Earthworks for the first 60 blocks are due to start in two weeks, across two stages, and One Agency director Ash Brown said buyers were attracted to the estate’s grid structure and views to Mount Canobolas, and was sure location would also entice health sector workers.

“It’s nice to be home from work in five minutes,” he said.

“It’s crazy we have a traffic report in Orange but there are bottlenecks in the morning near most schools… and Forbes Road.”

Mr Brown said most of the first stage’s 17 lots had been pre-sold and averaged about 800-900 square metres.

The 1700-lot urban release area was a talking point on Wednesday when progress was announced on the Bloomfield Private Hospital project, planned for the former drive-in cinema site in Forest Road.

Mayor John Davis said it had been years since the council first started talking about a subdivision at south Orange, but even then, it was considered a probable hospital suburb.

“Facilities in that area … will take pressure off the middle of the city,” he said.

“I think they’re going to work great together because we’ll have within the next two or three years the completion of the southern distributor from Dairy Creek Road to Bathurst Road to the west of Orange and that will join up Shiralee [and] the hospital precinct.”

Mr Brown said the Southern Feeder Road was due by the time the first houses were complete in two years’ time.

“It will be really good because the people who work over there won’t have to drive into town and back, it will connect it all up,” he said.

Cr Davis said it was planning at its best.

“You get criticism at times … in regard to, ‘was that thought of,  was that planned?’,” he said.

“This has been planned for many years.”

Town planner Peter Basha said the hospital precinct’s design would maintain the country feel.

“The idea, and I think the architects have been clever with it, they’ve kept a fairly narrow footprint even though it’s a taller building at six storeys, but what they’ve managed to do in the design is maintain some view corridors through the site so you can still look through to the west, there’s a rural hinterland to the west of the site so you’ll still be able to get the sense that you still are in the country but have these wonderful facilities at the same time,” he said.