NSW approves 249-apartment North Gosford tower scheme

NSW’s planning department approved a mixed-use scheme at 372-374 Mann Street and 35-37 Dwyer Street, North Gosford, on 25 September, according to the SSD-69773460 file on the NSW Planning Portal. The site sits in the Central Coast Council area and the application was decided by an Executive Director acting under delegation, the file’s own Project Details panel shows, not by a named minister or panel member.

Why it matters

The portal record settles the one question that matters most for a State Significant Development file: whether a proposal is a decision or still a request. SSD-69773460’s status field reads “Determination” with a decision of “Approved,” so this is a determined outcome, not an application still subject to change. For Central Coast builders and trades, it is a consented pipeline of about 249 homes that can now move toward a construction certificate. By contrast, the Central Coast’s other large state file, a data centre proposed for Lucca Road, Wyong, remains at the SEARs stage.

What the record does not settle is who is behind it. The Project Details panel has no Applicant or Proponent field at all. The Urban Developer, reporting the approval on 5 October, named the proponent as Stockbridge Properties Pty Ltd. Submissions attached to the SSD file corroborate the site and the scale of the scheme, but neither the determination page nor its attachment list names the applicant, so that identity rests on the outlet’s reporting rather than the record itself.

The file’s Determination Date is 25 September 2026. The Urban Developer’s piece ran on 5 October, ten days later, framed as fresh news. Readers relying only on the outlet’s publish date would place the decision later than the record shows.

The numbers

The planning portal’s summary page does not itself carry a unit count, storey figure or project value, a gap consistent with how SSD determination pages are built: the deciding facts sit in the attached determination documents rather than the landing page. Submissions on the SSD-69773460 file reference a 21-storey tower reaching 71 to 72.45 metres, alongside additional seven-storey buildings on the same land, matching the shape of scheme the Urban Developer described as a 21-storey tower plus three seven-storey buildings totalling 249 apartments.

That 249-apartment figure, reported by the Urban Developer as 81 one-bedroom, 137 two-bedroom and 31 three-bedroom homes, is not independently shown on the portal’s own summary fields, but it matches the scale the submissions describe for the same address and the same SSD number. The outlet also reported a project cost. No cost or capital investment value appears on the public portal page, so none is reported here.

The site itself spans 7,039 square metres, per the Urban Developer, with the tower portion developed at a floor space ratio of 6.48:1 against 2.14:1 for the remainder of the lot, with six basement levels holding 353 car spaces, the outlet reported.

What’s next

With a determination recorded, the next public markers are procedural rather than discretionary: a construction certificate, then the appointment of a principal certifier, before any site works begin. None of the eight files in the determination’s attachment group that were reviewed carry a construction start date.

The unresolved applicant question is likely to surface again once building activity starts, since a construction certificate application will need to name the entity carrying the approval forward. Until then, the only entity named anywhere in connection with the project is Stockbridge Properties Pty Ltd, and that naming comes from outlet reporting rather than from the Planning Portal record itself.