'Get it right before you build': What Wollongong's planners and housing experts are saying about duplicate approvals stalling the city's development pipeline

Wollongong City Council's development assessment unit is sitting on a backlog of at least 340 applications, and a chunk of the delay traces back to something deceptively mundane: uploaded images in planning submissions that don't match the proposal on the page. Duplicate floor plans, recycled site photos from other addresses, and mismatched elevation drawings are forcing assessors to pause files and chase down applicants — a problem that council officers described to The Daily Wollongong this week as 'manageable but maddening.'

The timing is lousy. NSW is under a state government directive to deliver 377,000 new homes across Greater Sydney and adjacent regions by 2029, with Wollongong's share sitting at roughly 11,500 dwellings under the Illawarra Shoalhaven Regional Housing Strategy. Premier Chris Minns, who told his own party at the state conference this weekend that Labor faces a steep climb to hold government, has staked part of that argument on a housing delivery record. Every stalled DA in Crown Street or Fairy Meadow counts against that tally.

Peter Nguyen, a registered building certifier who operates out of an office on Keira Street in the CBD, has lodged more than 60 applications through the NSW Planning Portal in the past 12 months. He says the duplicate-image problem is systemic, not accidental. 'The portal doesn't flag you when you upload a file with the same name as a previous document,' he told this reporter. 'So someone working across three or four jobs on a Friday afternoon can attach the wrong elevation set and not know until an assessor calls them two weeks later.' His estimate: each corrective cycle adds between eight and 14 business days to a typical residential DA.

Council, university and industry voices on fixing the system

The University of Wollongong's Smart Infrastructure Facility on Northfields Avenue has been watching the problem from a research angle. A team there working on digital twin applications for the built environment flagged as early as March 2026 that automated document-validation tools — already used in commercial construction procurement in Singapore and the Netherlands — could catch mismatched metadata before a file ever reaches an assessor's desk. The university has not yet signed a formal agreement with council, but conversations are underway, according to sources familiar with the discussions.

The Property Council of Australia's Illawarra chapter, which represents developers with projects from the Port Kembla renewal precinct up through Corrimal, sent a submission to Wollongong City Council in May arguing that image-validation errors were contributing to a 22 per cent increase in median DA processing times compared with the same period in 2024. The council's own quarterly planning report, tabled in June, put the median time for a residential determination at 67 days — well above the 40-day benchmark set under the Environmental Planning and Assessment Act 1979.

Wollongong City Council's manager of development and building, in a written response to questions from this newspaper, said the organisation was piloting a pre-lodgement checklist update specifically targeting document accuracy, with a rollout planned for August 2026. The checklist will require applicants to confirm, via a declaration, that every uploaded image corresponds to the specific site address on the application form. Council is also in talks with the Department of Planning about whether the NSW Planning Portal's own upload interface could be modified to cross-reference document titles against the cadastral lot number.

What applicants and owners should do now

For anyone with a DA in the queue — or about to lodge one — the advice from practitioners is consistent. Sarah Okafor, a town planner based in Fairy Meadow who handles mid-density infill projects across the Illawarra, recommends treating image auditing as its own step in the submission process. 'Print your document list, sit next to your site photos, and physically verify each file before you hit upload,' she said. 'It sounds basic, but the portal gives you no warning.'

Council's pre-lodgement meeting service — bookable through the Wollongong City Council website with a standard $330 fee for residential applications — offers a direct channel to raise document concerns before a formal submission goes in. With the August checklist update still weeks away and the backlog already at 340 files, applicants who lodge clean, verified packages right now stand the best chance of hitting the front of an overstretched queue.