Celsius completes first SDA project with Rocky Bay
This month we were both excited and humbled to attend the official opening and house warming of East Victoria Park’s latest Specialist Disability Accommodation (SDA) properties, built as a joint venture between Shift Accessible Homes, Rocky Bay and Celsius.
The development features eight villas in a boutique complex, four as rentals for the general public and four as new homes for Rocky Bay Clients. We began our discussion with Rocky Bay a few years ago and were incredibly pleased to progress these discussions into a joint venture that culminated in the delivery of 125 Bank Street East Victoria Park. We greatly appreciate the executive and board of Rocky Bay placing their trust in Celsius to firstly deliver and now retain collectively, this built to rent development for many years to come.
Celsius is vertically integrated offering both property and facility management in addition to our development, sales and finance divisions and our Property Management team look forward to looking after the front four villas and the complex whilst Shift takes care of the SDA homes. Retaining both ownership and management of the entire complex gives us an opportunity to ensure a harmonious complex enjoyed by all residents.
Built by Northerly Group I’d like to acknowledge the significant efforts of Michael Lawson and his team in battling incredibly trying construction conditions to deliver the project to a high standard. Our development Partner, Travis Mckenzie has also worked tirelessly, with Sheldon Vincent by his side, to bring this development to life. It is important to also acknowledge the Van Helvoort Family who are long term supporters of Celsius and we greatly value the ongoing relationship.
SDA offers a new standard of living for people with disability and these homes push those benchmarks even further with clever design and accessible features including state of the art technology.
The front four villas were placed on the rental market a couple of weeks ago and the demand far exceeded our expectations with 306 enquiries, 36 inspections, 16 applications and all four villas leased to lovely tenants. It is very clear there is a very significant lack of new, quality homes entering the rental market with the majority of new homes sold to Owner Occupiers in the past few years. We saw this first hand when selling the Vic Quarter apartments in Victoria Park on behalf of the Fowler Group, where 93 of the 105 apartments sold to Owner Occupiers. It is for this reason Celsius has entered the built to rent arena securing a significant land holding off Development WA in Montario Quarter Shenton Park. We are presently reviewing 3 other sites suitable for BTR projects in locations ideally suited to where tenants want to live.
We understand there is a chronic shortage of housing in Perth right now with build cost escalation and tightening lending conditions making it difficult for the market to respond with much needed new supply. As interstate and overseas migration return to normal levels pressure on the rental market will only continue to build with the vacancy rate already sitting at 0.6%. We appreciate the Government is doing all they can to assist through planning, land releases and any other means. With cost of living pressures rising across the board, a collaborative approach will be required between private enterprise, private equity and both the State and Federal Governments to deliver new supply into the market.
If you have any queries or ideas with respect to either built to rent or SDA housing please feel free to touch base and as always we will help however we can.
All the very best,
