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Dual Key

A guide published by Dotto

Dual-key homes, read by the rules that exist

Homes NSW describes a dual-key unit as two self-contained dwellings off one shared foyer, with lockable doors. Of the planning rules drawn on here, only Western Australia’s R-Codes define the term, and they file it under ancillary dwellings; this guide sets out how the rules that exist treat a home built that way.

A drawn butt hinge: two leaves with three screw holes each, turning on one pin through five knuckles
  • Home A. One self-contained dwelling.
  • Home B. The other.
  • The pin. What joins them: the shared foyer and its lockable doors.
A butt hinge: two leaves turning on one pin. Drawn for this guide; it is not a plan of any home.

General information. Dual Key describes rules in general terms. It is not legal, planning or financial advice for any home. The official places to check are each state’s planning department and the local council, the land titles office, and the tenancy regulator, all linked on the guides.

Dual Key is a guide to how dual-key homes are read by the planning, strata and tenancy rules of the places it covers, written and published by Dotto. The short answer is that one set of rules found gives them a name of their own, Western Australia’s R-Codes, and even there a dual key dwelling is a kind of ancillary dwelling. Everywhere else drawn on here, a dual-key home is sorted under rules written for something else.

Where the word is used

The clearest official description of a dual-key home is on a NSW Government page about a social housing building in Crown Street, Wollongong, published by Homes NSW. The building has 65 units, and 8 of its social housing units have dual-key access. The page describes them this way:

“A dual-key unit has 2 self-contained dwellings. Each has its own bedroom, bathroom, kitchen and living space, accessed via a shared foyer, with lockable doors.”

NSW Government, Crown Street, Wollongong redevelopment project

It goes on to say the unit can run as a single dwelling or be split into two when needed, and that the layout can help people living with disability to live in a home of their own, with a carer or support worker living in the unit next door.

That is a description of one building’s design. It is not a rule, and it does not decide how a dual-key home is treated anywhere else.

A black and white photograph of a small pair of wooden shutters on a white wall, each leaf hung on two iron strap hinges, with one iron bar latching the two leaves together in the middle.
Two leaves, each on its own hinges, held together by one bar across the middle. Photo by vkaresz72 on Pixabay

Where the term is defined

One state planning code does define the term. Western Australia’s Residential Design Codes Volume 1 list a dual key dwelling among their definitions: a kind of ancillary dwelling, with a shared internal corridor and lockable doors to parts of the home, so that it can be split into two separate homes. In a multiple dwelling development of up to 19 dwellings, the Codes’ standard route allows only this kind of ancillary dwelling, one per development, of at most 70 square metres inside.

Elsewhere, no planning definition has been found. Victoria’s planning provisions use neither “dual key” nor “dual occupancy” as a term, and the Queensland planning material drawn on here does not use “dual-key” either. For New South Wales, no planning definition has been confirmed either way.

Brisbane’s planning word for two homes together is a different one: Brisbane City Plan 2014 uses “dual occupancy” for duplex development. That is Brisbane’s plan, not a rule for the rest of Queensland.

So outside Western Australia a dual-key home has no category of its own. It is read under other rules, and the reading changes with the place and with how the home is built and titled.

Three ways the rules read it

As one home with a second part, or as two homes. Victoria and Western Australia each have a category for a smaller second home that stays tied to the main one. Victoria’s planning department says a small second home cannot be subdivided or sold separately from the main home, and Western Australia says an ancillary dwelling sits on the same title as the main dwelling. Two full homes on one lot fall under other rules: in Victoria, clause 55 of the planning schemes applies to two or more dwellings on a lot.

As two lots. Where each side has its own title, the owners hold a lot each and usually share the rest as common property. Queensland’s body corporate guidance names a duplex as one kind of body corporate property, and several places lighten the management rules when a scheme has only two lots.

As a rented home. Tenancy is each state’s and territory’s own law. None of the regulators’ pages drawn on here has a rule written for dual-key homes, so the guide sets out their general rules on locks, keys and entry as each regulator states them.

The guides

  1. One home or two: how planning rules read a dual-keyVictoria’s small second home and clause 55, Western Australia’s ancillary, grouped and multiple dwellings, and Brisbane’s dual occupancy.
  2. Two titles, one scheme: the two-lot schemeWhen each side is its own lot: schemes in Queensland, WA, SA, Tasmania and the ACT, and the lighter two-lot rules in Queensland and WA.
  3. Renting one side: locks, keys and entryTenancy law, state by state, on locks, keys, the owner’s entry, ending a tenancy and the neighbours across the foyer.