andy w

hi
We have been here just under 2 years and loving it. We brought a house in Wakiki with a 5 minute walk to the beach. Its about the best beach i have ever seen great for the kids. We had a rental for a year just down from rocky city (shopping center) it took about 5 mins to drive to beach and 15 to walk to the shopping center. quite a bit of graffiti and rubbish around this area, due to the center. Most areas are nice but you tend to find you get more land for your bucks in Wakiki, Safetybay, Sholewater, Rockingham & Coolungup. Block size seem to be around 700sqm. The other areas are new so block sizes are a lot smaller 500 - 600 sqm. The new builds are fantastic but next to nothing in the way of a garden.What i would advise you do is spend a weekend touring the open houses, estate agents open up for sale houses for inspection, you get a list from the local paper. This would give you a good incite as to what is available.
All the best

Elaine

Gordo Marshall

South of Perth can be very nice, but like other posters highlight, the distances you propose are too far from Mandurah to Perth. Realistically I think S Harbor is about the furthest you would like to be from Perth if communting - just think about all that heat and trying to drive too far!' easy to say when you are sat in the UK in the rain etc, but when you are in WA the reality will soon sink in if you have to drive too far!.- half the reason most of us came to Australia was to get away from the car park highways we have created ourselves. Other posters are correct about the northern suburbs - too far from Rocko etc.

If you get google map online and look at the distance from Yanchep in the north to Mandurah in the south (the most southerly bit of Mandurah) it is around 100 miles believe it or not!. That is the same as driving from Edinburgh to Carlisle! Staggering I reckon!. In addition the traffic snarls around Perth are pretty full-on too, and getting worse. Best bet if you are working Perth I reckon is to locate yourself not far from a railway station. The trains and cheap and fast. It is the BEST way to get from the areas you suggest to Perth central and feed out from there.

House are ALOT cheaper round Rocko, etc, and I think Baldivis is a lovely location and a bit cheaper than S Harbour as you are a bit more inland (around 10kms). There are alot of private little estates around there, and near Settlers too!. It is well-connected to the end of the freeway, and will attach to the currently under build Mandurah / Bunbury bypass (that will be a HUGE blessing when that arrives) - I HATE driving in Manduarh in mid-summer - endless traffic lights that go on and on and on and ...... on and on and on (you get the idea. I would live north of Mandurah if I were you. Oh yeh, and Golden Bay etc are nice too. The local secondary is the new Comet Bay College - very good apparently.

Good luck


Best of luck.

ACE

Hi Steve,
I would recommend that you rent somewhere short term before you arrive (a few weeks maybe) and visit the places you mentioned. I can't stress how important it is to choose the right place. I have so many friends who have jumped in too quickly and ended up in an area that doesn't suit them or their families and then felt that they had made a mistake and wanted to move back home. The biggest single factor in us settling so quickly was that we chose absolutely the right place for us. This area has everything that we moved to Australia for therefore we don't feel dissolutioned by the hype. A really useful exercise for us was to drive around the areas we were interested in at different times of the day and different days of the week. Another thing we did was to look at the front gardens to see how well kept they were. Out of the places you mentioned Secret Harbor is probably the most appealing but that is because I prefer new and tidy areas where some prefer older more established suburbs. I personally didn't get a feel for any of those places but you may love them. We are south of Mandurah in Port Bouvard a fairly new suburb which is quiet, very friendly and has a variety of houses as well as a very good primary school. It is built on two stunning beaches (a family beach and a surf beach), it is walking distance to the estuary and is also built around Venice style canals on one side, a marina on the other and a championship golf course on another side. There is a shopping precinct 2 minutes away with a Wollies, doctor, dentist, optician, hair dresser, bottle shop etc and far too many take away restaurants. We are building slightly further south in Dawesville as we wanted a bigger block. My husband commutes to the Kwinana industrial area but he only has to do it 4 out of 10 days so it's not too bad. We have friends who commute to Perth 5 days a week and the general consensus is that it is a bit of a pain if you drive but not too bad if you are able to take the train.


If schools are important you need to think very carefully about where you settle, talk to the locals they are generally very happy to give you an honest opinion about the local schools we found that there are some good state primary schools around but it gets a bit tricky when it comes to high schools (I am a high school maths and IT teacher).

Hope this helps

ACE