Auckland Unitary Plan: The Terraced House and Apartment Building Zone

The Terraced House and Apartment Building zone is one of the four residential zones within the Auckland Unitary Plan.

This zone, in particular, tends to be focused on metropolitan areas, town centres and close to public transport. It’s what’s called a high-intensity zone, in that the zone encourages apartments and terraced houses as a development typology.

The zone, however, comes with some limitations, and you as landowners and developers need to be aware of these limitations. One of the key limitations of this zone is that your land has to be the right size to be able to develop it, particularly if you’re looking for apartments.

The site size plays a key role in allowing you to build higher. The standard site size, i.e. those site sizes of around 700 square meters and rectangular in shape, make it very difficult to build apartments.

What you want when you’re looking to develop in this zone, particularly if you’re looking to do apartments, is a larger site, a site that’s more square in shape and is roughly between 1,200 to 1,600 square meters. This type of site allows you to build much higher, up to five storeys and gives you flexibility in terms of where the building needs to be located.

The other limitation of the site that you need to be aware of as a landowner and developer is that you can’t under-deliver on housing within this zone.

Council is very resistant to applicants presenting projects that are low in density, i.e. have low house numbers. They’re looking for you to develop terraces and apartments, hence the name of the zone. If you come into council with a low-density, single-house development, it’s likely they’ll resist it, but other than that, the zone itself is very flexible and does present significant opportunities.