The first house blocks inside Ocean Reef Marina go on sale on Thursday 24 September, with prices starting at about $860,000 — and that is for the dirt alone.

It is the first time anyone has been able to buy into the development that has been reshaping Perth's northern coastline for five years. 10 News Perth, which reported the release on Wednesday, described it as the marina's "first taste of oceanfront living".

What is actually for sale

Not much, in the scheme of it. Stage 1 of the marina creates around 70 single residential lots and three larger development sites earmarked for apartments, and DevelopmentWA — the State Government's land agency, which is running the project — is bringing them to market in staged tranches rather than all at once. The 24 September release is the first of those tranches.

The $860,000 entry price buys a vacant block. A buyer then has to build on it, inside a marina that will not be finished for another decade. When the whole site is built out, the plan is for roughly 1,000 dwellings, 550 boat pens, 200 boat stackers and about 12,000 square metres of shops, cafés and commercial space.

The marina behind the price

The breakwaters are the part most people have seen from Ocean Reef Road: a southern wall running 1.2km and a northern wall of 670m, both rising eight metres above sea level. They were finished in August 2023. Georgiou Group then began the Stage 1 subdivision works, a contract worth about $107 million.

The sales pitch that comes with all of it is a big one. The project's own material claims more than 8,600 construction jobs and more than $3 billion for the Western Australian economy.

What it has cost

The West Australian reported on Thursday morning that the marina's cost has climbed to $325 million.

That figure is worth handling carefully, because the numbers attached to this project measure different things. The State Government's own allocation across the life of the project has been put at $126.5 million, while total public and private investment in the finished marina is expected to exceed $900 million. A rising headline cost is not automatically the same as a blowout against the government's contribution — but it is a number that will be read that way at a moment when WA is arguing about the price of everything from bricks to petrol.

What was given up to build it

Ocean Reef Marina did not arrive quietly. The Environmental Protection Authority cleared it in February 2019 with conditions attached, and in October 2019 State Parliament passed a bill excising 143 hectares from Marmion Marine Park so the project could expand into it.

Five surf breaks went with it — The Pylon, Middles, Mozzies, Geoffries and Big Rock — waves that northern-suburbs surfers had been riding for generations. That grievance has not gone away. On the same evening the lot prices were announced, 10 News Perth told viewers to tune in to hear why local surfers were unhappy.

Perth has been here before. Hillarys Boat Harbour, a few suburbs down the same coast, cost the city waves too when it was built in the 1980s, and is now the thing people point at when they argue the trade was worth it.

What happens next

The central parkland and a protected family beach are due to open this year, with an eight-lane coastal pool expected in 2027. Civil construction is scheduled to finish around 2030, and the full marina build-out is not anticipated until 2036 or later.

In other words, the people buying in on 24 September are buying a view of a building site — an expensive one, with a long way to run.

Why it matters

Perth gets a genuinely new coastal suburb about once a generation. The last one on this stretch, the original Ocean Reef Boat Harbour, opened on 2 December 1979 and cost $1.6 million — a joint effort between the State Government and what was then the Shire of Wanneroo, opened by Premier Charles Court.

Forty-seven years later, a single empty block on the same headland is priced at more than half of what that entire harbour cost to build. Inflation makes that a useless comparison in strict dollar terms, and nobody should pretend otherwise. But it is a reasonable measure of how much this piece of coast has changed, and of who the next version of it is being built for.

Photo: Orderinchaos via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0). File photo of Hillarys Boat Harbour, the marina built on the same stretch of Perth coast in the 1980s — not Ocean Reef Marina.