Alkimos has one of the highest shares of England born residents of any suburb on this list, and the youngest population of all of them. The median age is 31.
It is also the one where the advice you find online is most likely to be out of date, because the train arrived in July 2024 and almost everything written before that assumed it had not.
The One Thing People Get Wrong
You will read that Alkimos is a long drive from everything. That was true until 14 July 2024.
The Yanchep rail extension took the line 14.5 kilometres north of Butler and opened three stations, at Alkimos, Eglinton and Yanchep. Alkimos station has more than seven hundred parking bays.
Anything written before mid 2024, and a lot of it is still near the top of a search, describes a suburb whose nearest station was Butler. Check the current timetable rather than taking either version on trust, including this one.
What It Is Actually Like
New. Most of it has been built since 2011, so the houses are modern, the gardens are young and the trees are not tall yet. If you want an established street with shade, this is not the suburb.
What you get instead is a beach suburb at a price that reflects its age, and neighbours who arrived the same way you did. Nearly one in five residents was born in England, and only half the suburb was born in Australia.
The median age of 31 is the lowest here by some way. There are a great many small children.
Schools
Primary schools have opened alongside the estates rather than ahead of them, which is the normal pattern in a growth suburb and the thing to check rather than assume.
Confirm catchments with the Department of Education for the specific address you are looking at, because boundaries in new suburbs move as schools open.
The Australian school year starts in late January and finishes in December. It does not run September to July. If you are arriving mid year your children will be joining part way through, and if you are timing your move around schooling you are aiming at January rather than September.
Being Honest About Alkimos
It is still being built. You may buy into a finished street and look at a construction site for two years, and the only way to know is to walk the actual street rather than the display village.
Forty two kilometres is a long way out. The train helps enormously and it is still the better part of an hour to the city.
Services have followed the housing rather than led it, so shopping and medical have at times meant a drive to Butler or Clarkson. That keeps changing, which is itself the point: check what is open now.
The Questions We Cannot Answer Here
Mortgages, visas, insurance and shipping come up constantly, and we are not licensed to advise on any of them. What we can do is point you at the firms in our directory who are, and who deal with British and Irish arrivals every week.
Ask Somebody Who Lives There
40,000+ British and Irish people in Perth are in our community, across the group, page and Instagram, and a good number of them live in Alkimos. If you want to know whether it suits your family, ask them. It is free to join, and somebody will answer within the hour, usually several somebodies with strong opinions.