Suburb guide · 2104
Can I build a duplex or granny flat in Bayview?
Bayview sits in Northern Beaches Council's area under Pittwater Local Environmental Plan 2014. We ran 25 real Bayview addresses through the checker: the typical block is 868 m² with 24.8 m of frontage, 19 of the 25 could add a granny flat, and 3 could carry two separate homes today.
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The typical Bayview block
The middle block of the 25 we checked is 868 m² with 24.8 m of street frontage. The smallest was 595 m² and the largest 20,125 m². Zones in the sample: R2 (11), C4 (9), R5 (4), RU2 (1).
The 25 blocks we checked, by land size.
A granny flat
19 of the 25 blocks we checked could take one. Pittwater LEP cl 5.4(9) — the greater of 60 m² or 25% 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 Bayview
3 of the 25 blocks we checked could carry two or more separate homes today.
Under Pittwater Local Environmental Plan 2014 a dual occupancy needs 800 m² — this LEP sets no frontage minimum, so Council's DCP governs width.
Of the 11 ordinary R2 blocks in our sample sitting outside the Low and Mid-Rise area, 3 had the 800 m². There is no LEP frontage test to pass here, but Council's DCP still judges width, setbacks and private open space, so clearing the area alone does not settle it.
Low and Mid-Rise
None of the 25 blocks we checked fell inside the state Low and Mid-Rise area, so in this part of Bayview the LEP minimums are what count. The boundary is a walking distance from a listed centre, so it can cut through a suburb — the checker reads which side of it your own address sits on.
What else turned up
5 of 25 were on bushfire-prone land. 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. Northern Beaches has no flood layer on the Planning Portal, so flood is checked against Council’s own study by hand.
How we got these numbers
We took 25 real Bayview 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 25 blocks we checked" rather than a figure for every block in Bayview. 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.