Guide
Why so many different businesses choose Advantage Road
On most streets, the businesses have something in common. Advantage Road doesn't bother. A ceramicist works three doors from a strength gym. A cabinetmaker shares a driveway with a web agency. It sounds like an accident. It isn't.
Advantage Road runs one short block south off Bay Road in Highett, tucked between the Nepean Highway and Highett Road. Blink on the drive to Southland and you'll miss it. Yet inside that block sits one of the broadest concentrations of small business in the City of Bayside — and one of the very few places left in the municipality where you can still rent a roller door, a concrete floor and three-phase power without driving to Braeside.
The mix, roughly in order of surprise
Artists and makers. This is the part the rest of Melbourne has started to notice. Bayside City Council now describes Advantage Road as the creative hub of the municipality, with more than twenty studios along and around the street — painters, printmakers, textile artists, milliners, ceramicists and sculptors. There's a permanent gallery and event space at number 26 that runs exhibitions year round, and shared studio buildings where a dozen practising artists work side by side. Once a year the street throws its doors open for Open Studios, and a few thousand people wander down a road they'd otherwise never have a reason to turn into.
Fitness and active. Warehouses are very good at being gyms. High ceilings, no upstairs neighbours, a slab you can drop a barbell on, and parking at the door — the same qualities that suit a joinery workshop suit strength training, functional fitness, pilates, martial arts and physio-adjacent rehab space. The Bay Road corridor has become one of the denser fitness pockets in the south-east for exactly this reason, and Advantage Road sits in the middle of it.
Health and wellbeing. Following the gyms, and often sharing their clients: remedial massage, myotherapy, physiotherapy, podiatry, allied health and recovery studios. For a practitioner starting out, a small warehouse tenancy is often a fraction of a Church Street or Bay Street shopfront, with better parking and clients who are already driving.
Trades and building. The original tenants, and still the backbone. Cabinetmakers, joiners, builders, electricians, plumbers, tilers, glaziers, upholsterers, signwriters, fabricators. A Bayside tradie who lives locally and works locally needs somewhere to keep a ute, a trailer, stock and a workbench, and that somewhere has been disappearing from this side of the highway for twenty years.
Digital and professional. The quiet growth category. Design studios, agencies, IT and software people, bookkeepers, e-commerce operators running stock out of the back and a desk out of the front. There's a serviced office and coworking operator on the street with permanent desks and hot desks, which tells you how much demand there is locally for somewhere to work that isn't the spare room and isn't a 45-minute train ride.
Pets, food and everything else. Dog grooming and training, boarding and daycare, pet supplies. Small-batch food producers and coffee roasters. Auto and marine trades. Storage. Wholesalers with a trade counter. If a business needs a shed and a phone line, it has probably looked at this street.
What the mix actually gives you
The obvious answer is cheap space, and it isn't wrong — but that undersells it. Three things make this street work.
The zoning is permissive. Most of Advantage Road sits in a Commercial 2 Zone, which is the planning system's way of saying business, industry and services, but not housing. A C2Z will happily accommodate an office, a warehouse, a gallery, a gym, a trade supplier or a workshop in the same building envelope. On a retail strip you'd need a permit and an argument. Here, the uses genuinely coexist, and nobody's neighbour is complaining about the noise from a table saw at 7am — because their neighbour also owns a table saw.
The customers are already close. This is the bit people from outside Bayside miss. Advantage Road isn't a remote industrial estate. It is a five to fifteen minute drive from Highett, Cheltenham, Hampton East, Hampton, Sandringham, Black Rock, Beaumaris, Brighton East, Moorabbin, Bentleigh and Mentone. That's a very large, very established, high-income catchment, and it's sitting on top of a street that charges warehouse rent. A dog groomer or a physio or a picture framer in that position gets metropolitan-fringe overheads with inner-suburban demand.
Getting in and out is trivial. Bay Road connects straight to the Nepean Highway at one end and runs through to Sandringham at the other. Highett and Moorabbin stations are both on the Frankston line nearby. There's a bus along Bay Road. And unlike anywhere on Bay Street or Church Street, your clients can park at your door, for free, without circling.
The street's real asset isn't the buildings. It's the postcode the buildings happen to be in.
The neighbourhood is filling in around it
Advantage Road no longer sits alone. Council's purpose-built community art space, Bayley Arts, opened on Avoca Street immediately next door, giving the creative side of the street a formal anchor with studios and an exhibition space. The Bay Road employment corridor either side has kept attracting gyms, allied health, trade showrooms and food operators. And a few streets away on Talinga Road in Cheltenham, an eleven-court indoor pickleball venue — Pavilion Bayside — is being built out in a warehouse of exactly the kind Advantage Road is made of, which is a fairly good indicator of where this pocket is heading.
The pattern is consistent: activities that need floor area and can't afford main-road retail keep landing in the Bay Road backstreets, and Advantage Road is the most concentrated version of it.
If you're looking for space here
- Stock turns over quietly. Many tenancies never reach a portal — they go by word of mouth, an agent's database, or a sign on the roller door. Drive it. Call the agents who work the Bayside industrial market.
- Sizes start small. There are single units under 100sqm suited to storage, a solo trade or an online business, right up to multi-level warehouse-and-office buildings of several hundred square metres.
- Check the use before you sign. C2Z is broad but not unlimited, and some uses — anything with customers arriving in volume, food, or health services — can carry permit, parking or amenity conditions. Ask the agent for the zone and any overlays, and confirm with Bayside City Council's planning team before you commit.
- Newer stock is arriving. A boutique development of twelve architecturally designed multi-level creative spaces at 13-15 Advantage Road is aimed squarely at owner-occupiers who want warehouse function without the warehouse look.
Are you on the street? This directory is free to be listed in. Send your trading name, street number, a sentence on what you do and a link, and we'll add you — add your business here.