Broome Cable Beach bungalow

This 115 square-metre bungalow sits on a shaded block in Broome, the pearling town on the Kimberley coast where red pindan soil meets turquoise Indian Ocean. The house is proper Broome design: a low-set, cyclone-rated frame with wide eaves, banks of timber louvres, corrugated iron and a lattice-screened verandah wrapping the western side. Three bedrooms — the main with an ensuite — a second bathroom, a big open kitchen-living space with polished concrete floors, ceiling fans throughout and split-system air-conditioning for the build-up. Outside there is a mature poinciana and frangipani canopy, an outdoor shower, a plunge pool, a lock-up shed and off-street parking for a 4WD and camper.

Broome is a genuinely famous destination — Cable Beach, camel trains at sunset, Staircase to the Moon, the pearl farms — and yet residential housing here has stayed unusually accessible because the market is small and cyclical. A three-bedroom house of this quality would be double or triple this price in an equivalent-profile coastal town in New South Wales or Western Australia's south-west. Freehold title, standard WA conveyancing; foreign buyers require FIRB approval and pay WA's foreign buyers duty surcharge. Insurance carries a Kimberley cyclone loading; check the roof tie-downs and window shutters.

Nine hundred metres — a five-minute bike ride down a flat, sealed path — is Cable Beach: twenty-two kilometres of broad white sand meeting water that runs an improbable turquoise, with tides so large the beach doubles in width twice a day. It is patrolled in the dry season, drivable at the northern end, and the sunset camel trains are a genuine daily spectacle rather than a tourist myth. Town Beach on the Roebuck Bay side is where you watch the Staircase to the Moon, and Gantheaume Point at the southern end has dinosaur footprints in the reef at low tide.

Broome has full services for a town of 15,000: Coles and Woolworths, a hospital, medical and dental specialists, primary and secondary schools, a TAFE campus, the historic Sun Pictures outdoor cinema, Chinatown's pearl showrooms and restaurants, the courthouse markets on Saturdays, and a food scene that runs from Matso's brewery to serious seafood.

Broome International Airport sits inside the town boundary — ten minutes from this house — with year-round Perth flights and dry-season direct services to Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. The Great Northern Highway connects to Darwin and Perth for the long drive.

Buy here for the dry season: April to October days in the low thirties, cloudless, with the whole Kimberley — Cape Leveque, the Dampier Peninsula, Gibb River Road — as your backyard.