Suburb guide · 2535
Can I build a duplex or granny flat in Back Forest?
Most of Back Forest is land this tool does not answer for. 22 of the 22 blocks we checked sit in rural, conservation, industrial or special-purpose zones rather than a residential one, and Block Checker covers residential zones only. The counts below are what it could assess — they are not a finding that nothing can be built. For land like this, a planner reads the LEP for the zone directly.
Back Forest sits in Shoalhaven City Council's area under Shoalhaven Local Environmental Plan 2014. We ran 22 real Back Forest addresses through the checker: the typical block is 23,036 m² with 141 m of frontage. Most of them are not residential land, so see the note below before reading the counts.
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The typical Back Forest block
The middle block of the 22 we checked is 23,036 m² with 141 m of street frontage. The smallest was 1,992 m² and the largest 542,837 m². Zones in the sample: RU1 (21), C3 (1).
The 22 blocks we checked, by land size.
What homes sell for in postcode 2535
Median sale prices for the whole of postcode 2535, January to March 2026. These cover every suburb sharing the postcode, not Back Forest alone, and they are not a value for any one block.
- Houses: $1.62m (11 to 30 sales, a small sample)
- Units and apartments: not published (10 or fewer sales this quarter)
Source: NSW Government Rent and Sales Report (Department of Communities and Justice), sales tables by postcode, NSW Government. Updated each quarter.
A granny flat
0 of the 22 blocks we checked could take one. Shoalhaven LEP cl 5.4(9) — the greater of 60 m² or 60% of the house’s total floor area, parking excluded. Separately, the state Housing SEPP allows a granny flat of up to 60 m² through the ten-day complying-development route on a lot of 450 m² or more with a 12 m frontage, where the land is not flood, bushfire or heritage constrained.
Dual occupancy (duplex) rules in Back Forest
0 of the 22 blocks we checked could carry two or more separate homes today.
Shoalhaven LEP sets no minimum lot size or frontage for a dual occupancy in R2 — permitted with consent and judged on Council's DCP; the Lot Size Map governs any split into two titles; outside the state Low and Mid-Rise area
What else turned up
22 of 22 were on bushfire-prone land; 2 of 22 carried a heritage listing or conservation area. Any of those takes a block out of the fast-track routes and into a full DA, so it changes the answer more than the lot size does.
How we got these numbers
We took 22 real Back Forest street addresses from the NSW geocoder and ran every one through the same engine this site runs for you, reading the planning controls live. Nothing here is modelled or estimated.
It is a sample, not a census. The addresses are a spread across what the geocoder returns, so treat these as "of the 22 blocks we checked" rather than a figure for every block in Back Forest. Your own block is the only one that answers for itself — that is what the box on the right is for.
Enter the address — lot, frontage, zone, constraints and what it can carry.