ApartmentsClare BurnettTue 29 Sep 26
The $210,000-a-Box Answer to Sydney’s Missing Middle
The housing market has taken a hammering in recent years, and the ‘missing middle’ of smaller-scale apartment projects have been hit hardest.
One developer taking on the challenge is Sydney-based Uncommon Living, which uses prefabricated components to cut construction costs and timeframes.
Uncommon Living co-founder Charles Peters says the aim is to make smaller projects more buildable and better-performing by pairing thoughtful design with a repeatable prefab system.
“With Class 2, so much of the cost is in the cost of the site, the time it takes you to build it, the number of people it takes to build, the complexity in that, and also the quality control,” Peters says.
But with prefabricated elements, per square metre rates are competitive. In one of its recently submitted projects, Uncommon has proposed building 15 apartments at Marrickville in Sydney’s Inner West at a build cost of $210,000 per box.
For comparison, the Centre for International Economics estimated that the cost of delivering a mid-rise infill apartment in Sydney was $1.05 million in 2025.
“For the Uncommon model, not having basements is a massive bonus because you’ve got less in the ground and you’re impacting neighbours less. The actual prep work, groundwork and ground floor slabs takes less time.
“You don’t need the same complexity of trades as you would with a conventional Class 2 building, and you’re delivering at a much higher standard out of the box, no matter where you are in the world.”
Uncommon Living has teamed up with a group in Poland, which has specialised in prefabricated buildings for 35 years. This has given the team a serious knowledge advantage, co-founder Michael Drage said.
“Shipping is a big cost, but it’s not a big cost when you’ve got other savings and efficiencies. And then by the time you have those efficiencies on site, [because] you get the design right,” Drage said.
“When you’ve got a company that or a partner has been doing it for 30-odd years, you iron out a lot of those kinks.”
The aim is to reduce construction timeframes by 50 per cent on ‘missing middle’ projects, Drage said,
“It’s really really hard to get stuff built in any normal way at the moment. So, how can we do it in a way that actually responds to the site? How can we reimagine this?”
Listen to the Uncommon Living founders discuss their approach with The Urban Developer journalist Patrick Lau on Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube (audio only).
