of land so a proposed use becomes possible.
- Structure plans: the planning framework that sets out how a larger area will be developed.
- Subdivision approvals: preparing and lodging applications with the Western Australian Planning Commission.
- Development approvals: guiding a proposal through the local and state approval process.
Our team has a thorough understanding of the planning frameworks and policy requirements that a development project has to answer to. Because we sit alongside land surveyors, engineering surveyors and project managers in the same organisation, we can test whether a plan is practical before it goes anywhere near a lodgement, which is what gives a proposal a realistic prospect of approval.
Working through the approvals process
Any subdivision of land in Western Australia needs approval from the Western Australian Planning Commission before it can be implemented and new titles created. Applications have to follow the format the Commission stipulates and address design, traffic, servicing and bushfire requirements. A decision commonly takes at least three months. We prepare applications that respond to the opportunities and constraints of the land while keeping the end product marketable, and our planners work directly with state and local government planners to negotiate the conditions attached to an approval. We keep clients across changes to legislation and regulation, and we report back as a project moves rather than leaving people to wonder.
Albany projects and how to reach our office
Recent Great Southern work includes Little Grove, on the southern side of Albany overlooking the city, where a single long residential lot was prepared for subdivision into 16 residential lots. At Brooks Garden, behind Woolworths and near an over-55s development, we renewed planning approvals that had expired and then carried the project through subdivision implementation and construction surveying, for around 36 residential lots. For AUSPAN we delivered the planning for a new CJD Equipment facility in Albany, first amalgamating five lots into a single title and then running the development application for a workshop, warehouse and office complex. That project ran roughly 18 to 20 months through amalgamation and approval, took in waste, traffic and acoustic assessments and a crossover issue on Chester Pass Road that needed Main Roads Western Australia at the table, and is now under construction.
The Great Southern office is on (08) 9844 5100 and the firm’s general email is [email protected]. If you have a block you are thinking about, ring the Albany office and we will tell you what the planning framework allows.