What is DA approval in Off The Plan Property?

The interesting thing about property sale person is they won't tell you everything unless you ask. We learned a lot along the process of buying a property in Australia. One of the very most importing things is "DA Approval, it stands for "Development Application Approval"that we didn't aware of.

All off the plan properties require DA approval before the developer can start building a property and usually the major factor of delaying a property completion is due to this DA approval. All off the plan property contracts protect developer for this DA approval delay. That means if the DA approval is delayed, they have the rights to delay the sunset date (i.e. worst case date of property completion).

If you ever want to buy an off the plan property, the first question that you want to ask is, have this property already got DA approval? If yes, the risk of delaying the property completion is low (assuming this is a reliable developer) or otherwise is high.

This is also another way of probing how well the sale person understand the property that he or she is selling. If he/she doesn't know the answer, it basically tells he/she is not knowing the property enough.