Suburb guide · 2234
Can I build a duplex or granny flat in Menai?
Menai sits in Sutherland Shire Council's area under Sutherland Shire Local Environmental Plan 2015. We ran 25 real Menai addresses through the checker: the typical block is 601 m² with 17.3 m of frontage, 18 of the 25 could add a granny flat, and 5 could carry two separate homes today.
Thinking of building or selling in Menai?
Tell us what you have in mind and we'll read your block and come back to you within a day. Free, no obligation.
The typical Menai block
The middle block of the 25 we checked is 601 m² with 17.3 m of street frontage. The smallest was 279 m² and the largest 854 m². Zones in the sample: R2 (14), C4 (11).
The 25 blocks we checked, by land size.
What homes sell for in postcode 2234
Median sale prices for the whole of postcode 2234, January to March 2026. These cover every suburb sharing the postcode, not Menai alone, and they are not a value for any one block.
- Houses: $1.88m (59 sales)
- Units and apartments: $1.21m (11 to 30 sales, a small sample)
Source: NSW Government Rent and Sales Report (Department of Communities and Justice), sales tables by postcode, NSW Government. Updated each quarter.
A granny flat
18 of the 25 blocks we checked could take one. Sutherland Shire LEP cl 5.4(9) — the greater of 60 m² or 5% 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 Menai
5 of the 25 blocks we checked could carry two or more separate homes today.
Under Sutherland Shire Local Environmental Plan 2015 a dual occupancy needs 600 m² — this LEP sets no frontage minimum, so Council's DCP governs width.
Only 5 of the 25 blocks we checked were ordinary R2 land outside the Low and Mid-Rise area, which is too few to read anything into — most of Menai in our sample was zoned or mapped some other way.
Low and Mid-Rise
11 of the 25 blocks sat inside the state Low and Mid-Rise area — within about an 800 m walk of a listed centre or station. Inside it the Housing SEPP overrides the LEP minimums: a dual occupancy on 450 m² with a 12 m frontage, terraces on 500 m² / 18 m, townhouses on 600 m² / 12 m and a manor house on 500 m² / 12 m, up to 9.5 m. That is what lifts the two-homes figure above; a block one street outside the line gets the LEP figure instead.
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.
How we got these numbers
We took 25 real Menai 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 Menai. 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.