Planning permits in City of Boroondara.

Boroondara is the most heritage-intensive municipality we work in, and it is not close. In the Camberwell Junction activity centre catchment alone there are around 4,500 heritage-listed properties — roughly 48% of that catchment sits under a Heritage Overlay.

If you are building in Boroondara, the first question is not what you want. It is what your property is graded, and what the precinct statement says. Everything else follows from that.

The overlays that matter in this municipality

Overlays are what quietly decide cost and programme. These are the ones that genuinely recur here — and what each one actually means for your drawings.

• Heritage Overlay — Extensive, and graded. Properties within precincts are individually assessed as Significant, Contributory or Non-contributory — and that grading, not the street, determines what you can do.
• Significant Landscape Overlay — Schedule 5 applies in defined areas.
• Design and Development Overlay — Multiple schedules, including DDO31, which is named on council's VicSmart eligibility list.
• Environmental Significance Overlay — Applies in defined areas.
• Special Building Overlay — Flood-related.

You can check which of these sit over your own title in about two minutes, free, before engaging anyone: search your address on the Victorian Government's planning property report. Send us the result and we can usually tell you whether a permit is likely from one conversation.

Local controls and quirks worth knowing

• Heritage grading is the whole conversation. Significant, Contributory or Non-contributory — each carries different latitude. A Non-contributory property in a heritage precinct is a very different project to a Significant one next door.
• Neighbourhood Character Precincts have individual Precinct Statements under Clause 15.01-5L of the Boroondara Planning Scheme. Like Frankston, this is precinct-level, not municipality-level.
• Council publishes a free self-check tool called myLot for testing whether a permit is required. Worth five minutes before engaging anybody.
• State-driven Activity Centre Program controls were introduced for Hawthorn, Glenferrie, Auburn and Kew Junction in 2026 — this is a live, evolving policy area rather than settled ground.
• Council has a dedicated page for the Townhouse and Low-Rise Code, the state's deemed-to-comply pathway.

Timing, fees and process

• VicSmart: processed within 10 days. Council will contact you within 5 business days if further information is needed.
• Pre-application meeting fees: $319 minor, $744 major. Written planning advice: $212.25.
• The Metropolitan Planning Levy threshold is $1,344,000 of works — that is a State Revenue Office levy, not a council fee.

Figures above are council-published at the time of writing and change — treat them as orientation, not gospel, and confirm current fees and requirements with council. We keep across them, but the council's own page is always the authority.

How we prepare a submission here

The way to move quickly through planning is not to make the drawings prettier — it is to make them answerable. Most delays are not design disputes; they are requests for further information, which stop the statutory clock until you respond.

So we start with the planning property report, establish the zone and overlays before design, get a feature and level survey underneath it, test the built form against the local character controls that apply to your precinct, and then assemble a submission that responds to each relevant ResCode standard — Clause 54 for a single dwelling, Clause 55 for two or more — rather than asserting compliance and hoping.

Read more on what a town planning set contains, multi-dwelling work under Clause 55, or the building permit stage that follows.

Suburbs we cover in City of Boroondara

Ashburton, Balwyn, Balwyn North, Camberwell, Canterbury, Deepdene, Hawthorn, Hawthorn East, Kew, Kew East and Mont Albert, plus parts of Burwood, Glen Iris and Surrey Hills.

Suburbs we have built in, with their own local detail: Kew East · Surrey Hills · Camberwell.

Working somewhere else? See all our service areas, or send us your address and we will tell you which council and controls apply.