Suburb guide · 2515
Can I build a duplex or granny flat in Scarborough?
Scarborough sits in Wollongong City Council's area under Wollongong Local Environmental Plan 2009. We ran 25 real Scarborough addresses through the checker: the typical block is 517 m² with 13.1 m of frontage, 16 of the 25 could add a granny flat, and 17 could carry two separate homes today.
Thinking of building or selling in Scarborough?
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 Scarborough block
The middle block of the 25 we checked is 517 m² with 13.1 m of street frontage. The smallest was 327 m² and the largest 232,384 m². Zones in the sample: R2 (17), C4 (7), C3 (1).
The 25 blocks we checked, by land size.
What homes sell for in postcode 2515
Median sale prices for the whole of postcode 2515, January to March 2026. These cover every suburb sharing the postcode, not Scarborough alone, and they are not a value for any one block.
- Houses: $2.20m (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
16 of the 25 blocks we checked could take one. Wollongong LEP cl 5.4(9) — the greater of 60 m² or 67% 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 Scarborough
17 of the 25 blocks we checked could carry two or more separate homes today.
Wollongong LEP sets no minimum lot size or frontage for a dual occupancy — permitted with consent in R2 and judged on Council's DCP (which has its own site-area tests); the Lot Size Map governs any split into two titles
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 Scarborough 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
22 of 25 were on bushfire-prone land; 5 of 25 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 25 real Scarborough 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 Scarborough. 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.