Lilywood Landings is the first masterplanned community to open inside Waraba, the growth area planned to hold 30,000 homes north of Brisbane. Lennium Group’s Leon Calahorra on the pipeline, the guidelines and what the developer side wants from builders.

Queensland’s newest city has exactly one community you can currently walk around in. Lilywood Landings, north west of Caboolture, has nearly 400 lots sold, a park and playground finished, residents already in their homes and 31 display homes open to the public. Almost everything else about Waraba exists as a structure plan, an interim land use plan and a very long infrastructure schedule.

That gap between the plan and the built thing is where the commercial question sits. Waraba is not a large estate. It is a growth area of roughly 3,156 hectares that the state expects to deliver around 30,000 homes for about 70,000 people and roughly 17,000 jobs over a 40 year horizon. Lennium Group’s Leon Calahorra, speaking to us about Lilywood Landings, described what that looks like from inside the first community out of the ground.

Lilywood Landings is where the Waraba plan stops being theoretical

“Lilywood Landings is the first masterplanned community to come to life in Waraba, so in many ways this is where people can already see the vision for Queensland’s newest city becoming a reality,” Calahorra said.

The estate sits on about 70 hectares with the Caboolture River on one side and views toward the D’Aguilar Ranges, and more than 23 hectares of parkland planned across it. The regulatory ground under it has already shifted once. The Caboolture West Interim Structure Plan became operative in March 2023, then the Waraba Priority Development Area was declared on 2 August 2024, moving assessment for about 2,880 hectares to Economic Development Queensland.

What a Priority Development Area means for a project

A Priority Development Area, or PDA, is land declared under the Economic Development Act 2012 where planning and development assessment moves from the local council to Economic Development Queensland. Development is assessed against a PDA development scheme or interim land use plan rather than the council planning scheme, and infrastructure charges are set under the PDA’s own funding framework. The Waraba PDA was declared on 2 August 2024 and covers about 2,880 hectares of the Caboolture West growth area.

The buyer mix is broader than a standard greenfield estate

Calahorra described demand from first home buyers trying to get into the market, families looking for more space, and buyers who want a new home where infrastructure and amenity are visibly on the way. The numbers, he said, point to “the creation of an entirely new city rather than another residential estate.”

That forward looking component changes how homes get specified and sold. “Buyers aren’t just looking at the home they’re purchasing today,” Calahorra said. They are weighing up “what this whole area is going to become over the next 10, 20 and 30 years.”

The state is funding on the same premise. Economic Development Queensland has flagged Infrastructure Activation Fund support for roughly 16,845 new homes in Waraba to mid 2034, of which 6,738 are earmarked for first home buyers. It is a familiar pattern in Australian growth corridor pipelines, where land supply arrives well before the services catch up.

The product mix is deliberately wider than family homesites

Lilywood Landings is approved for 705 lots, and Calahorra said the housing choice was set intentionally, running from traditional family sized homesites through to terrace homes that offer a lower maintenance alternative. “There’s a substantial pipeline because Lilywood Landings is growing alongside Waraba itself,” he said.

The effect is that one estate carries several price points and household types at once rather than one standard product repeated across every stage. Terraces are currently being delivered there by Dare Homes and Glenvill Homes, listed from $764,000.

The display village says the same thing. It opened with 28 homes from 16 builders and now runs 31 homes from 18, including Metricon, Simonds, Brighton Homes, Burbank, Hudson Homes and Creation Homes. Master Builders Queensland, which manages the village, has described it as the first in the new city.

A display presence in a corridor at this stage is a lead asset competitors cannot replicate later at the same cost, which is why allocations in new growth areas move quickly. It is also a standing overhead, and how a builder runs and measures a building business usually decides whether it pays back.

The framework is set before a builder prices a lot

Calahorra was direct about how Lennium expects the relationship to work. “For us it’s about having a clear framework and working collaboratively with builders from the outset,” he said. “We have detailed building and design guidelines so everyone understands what’s expected, and we’ve made the relevant information readily accessible through the Lilywood Landings website.” That accessibility, he said, “helps builders design and price homes appropriately for individual lots.”

“The best outcomes happen when the developer and builder are working towards the same objective, creating good individual homes while also thinking about how streets and neighbourhoods will look and function as a whole.”

Design guidelines and covenants in a masterplanned community are a pricing input, not paperwork. Facade requirements, driveway and fencing standards, roof form, landscaping obligations and setback rules all land in the build cost before a contract is signed, and they vary between estates and between stages inside the same estate.

“Ultimately, we’re not just delivering individual blocks of land,” Calahorra said. “We’re creating a community, so the quality of every home contributes to the quality and character of the place we’re building.”

Queensland buyer expectations shape what actually sells

Asked what a builder coming up from the southern states should understand, Calahorra pointed at buyers rather than construction method. “Queensland buyers really value space, outdoor living and connection to their surroundings,” he said, “so the homes and neighbourhood have to respond to that lifestyle rather than simply maximising the number of lots.”

Lennium Group has been developing residential communities across Australia for more than 20 years, and Calahorra said the lesson has been consistent. “You can’t impose exactly the same model everywhere. You have to understand how people want to live in that particular place.”

That is the logic sitting behind how builders market a building business in a new corridor, where the display home does the arguing.

The work in a new city is not only residential

The part of Waraba that is easy to underestimate is everything that is not a house. “A city of around 70,000 people will require retail, education, services, employment and infrastructure, so there is a much broader economic story unfolding here as well,” Calahorra said.

Some of it is already visible. A Coles supermarket is under construction roughly 500 metres away, with specialty retail going up alongside it, and a childcare centre and local shopping are planned inside the estate. Waraba’s first residential approvals in August 2023 covered four developers, and civil works are now underway on Stockland’s 2,050 lot project at Lilywood.

THE GOOD BUILDER TAKE

The pitch for a corridor like Waraba is always the 30 year number. The commercial reality for a builder is the next 24 months. What is verifiable right now is one community with roughly 400 lots sold, a full display village, a supermarket under construction and a second major developer starting civils. That is enough to justify reading the guidelines and the stage release schedule. It is not enough to price a 40 year city into a tender today. The builders who do well in new growth areas tend to be the ones who read the covenants before the population forecast.

A development becomes a community after the civils are finished

Calahorra said what surprised him most was how quickly the place stopped looking like a worksite, pointing to families using the park and playground since the first move ins last year. In five years, he said, Lilywood Landings would no longer feel like the beginning of something. “You’ll have more homes and residents, but importantly you’ll also have more of the infrastructure, retail, services and amenity that come as Waraba grows around us.”

For builders, the sequence is the useful part. Land comes first, the guidelines come with it, the display village sets the competitive field, and the amenity arrives afterwards. Waraba is at the point where the first three have happened and the fourth is visible from the estate.

“You can put the roads and infrastructure in place,” Calahorra said, “but it’s the residents who ultimately turn a development into a community, and that’s what we’re seeing happen now.”

Waraba has about 29,600 homes to go.

Frequently asked questions

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Last updated 22 September 2026

General information only. This article reports on planning instruments, published projections and developer supplied information current at the time of writing and does not constitute legal, financial or professional advice. Builders and buyers should verify current stage releases, design guidelines and infrastructure charges directly with the relevant authority or developer.

Author: TGB Editorial