Mirvac, Altona Townhouses

Developer	Mirvac
Location	Black Shores Road, Altona, VIC
Solution	The Helical Pile
Scale	3,247 screw piles installed to date across four stages, with Stage 5 scoped at a further 774
Timeframe	Underway since 2019; Stage 5 due to begin October 2026

The Stake

Mirvac’s eight-stage townhouse development on Black Shores Road is entirely self-funded: each stage only goes to construction once enough of the previous stage has sold. That funding model puts a premium on speed once a stage is triggered, every week spent on foundations is a week of Mirvac’s own capital tied up before the stage can start delivering completed homes back into the sales pipeline.

The Challenge

Beneath the surface, Altona shifts from solid rock to excessive fill to highly reactive clay, sometimes within metres of each other, a combination Steve Hassett describes as close to the worst soil profile a builder can face. In places, the rock runs too dense for a screw pile to be driven at all, and as the development has pushed deeper into the site across later stages, the ground has kept changing on FTA.

The Approach

Rather than design once and hope, FTA tested ahead of every new stage and passed the results straight to Mirvac’s consulting engineer, so each stage’s foundation design was finalised with contingencies already built in, not worked out mid-install. Where testing flagged rock, the fallback plan was agreed before the crew arrived, not after. One dedicated team has stayed on the job throughout, installing between 18 and 90 piles a day and typically clearing a stage in around two weeks.

The Outcome

By removing the soil excavation and concrete curing time a conventional footing would have added, FTA estimates the project has run at a 10 to 15% cost advantage overall, driven less by the piles themselves than by the time saved across the whole build program. Later stages have faced their own delays, driven by softer townhouse sales rather than anything to do with the foundations, a reminder that on a self-funded project, the foundations are rarely the co