More than 7,300 pieces of land in NSW and Victoria are reserved for future roads and public works
When a government plans a road, a drain or a park years in advance, it draws the land on the planning maps first. The reservation sits there, public but almost never read, while the houses on top of it are bought and sold. We counted every one of those reservations in the two biggest states.
The numbers
The NSW planning system currently maps 5,432 land reservation acquisition areas across 76 local government areas. Victoria's planning schemes carry 1,921 Public Acquisition Overlay areas across 69 municipalities. Together that is more than 7,300 pieces of land that a public authority has formally set aside for a future purpose.
What the land is reserved for tells the story. In NSW, 2,180 of the reservations are for classified roads and another 513 for local roads and road widening: half of all reservations exist so that a road can one day be built or widened through them. The rest is open space (1,061), drainage and stormwater (369 plus), and environmental conservation.
Who holds them: councils hold 1,817, and the state road authorities under their various names (Roads and Maritime Services, Transport for NSW, RTA) hold close to 2,000. Sydney Water holds 165.
Where they concentrate: the growth corridors
The pattern in both states is the same, and it is the part that matters for buyers. Reservations cluster exactly where the population is growing and where first home buyers are looking.
NSW, most reservations
Hawkesbury
266
Penrith
217
City of Parramatta
214
Canterbury Bankstown
210
Lake Macquarie
209
Blue Mountains
208
Campbelltown
194
Bayside
185
Liverpool
185
Central Coast
184
Victoria, most PAO areas
Casey
116
Wyndham
97
Greater Geelong
94
Whittlesea
83
Nillumbik
75
Frankston
66
South Gippsland
66
Mornington Peninsula
62
Hume
61
Boroondara
60
In NSW the top of the table is Sydney's west and the commuter belt: Hawkesbury, Penrith, Parramatta, Canterbury Bankstown, Campbelltown, Liverpool. In Victoria it is Casey, Wyndham and Whittlesea, the three fastest growing municipalities in the state, plus Geelong. Growth suburbs need future roads and drains, so this is where governments reserve land, and it is also where the auction queues are longest.
Spotlight: City of Casey
Casey carries 116 mapped acquisition areas, the most of any Victorian council, and the council's own planning scheme says what they are for: 75 of the 116 are PAO1, whose acquiring authority is the Head, Transport for Victoria and whose stated purpose is road purposes. The rest split across Casey City Council municipal purposes (26 areas), school sites for the Department of Education, Melbourne Water drainage, the Cardinia Creek Parklands and the Clyde Regional Park. This is overwhelmingly a road reservation story, concentrated where the network is being built out to meet the growth.
We crossed all 116 areas with the Vicmap property layer on 27 August 2026: 1,066 separate properties touch an acquisition overlay somewhere on their land, and 55 of them sit entirely inside one. 980 of the 1,066 have a street number, the closest defensible proxy for a home or business; the other 86 are unnumbered records, typically road reserves. By suburb, the addressed properties concentrate in Cranbourne West (139), Cranbourne East (113), Cranbourne (90), Endeavour Hills (88) and Clyde (76). The oldest gazettal date in the Casey data is 26 August 1999, so the longest standing reservations have been in place for at least 27 years; 26 areas carry that same date, which is when Casey's new format scheme was approved, so their true age is likely older still.
Read those numbers the honest way: touching an overlay usually means a boundary strip, not a lost home. The figure that matters for households is the 55 fully inside, and even there a reservation is a reservation, not a demolition notice. Whether any specific property is affected is a question for the official record on that property: the free Planning Property Report shows the mapped overlay boundary on the land itself.
What a reservation means, and what it does not
A reservation is not a demolition notice. Some reservations sit on the maps for decades without being acted on, and some are eventually removed. Nobody should read this analysis as a list of homes that will be acquired.
What it does mean, today, for an affected lot: development on the land is constrained, the reserving authority has a standing interest in it, and an owner can be compelled to sell when the project proceeds. NSW law also gives the owner of reserved land the right to require the authority to acquire it in cases of hardship. None of that appears at an open home, and a buyer who has not read the planning certificate can bid without knowing.
The reservation for each individual lot is public. In NSW it appears on the section 10.7 planning certificate in the contract of sale, and on the planning portal mapping. In Victoria it is on the VicPlan planning property report, free for any address. The information is there; it is simply read less often than it should be.
Method and source
NSW: we queried the Land Reservation Acquisition layer of the NSW Planning Portal's primary planning layers service on 25 August 2026 and aggregated the 5,432 mapped reservation areas by local government area, reservation class and acquiring authority. The data is published by the NSW Department of Planning under Creative Commons attribution licensing (NSW Crown Copyright).
A mapped reservation area is a polygon on a planning map, not a dwelling. A single area can touch many lots or none. We have deliberately not estimated a count of affected homes, because the honest unit of this dataset is the reservation itself. Journalists are welcome to use these figures and the charts on this page with attribution to PropertyFlags; we can supply the per council tables for both states on request.
PropertyFlags checks this layer, alongside the other official registers we query for its state, for any address in its reports. The reservation status of a single property is part of the free flag count.
All sources queried or checked on 25 and 27 August 2026. If a figure on this page and a source disagree, tell us at hello@propertyflags.com.au and we will correct the page.
Check one specific address
This analysis covers every reservation in two states. PropertyFlags checks one address at a time against every official government register we can query for its state, including this acquisition layer, and answers with red, yellow and green flags in about a minute.
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Research pages and guides are general information built from public government data as at the dates stated, not legal, financial or professional advice. Registers change; verify anything that matters for a decision with the authority that keeps the register.