Advantage Rd

Analysis

The future of Advantage Road

Highett, Victoria · 12 August 2026

Bayside has a bay, a golf course, a rail line and about as much industrial land left as you could fit in a large paddock. Advantage Road is one of the last pieces of it — and that, not its buildings, is the thing worth understanding about the street's next decade.

What the street used to be

For most of its life Advantage Road did the unglamorous work that a residential municipality still needs done somewhere. Panel shops, joinery, engineering, storage, wholesalers, printers. Highett had genuine industry on both sides of the rail line — the CSIRO research site off Graham Road, gasworks land over the Kingston border, factories and works yards scattered through the streets between Highett Road and the highway.

Almost all of that has gone to housing. The nine-hectare former CSIRO site on Graham Road is now Highett Common, a residential precinct approved for well over a thousand dwellings including apartment buildings of six and seven storeys. The gasworks land nearby went the same way. Council formalised the direction of travel when it updated the Highett Structure Plan and translated it into the planning scheme through Amendment C160bays, which the Minister for Planning approved in August 2022 — new residential zone schedules, revised built-form controls and a slightly tightened commercial zone footprint.

The net effect over roughly twenty years: Highett got several thousand new residents, and lost most of the places where somebody could put a workshop.

What it is now: a Commercial 2 Zone island

Advantage Road and its neighbours off Bay Road sit in a Commercial 2 Zone. In plain terms, C2Z is the business-and-industry zone: offices, warehouses, manufacturing, trade supplies, indoor recreation, galleries and services are all at home in it, while housing is not. That single fact is why the street has survived while the streets around it converted.

The local policy behind it is explicit about the intent. The scheme seeks to keep the Bay Road corridor working as a business and employment corridor, to encourage uses with an employment focus, and to make sure what happens there complements rather than undermines the nearby activity centres. Council isn't planning to hand this pocket to apartments — it's planning to keep it earning.

Two consequences follow, and they pull in opposite directions.

Scarcity is now the street's dominant economic fact. There is very little land in Bayside where a trade business, a fabricator, a gym or a studio can legally operate, and the supply is not being replaced. Every industrial site rezoned in Highett, Cheltenham and Moorabbin over the past two decades has made the remaining C2Z land more valuable and harder to get into. Agents describe this pocket as tightly held, and they aren't exaggerating for effect — small tilt-slab warehouses in this area come up a handful at a time.

Intensification is arriving anyway — just vertically, and commercially. Height controls in the Bay Road area have been relaxed relative to the old two-storey expectation. Agents marketing Advantage Road stock now routinely reference recent changes permitting development of up to four levels subject to a permit, and the scheme's built-form controls for parts of this area work to a maximum building height in the order of 14 metres, with setback and buffer requirements where sites sit near the Highett Grassy Woodland and Heathland Reserve. The exact schedule and any overlays depend on the individual title, so confirm yours rather than relying on a marketing line.

Not planning advice. Zoning, overlays and height controls change, and they vary title by title. Before you buy, lease, build or commit to a use, get the property's planning certificate and speak to Bayside City Council's statutory planning team or a planning consultant. The current controls are published in the Bayside Planning Scheme.

What four levels actually means for the street

It means the next generation of building here is not a shed. It's a stacked one.

The clearest example is already under way at 13-15 Advantage Road, where a boutique development is delivering twelve architecturally designed two and three level spaces pitched at owner-occupiers — warehouse function on the ground floor, offices and amenity above, and a facade that could sit on a main road without embarrassment. That product type is the logical answer to expensive, scarce land: build up, sell strata, let a dozen small businesses own their own premises on a footprint that used to hold two.

For anyone currently renting a plain warehouse on the street, this is the thing to watch. Redevelopment of a site into multi-level strata typically prices out the low-rent uses that made the street interesting — the storage tenancies, the month-to-month workshops, the artist studios paying by the square metre. The creative community on Advantage Road exists because the space was cheap and rough. Newer stock will be neither.

Employment zoning protects the street from becoming apartments. It doesn't protect the cheapest tenants from the street becoming expensive.

The state planning changes happening around it

The bigger story in Bayside right now is residential, and it's being run from Spring Street rather than Boxshall Street.

The Victorian Government's train and tram zone Activity Centres Program is setting new planning rules in and around 60 activity centres across Melbourne, with capacity targeted at more than 300,000 additional homes by 2051. Plans for 58 of those centres have been finalised. Moorabbin was one of the ten pilot centres and its plan is done; on the Frankston line, Bentleigh and Mentone are among the later additions; on the Sandringham line, North Brighton, Middle Brighton, Hampton and Sandringham are all in the program.

Highett station itself is not a designated activity centre — which is a genuinely important detail. It means Highett sits in the gap between centres that are being planned for substantial growth on either side of it. Separately, state amendment VC267, gazetted in March 2025, introduced the Townhouse and Low-rise Code for developments up to three storeys with a deemed-to-comply pathway and no third-party appeal rights, plus new standards for apartment developments up to four storeys. Residential land across Bayside got materially easier to develop.

Council has not been quiet about the process. Bayside launched proceedings in the Supreme Court of Victoria seeking access to documents behind the Minister's decision to exempt the Activity Centres Program from the usual notice and exhibition requirements, using powers under section 20(4) of the Planning and Environment Act 1987. A directions hearing was held in June 2026 and a preliminary discovery hearing was listed for 27 August 2026. However that plays out, the direction of state policy is clear enough.

Why that matters to a street with no housing on it

Because every additional dwelling within a fifteen minute drive is a customer, and every rezoned industrial site is a competitor removed. More people in Highett, Moorabbin, Bentleigh, Cheltenham and Mentone means more demand for the trades, gyms, allied health, pet services, storage and studios that Advantage Road houses — while the supply of places to run them from keeps shrinking. That's an unusually good position for an owner-occupier and a squeeze for a tenant.

Who the street is built for next

The honest forecast

Advantage Road will not become apartments. It will become a denser, more expensive, better-presented version of what it already is: multi-level strata workspaces, more owner-occupiers, more customer-facing uses, fewer bargain sheds, and an arts community that has to work harder to hold its ground. The street's advantage — and it's a real one — is that it is the last of its type this close to a very large number of people who need it.

Sources worth reading

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← Read: why so many different businesses choose Advantage Road