Goodman plans 2,150 homes opposite its own $1.4b data centre

Goodman Group, the industrial developer led by chief executive Greg Goodman, plans 2,150 homes across five towers of 45 to 60 storeys at 3-5 Talavera Road, Macquarie Park, directly across the road from its own $1.4 billion data centre, Mingtiandi reported. On 14 October the NSW Housing Delivery Authority backed declaring the towers State Significant Development, a call the planning minister has yet to make.

Why it matters

The land is already Goodman’s: today it carries The Park, an office building, and Park View Business Park, a mix of warehouse and office space. A State Significant declaration would let Goodman file a full application, which the planning department would then assess on its merits. Across the road, Goodman’s own Project Apollo data centre won state approval on 2 September, and a 1.2 hectare public park would separate the two sites. At the authority’s briefing, Tom Gellibrand, who heads Infrastructure NSW, noted that existing zoning on the land already permits mixed use, the transcript shows. The Australian reported that City of Ryde had not yet seen detailed plans, and Ryde mayor Trenton Brown cautioned that state-run approval tracks allow big planning calls to be made “without proper strategic oversight.” Asked about the data centre’s effect on the homes, Goodman pointed to its role supplying digital infrastructure on infill land in cities, and said it is a long-term owner, developer and manager of its assets.

The numbers

SLR Consulting, in a noise report for Goodman, put the precinct’s freshly rezoned mixed-use land at roughly 600 metres or further from the approved centre. Its consent covers 36 evaporative cooling towers on the roof, drawing as much as 1.5 million kilolitres of water annually, and 66 diesel generators rated at 2.8 megawatts apiece, capped at 187 hours a year except during unplanned outages. The consent sets noise limits at four nearby receivers, but none on the proposed tower land, and requires a year of continuous rooftop monitoring once the centre is fully running. The same noise study identified four further data centres, approved or proposed, sitting 300 to 1,200 metres from the site, one of them at 269 Lane Cove Road. Goodman withdrew a separate proposal, a 90 megawatt data centre in Lane Cove West known as Project Mars, about five weeks before the Macquarie Park towers surfaced; that withdrawn plan had drawn 374 public submissions, of which nine were supportive. Goodman has sold Talavera Road land for housing before: Meriton paid a reported $200 million for a site in 2016 and is building four buildings there, the tallest reaching 60 storeys. It follows Sonic Healthcare’s plan for 514 apartments across two towers on its own landholding nearby. Data centres made up 73 per cent of Goodman’s $14.5 billion work-in-progress book as at the end of March.

What’s next

The NSW planning minister will decide whether to declare the Macquarie Park residential towers a State Significant Development. A declaration would send the proposal to the Department of Planning, Housing and Infrastructure for a merit assessment. Goodman has not disclosed a development cost for the towers. The residential proposal is separate from the data centre approval, which already covers the site directly across Talavera Road.