Land Acquisition and Development Approvals: Wind, Solar, BESS

Enhar has an exciting opportunity for an experienced and efficient Land Acquisitions and Development Approvals Manager to join our growing team.

Our vision is to be the leading renewable energy and storage consultant for origination and development approval services in Oceania. We do this through empowering partnerships between developers, landowners and regulatory authorities.

Our values are: Excellence, inclusiveness, enthusiasm, making a difference, innovation, teamwork, transparency, clarity and cohesion.

We are seeking a team member who is in their mid-career phase: Holding 12-16 years of professional experience in relevant fields.

You are passionate about striking land deals between developers and landowners to create win-win outcomes, and you are experienced in guiding projects through state government development approvals.

The job is full time.

For candidates in or near Melbourne, office days are Tuesdays and Thursdays, other days can be worked from home.

They essential skills you must have are:

1. You are great at communicating with rural landowners and understanding their land usage
2. You are skilled at land acquisition negotiation acting for developers, landowners or real estate agents.
3. You are skilled at managing projects through development approvals processes including state government (VIC experience essential), with established contacts within planning authorities.
4. You are skilled with computers and organising online documentation including carefully editing land agreement documents. You are skilled at using cloud software tools to interact with your colleagues when working from home or during field trips.

Desirable skills include:

1. Experience with negotiating wind farm and/or solar farm or battery land agreements
2. Experience with site selection for wind farms and/or battery or solar projects, transmission lines in NSW, QLD or other states
3. Experience managing projects through development approvals processes at state government level in SA, NSW, QLD.
4. Computer based mapping experience for site identification. We have a GIS team who will provide detailed maps for you but if you understand and can do some mapping in GIS this is strongly regarded.

You have project management skills with proven track record in taking responsibility for project outcomes including: land agreements successfully negotiated and executed and development approvals secured. Experience in renewable energy infrastructure is well regarded, along with a strong understanding of the factors which make a robust 'investable' land agreements which developers and host landowners both agree to.

Our client project pipeline is primarily in VIC, NSW, SA and QLD. Our head office is in Melbourne but you can be located in regional VIC as long as you are willing and able to travel to our office weekly.

You will travel to site visits regionally and interstate overnight for up to 5 days every month to visit landowners and sites.

About us

Enhar's mission is to increase the pace of renewable energy and storage deployment in Australia through better development services leading to faster land agreements and development approvals. Out team raises the standard of the solar and smart energy industry through excellence in project development, engineering and quality management.

We’ve proven ourselves over 17 years business with steady growth and expansion of our reputation and client base. Our team are passionate about deploying clean energy technology to solve the climate crisis. The renewable energy revolution must be both fast and high quality/durable and that is what we are all about. Securing good sites with high integrity land agreements is key.

About you

You are an experienced land acquisition manager, with a real estate or/and renewable energy background, who is supportive of clean energy, has relevant experience in land deals for large rural infrastructure projects, and have achieved development approval outcomes.

Your personal values align with Enhar's mission above.

About the Role

Your Strategic Objectives are:

· Secure land agreements for wind farms, solar farms, BESS.

· Secure development approvals for these projects once land is secured

Your Success Factors include the following regular activities:

· Regularly meet and engage landowners

· Meet Enhar clients weekly (mostly online) and provide clear visibility of progress of sites

Your Core Competencies are:

• Communication, empathy, emotional intelligence
• Able to compellingly engage stakeholders including farming families, to get the best outcome for the project and our client.
• Decisive project manager willing to take control of projects and stakeholders to drive outcomes in land acquisition and development approvals
• Work with our in-house design team to apply site constraints into concept designs which landowners accept
• Take full responsibility for land acquisition and development approval outcomes and timeframes and take a strong pride in effective delivery
• Manage specialist consultants working on development approvals and coordinate the consultants to provide holistic outcomes
• Quality control of consultants reports by reading and understanding the validity, identifying areas of improvement and ensure reports shared with clients and planning authorities are of the highest quality
• Ability to write reports including project management dashboards
• Fluent English with correct grammar and spelling without over-reliance on AI
• Competent in software for remote working including Outlook email, Outlook shared calendar, Teams meetings and video calls, Workflowmax for weekly timesheet recording, cloud file management in Onedrive, ability to use phone for most of these functions while travelling remotely

Qualifications you Must Have:

· Experience in land acquisition for development companies or real estate industry

· Experienced in any of wind farm, solar farm, battery project land acquisition

· At least 8+ years experience in securing land and development approvals permits including rural projects

· Native level English speaking, writing and reading skills

· Client facing skills, charisma, ability to build trust and rapport with diverse landowners

· Valid Australian driving License. Flexible to use own vehicle for travel to sites within a days drive of your residence.

· Australian permanent residency status

· Australian based applicants only, must have over 15 years continuous living in Australia , or at least 10 years if previously lived and worked in country with similar land ownership and planning regime for a further 5+ years

Qualifications we’d like you to have:

· Located in VIC or NSW, however South Australia or QLD located appicants will also be considered, you must be able to travel to regional VIC, NSW, SA and VIC up to once a month with up to 4 night overnight trips

· Hands on background in agriculture, farming, grazing, ability to understand and get along with rural landowners extremely well

· Good working understanding of physical footprint layout of wind farms, solar farms and BESS projects e.g. have visited multiple projects

Salary Range:

The package will be in the range $145,000-$160,000 (depending on experience) + super base salary, plus success fees when you successfully negotiate executed land agreements between landowners and our clients.

What we do

Current Enhar ReGen projects include origination of large scale wind farms, solar farms and BESS for major international and national developers with large scale pipelines in Australia.

Typical project scales are 100-500MW, located in regional VIC, SA, QLD and NSW

We are also providing electric vehicle charging station origination.

We have an established in house team including project manager, land negotiators, GIS specialist, environmental planner, project engineer, layout draftsman and a founding director responsible for this department.