What is a Dual Occupancy Home

What is a dual occupancy home will depend on the local government area you are located in. Generally, a dual occupancy home is defined as two dwellings on one title of land. That dual occupancy home can either be detached or attached to each other.

Colin Fragar, our founder and CEO, goes through the need to know fundamentals of what is a dual occupancy home.

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Or for those that prefer to read, here is a transcript of the video…

Hi everybody, Colin Fragar, CEO of Council Approval Group.

I would love to share with you one of my favourite types of property investment and that is a dual occupancy. And specifically, I want to answer the common question, What is a Dual Occupancy Home?

What is a Dual Occupancy Home?

So dual occupancy isn’t really a common day language that we use. We use words like duplex or townhouse or subdivision, but a dual occupancy is a town planning term.

A Dual Occupancy is usually defined as two properties on one title, either attached or detached.

If you drive down the street and pull up at a house with a common wall in between may certainly be a dual occupancy. However, there are other types of dual occupancies. (As an aside I actually think that it’s always the best use of a site to put this style of dual occupancy on a property).

Attached Dual Occupancy Homes

I want to show you on my notepad the different types of dual occupancy. First of all, we talked about an attached dual occupancy. So imagine you got the street down here and you pull up in your car. The first one we talked about is where there is a common wall and you’ve got two houses that are attached. That is an attached dual occupancy.

You can also have another type of an attached dual occupancy where it runs with a common wall again and there’s your street there. Some tricks and tips on this, if you are doing an attached dual occupancy, see if you can retain the existing dwelling. I promise you, you will literally save hundreds of thousands of dollars. In my experience, based on the ones that I’ve done, you save because you don’t have to rebuild. It’s effectively $300,000 or $400,000 for another dwelling.

So if you can keep an existing dwelling, here’s a trick that I often do with Attached Dual Occupancy, and I’ve done this for thousands of clients, including for myself. If you’ve got an existing dwelling, and you’ve got the street here and you’ve got the house like this, and you’ve got the carport. So often the carport is like this, you remove the carport, you put it behind, and often you can attach depending on the local government area that you’re in, you can attach a carport, and that becomes an attached Dual Occupancy.

So you don’t need that common wall. If you want a little bit more separation, you have cars going coming and going from there. So that is attached to dual occupancies.

Detached Dual Occupancy Home

Okay, second question, what is a Detached Dual Occupancy? A detached Dual Occupancy, as you probably guessed, is detached. So, I like this one for other reasons, which we’ll go into in other videos. So please make sure you watch them particularly Dual Occupancy subdivision. We’ve got some great videos on that.

But imagine you’ve got an existing house, you can have a detached Dual Occupancy. And that is of course not joined together.

A Dual Occupancy is a great investment strategy. If you would like to know more, there’s so much more for us to talk about than in just this video. So make sure you look at the other videos. Alternatively, make sure you get your Council Approval Group guide, which you can get available from our website for free and it goes into the strategy in more depth.

And finally, if you do have a site that you’re ready to start having a conversation with somebody about, please talk to the Council Approval Group. Book in for a consult, for 30-minute complimentary consultation to talk about your property and what you want to achieve.

Thanks for watching and see you in the next video.