The 52 “Halcyon” units, designed by high-profile Australian architects Bates Smart, will be spread over four floors above Doma’s five-storey Little National Hotel on the south side of Honeysuckle Drive. 

Doma is the Canberra company behind the waterfront Lume apartments at Honeysuckle, which sold off the plan last year in five days, and the harbour-side Huntington apartments across the road from the Halcyon.

It has also proposed two 30-storey commercial and residential towers on the Store building site in Hunter Street and is building The Crossing, a unit development in Merewether Street.

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Doma’s general manager of development, Gavin Edgar, said the company and the state government’s Hunter Development Corporation were committed to beautifying the harbourfront near the hotel with a “significant capital investment”.

Data from the PriceFinder website show August has been the peak selling time for units in inner-city Newcastle over the past three years.

The median price of units in the 2300 postcode has grown 33.7 per cent over the past two calendar years and now sits at $690,000.

But the volume of apartment sales in the inner-city has dipped markedly from 301 in 2015 to 165 in 2016, 169 last year and 59 this year.

It is a similar story in nearby Newcastle West, where 117 units sold in 2015 but only 53 last year and 16 this year in the 2302 postcode.

“With the success of Lume on the waterfront and the demand for apartments in the Honeysuckle precinct, we have a healthy database of buyers waiting for the opportunity to enter the market, and our agents are preparing them for the launch of Halcyon,” Colliers residential director Dane Crawford said on Tuesday.