Long gone are the days of pencil thin apartment towers reaching up into the sky. Newer apartment buyers are looking for a bit more in their homes.
Apartments have become increasingly spacious, amenity-connected, and lifestyle-oriented, with more innovations on the way.
So how are apartment developers adapting to meet this change in demand? Firstly, they are not just producing tall towers without much regard to design or community feel.
Nigel Edgar, General Manager National Development at Frasers Property Australia, said that older apartments frequently lacked on-site, internal, or adjacent amenities to improve occupants’ living experiences.
“20 years ago, an apartment building potentially was a building with little or no connection, without any natural or physical amenity,” he said. “If you’re lucky, you had an undercover lockup car parking space.
“Since then, apartment communities have evolved, and buyers expect far greater things out of today’s modern apartment.
“At Frasers, we focus on developing mixed use communities that are connected and a place where our residents feel they can belong to. Our modern apartment developments come with many important features such as restaurants, shopping facilities, gyms and pools, as well as landscape spaces with enough room for a family to run and play in and its these inclusions that people are expecting to be part of today’s apartment living.”
So, the apartment might have a café at the bottom with a mixture of one-, two- and three-bedroom apartments with enough design amenity internally to allow space for a study area and privacy for a family to grow.
Another way apartment developers can adapt to match new desires is creating a sense of community.
“Frasers Property only acquires where we consider that we can develop a community which has place for community connection” he said. “If the building is just a tall tower on a small land lot, we will struggle to create place or a point of difference.
“That’s just not what we do. What we want to do is build great communities that families can feel an ownership of and be proud of.”
Edgar said in their new projects like Midtown at Macquarie Park in NSW, amenity is key to design. The project will have a professionally run swimming pool in which residents can exercise in or learn to swim, it will have a gym, a coffee shop around the corner and a landscape break out zone to play with your pets.
“This is about activating apartment living,” Edgar said.
“As our cities will become denser, people will be placing a higher value on the tangible amenity that you haven’t historically been able to secure in an apartment building. At Frasers we are looking to deliver for those features in the modern master planned apartment community.”
Content repurposed from realestate.com.au’s article ‘How apartment living is being reinvented’.