Delivering Purposeful Outcomes in Council-led Strategic Transactions
A Victorian Perspective
Across Victoria, councils are increasingly focusing on public private partnerships or structuring transactions to deliver purposeful outcomes from strategic sites, especially those with the potential to deliver housing, social infrastructure, employment uses or precinct renewal.
The interest is high, but the pathway is rarely straightforward.
For many Councils, these are not straightforward transactions. They are balancing acts between community expectations, commercial reality, political responsibility and long-term place outcomes.
Because of this, the success of a council-led transactions is often determined long before the EOI or active engagement with a counterparty gets underway.
Three early-stage considerations matter most:
Clarity of Purpose
The strongest PPPs begin with a shared understanding of what the site is meant to achieve.
Is the priority housing? Mixed use? Civic presence? Economic uplift? Public space?
When this isn’t aligned early, the EOI becomes very broad, unfocused, reactive and difficult to evaluate in a transparent way.
Purpose isn’t a constraint, it’s a compass.
The Right Structure
A good Approach to Market process (whether public EOI or private treaty negotiations) doesn’t overload counterparties with complexity.
It frames the opportunity clearly, defines what “good” looks like, and gives enough flexibility for innovation, without undermining governance.
For councils, the challenge is knowing how much to ask for at the early stage and how much to leave for later negotiations. The answer sits in establishing the principles early:
community benefit
design excellence
financial structure
partnership models
expectations for risk and return
long-term stewardship and operational considerations.
The structure should support decision-making, not overwhelm it.
Community Benefit as a Shared Value
Community benefit is often treated as an add-on and sometimes by counterparties, as an afterthought or necessary but reluctant and painful part of the process. It’s the heart of a successful transaction.
This doesn’t mean mandating outcomes too early. It means defining what types of community benefit matter and why. Affordable housing, public space, cultural uses, and potentially, social enterprises, will all have a different profile, depending on context.
When understanding of community benefit is aligned early, the eventual partnership feels balanced rather than negotiated under pressure.
Victorian Context
Victoria’s development environment is in a challenging but transitional moment. Construction costs remain elevated, financing conditions are tight, and many projects that would have been viable five years ago no longer stack up under current feasibility pressures.
At the same time, the State is pushing for more housing delivery and has introduced planning reforms to support it, but policy shifts alone can’t resolve market fundamentals.
For councils and private partners alike, this means timing, staging and certainty around delivery have become far more difficult to forecast. In this environment, projects progress most effectively when the early purpose, structure and expectations are clearly aligned.
When this alignment occurs before significant design or commercial work begins, it reduces ambiguity, strengthens confidence and creates a more stable foundation for the decisions that follow.
