After 70 years as a site of education excellence, the 13.32 hectare Charles Sturt University (CSU) South Campus will be up for grabs in February.

Wagga’s key planning document – which will be rewritten by early 2018 – mandates the Turvey Park site be used solely for education but it is common practice for governments to overhaul zoning to maximise privatisation profit. 

Real estate experts predict the sprawling acreage will be chopped up and turned into houses, with developers tipped to pay anywhere between $4 million and $10 million depending on the density of any future rezoning.

Head of Campus at CSU in Wagga Miriam Dayhew does not know whether the windfall will be reinvested in the main CSU Wagga campus or stashed in government coffers.

The Kay Hull Veterinary Teaching Hospital – on a separate land title – will be retained by the university and the regional archives will be relocated to the main campus at Boorooma Street. 

Question marks hang over the futures of Saint Mary MacKillop Colleges and the Riverina Conservatorium of Music.

Property valuer Chris Egan said Wagga’s established suburbs had been crowded out, which would make the university campus hot property.

“Based on general residential zoning you get 10 lots per hectare, which would mean there’d be 130 lots.

“Undeveloped residential land can sell between $25,000 and $40,000 per lot, which means the site will have value of between $4 million and $5 million.

“The government has an obligation to make most of this asset, so if it’s zoned high density residential, it will fetch in the order of $8m to $10m.

“If the government’s smart, they’ll break it up into 20 to 30 lot subdivisions because there’s only a few players big enough to buy the whole site.”

Wagga academic Dr Graeme White, who discovered the comet White-Ortiz-Bolelli, has called on the government to resist the temptation of salivating property developers and build a technology park to combat the city’s “brain drain”.

“My question would be, what's in it for Wagga?” Dr White said.

“It would be a great shame if this piece of land belonging to the university is flogged off for more bloody housing.

“With the NBN there's no reason you can't attract tech industries like those in Silicon Valley (San Francisco), creating the tech capital of Australia.

“Our smart kids go the city and disappear and they won’t come back unless there's a bloody job for them.”