Karam Group lodges 81-apartment tower at Oban Lane, Southport

Karam Group has filed a material change of use application for an 81-apartment tower at 6 Oban Lane, Southport, Queensland, within the Southport Priority Development Area. The Urban Developer reported the filing on 8 October 2026, describing a 13-storey building on a 1,214 sqm site spanning two adjoining lots at 4 and 6 Oban Lane. The City of Gold Coast’s Development.i record for the application, PDA/2026/19, lists the status as In Progress but shows no lodged date, no applicant name and no cost of works.

Why it matters

Southport sits inside a state-declared Priority Development Area, so Karam Group’s application is assessed under PDA development rules rather than the standard Gold Coast planning scheme, a pathway intended to speed assessment within the designated precinct. An 81-apartment, 13-storey building on a combined 1,214 sqm site would be a dense addition to Oban Lane, which The Urban Developer describes as an infill site. The council record does not show who holds carriage of the application beyond the PDA/2026/19 number, nor what the proposal would cost to build, so the project is a filing before the Gold Coast’s PDA assessment process, not a confirmed development. The Development.i record’s Assessment Stages table carries no entries, meaning no milestone in the assessment has yet been recorded, and no decision date or decision authority is listed. The record identifies the application area as two titles, Lot 35 RP50000 at 4 Oban Lane and Lot 36 RP50000 at 6 Oban Lane, both carried under the single PDA/2026/19 number.

The numbers

The Urban Developer reported a unit mix of 22 one-bedroom, 31 two-bedroom, 22 three-bedroom and six four-bedroom apartments, totalling 81 units across 13 storeys. On those figures, one-bedroom and three-bedroom units each make up roughly 27 per cent of the total, two-bedroom units about 38 per cent and the four-bedroom penthouses about 7 per cent. The site covers 1,214 sqm across the two adjoining lots at 4 and 6 Oban Lane, Southport. None of these figures, the storey count, the unit mix or the site area, appears on the City of Gold Coast’s Development.i record for PDA/2026/19, which lists only the address, the proposal description as “Southport Priority Development Area Material Change of Use Multiple Dwelling x 81”. The record carries no cost of works figure, so no construction value is reported here.

What’s next

PDA/2026/19 remains In Progress on the City of Gold Coast’s Development.i register, with no lodged date, decision date or decision authority recorded. This application was previously assessed for this masthead on 14 October 2026 and held back because the same record carried no date; checked again on 22 October 2026, the record still shows no lodged date, so the filing is reported here on the strength of The Urban Developer’s 8 October 2026 account rather than a dated council milestone. A different Southport filing, CHL’s Skyline View social housing project, closed out at 30 completed homes earlier in October 2026; Karam Group’s application, by contrast, is still at the In Progress stage with no assessment milestones recorded. Until the City of Gold Coast sets a decision date and records an outcome, Oban Lane’s zoning and built form stay as they are, and the 81-unit proposal carries no planning certainty either way.