Abstract
The residential developer has been the predominant agent in the structural growth of Australian metropolitan areas in the past fifteen years. This paper attempts to place developer decisionmaking into a perspective through which it is possible to make deductions about the pattern of residential growth from a knowledge of individual behaviour.
From a series of interviews with a sample of developers engaged in residential subdivision on the fringe of metropolitan Sydney, a model is developed that structures the way in which investment and location considerations interact in relation to institutional and economic constraints at various stages of decisionmaking in the land acquisition process. The implications of the model are that developer behaviour is a reaction to the constraints imposed by the various government and institutional regulations and that his particular location preferences are conditioned by these. These constraints have spatial implications because the behavioural processes underlying the developer's reaction to them provide important insights into the changing spatial form of the city.
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