One Living Launches ‘Attainable Housing’ Push into Middle-Market Sydney

High construction costs and land prices are pushing middle-market developers deeper into luxury territory, but One Living sees an opening. The GreenPoint-backed builder-developer has high conviction in a model it believes can crack the middle-market conundrum of developing affordable apartments. “We firmly believe the luxury market is heavily saturated. There’s enough players in that market,” One Living joint manager Joseph Scuderi tells The Urban Developer . “We see this as a fantastic opportunity to really provide a difference in a segment of the market that is really, really a socio-economic problem—and we’re looking to provide a solution to that problem.” After about a year working to develop out the model, One Living has revealed its first major acquisition—a 140-apartment development site at 6-14 Mona Vale Road on Sydney’s Northern Beaches. But that could be just the tip of the iceberg, with more than 1000 apartments already under due diligence across the eastern seaboard, Scuderi says. One Living is Scuderi’s latest venture after a 22-year career in residential development with Mirvac and Landmark Group. Scuderi says he has assembled the right ingredients to crack a segment of the market that has proven too difficult for many peers. ▲ One Living joint manager Joseph Scuderi: The developer has acquired its first site, on Sydney’s Northern Beaches. It’s what he calls “attainable housing”—metropolitan Sydney projects broadly priced between $15,000 and $25,000 per square metre, targeting buyers priced out of the prestige end but still navigating a market transformed by a decade of cost escalation. It is a redefinition of mid-market that Scuderi says reflects structural shifts in Sydney pricing rather than upward drift in ambition. “Mid-market used to be between $10,000 and $12,000 per square metre,” he says. “And then anything above $15,000 to $16,000 was considered luxury. That market’s changed because of housing affordability generally—people are now more comfortable with the fact that if they’re going to buy a two-bedder, it’s probably going to cost them $1 million, or $1.2 million versus $750,000 or $800,000 like it used to.” Institutional buy-in on attainable housing model Underpinning the ambition is a capital partnership with New York-based GreenPoint Partners, a global real assets investment firm with more than $1 billion of equity committed across vertically integrated businesses in transport, logistics, energy, digital infrastructure and living. “For its size, sophistication and importance to the community, Australia’s living sector has remained largely under-institutionalised, which represents significant opportunity,” GreenPoint founder Chris Green says. “GreenPoint identified that gap, assembled the right team, and is backing One Living to build a platform that is aligned to market needs.” ▲ Global real assets investment firm GreenPoint Partners, based in New York, brings more than $1 billion of equity to the table. That institutional backing is central to One Living’s pitch to buyers as much as to its development model, and it also reinforces the next part of the strategy. “The institutional capital supporting the business is long-term capital, and that’s really important with off-the-plan sales,” Scuderi says. “People should be able to have trust in a One Living product knowing that we are going to be there with them throughout that whole journey.” One Living’s leadership team has more than 100 years of collective experience. Alongside Scuderi, joint managing director Matthew Finnimore brings institutional investment experience from Macquarie Capital and the Future Fund. Non-executive chairman Brett Mason is the former chief executive of Built, with 35 years in construction and executive leadership, while non-executive directors Chris Green and John Forrest bring global real assets and property technology expertise, respectively. The scale of the pipeline is indicative of the deliberate ambition baked into the model from the outset, and it leads into the company’s near-term rollout. “We’ve got a whole host of other sites that we’re looking forward to announcing over the next six months,” Scuderi says. But the sweet spot, he says, sits at 300-plus units per project, where the economics of standardisation and modularisation begin to work in earnest. ▲ One Living’s first project, slated for this site at Mona Vale, is deliberately lower-scale, Scuderi says. Scuderi says the slightly smaller scale of Mona Vale’s 140 apartments is a deliberate opening move. “We’re not looking to cap where we want to be—we’re also looking at other facets of the market, masterplan communities, potentially land lease. The bigger the better.” He says the developer would also look to expand into the Brisbane, Melbourne, and Adelaide markets once the Sydney groundwork is established. “I’m a firm believer of crawling before you walk. I want to make sure we establish our footings appropriately and make sure we’re settled in Sydney—and then at the appropriate time we’ll start to look at expansion,” Scuderi says. MMC will find savings Modern construction methodologies are at the heart of Scuderi’s belief that One Living can succeed where others have retreated. “The only way you can provide attainable housing now is by being a builder-developer,” he says. “If you’re relying on a third-party builder, the margins and the prelims they’re charging these days... it’s impossible to make it stack up.” And development contributions, which Scuderi says are “through the roof”, are compounding the problem. Scuderi’s answer is disciplined repetition across the supply and design chain. ▲ Scuderi believes modern methods of construction, including modular and prefab components, will deliver true savings. But incorporating repetitious modularisation into build-to-sell is no easy feat, compared to build-to-rent and student accommodation where volumetric modular construction has been successful. “[In] build-to-sell your apartment modules per floor are generally very different because you’re catering for one beds, two beds, three beds. So you have to look at the kit of parts that go into your design—having those modularised at a repetitive scale,” he says. And as the nuanced conversation continues over the cost of modular construction, Scuderi says while it may not be cheaper, the speed and efficiency could help find savings within projects. “I think over time, we will be able to make it cheaper, higher quality, and faster,” he says. “We don’t have legacy projects in the background, so we can put all of our energy and time into that as a focus from day one and make sure it’s being rolled out into all of our projects immediately.” Retaining rental stock part of the plan While the main thrust of the One Living model is build-to-sell, Scuderi says the intention is to retain a percentage of stock in each development. “We are not a build-to-rent operator, and I want to stress that,” Scuderi says. “But there’s a hybrid approach where we’d like to retain a percentage of our stock. We’re going to be building the product to last the test of time because we’re going to be there along that journey with them.” Scuderi says the team is rapidly scaling to help achieve One Living’s five-year vision. “We’d like to have a significant pipeline within Sydney, but also along the eastern seaboard, potentially Adelaide as well. And we’d like to be seen as a developer that people can have trust in and reliance on—to know that they’re going to be able to buy a good quality product at an attainable price and have the support behind them to take them through that journey.”

Exclusive
Taryn Paris
Thu 11 Jun 26

One Living Launches ‘Attainable Housing’ Push into Middle-Market Sydney

Get the full story.