Brisbane surveyor / town planner needed

We are wanting to split off the back yard on a house in southside Brisbane and build a new house on the back, or move the house back and move a character house onto the front.

After having a successful pre-lodgement meeting more than two years ago, we tried (three separate times) to have BCC produce a record of such meeting (from the archives) so we could take handwritten notes (not allowed to photocopy). Though the rules have changed since the pre-lodgement meeting, the house plan we used still fits the current regulations.

Might as well bang my head against a wall. After continual follow by us up on each of the three occasions, we still never got a phone call to say, come in, we’ve found the meeting notes. (Our notes were lost when our architect moved house.)

Consequently, it has gone into the too hard basket, the I’ll get back to that basket.

At the time we had the meeting, building a house on the back (battleaxe) block was (ballpark) about $230K (from memory). With passage of time, that cost would now be ballpark more than $330K.

At the time another option was to move the existing house to the back and move a character house onto the front, but the cost of making the existing house fit the current building code was a big factor, compared to leaving it as is, and building new on the back block.

We are now unsure whether to pursue building new on the back. Because of the rise in cost of building new, we could re-look at moving the existing house to the back and moving a character house to the front. We need to stick to character at the front because the street is part of a character precinct.

Because we are new to developing and finding it hard to get any headway even with the simplist things (like having the BCC call us back) and because we have been told that BCC much prefer to deal with people who know what they are doing, we’d like to find a surveyor and/or town planner who can lodge the paperwork for us.

We did originally have a town planner, and we have plans for a new house for the back but we really need someone to help us with the pros and cons of both scenarios.

We were referred to a second town planner but didn’t get any service from him either. Suspect it is because at the time we were following this up, Brisbane was going through a phenomenal period of growth, with every man and his dog subdividing and splitting etc.

Does anyone have a name of anyone who could help us? Our original town planner was going to do the objection signs etc anyway, but we’d much rather pay a bit more for someone who has done a battleaxe and/or small lot subdivision and knows the ins and outs, and retain our sanity than chase our tails like we have in the past.

Thanks, Wylie