The beachside suburb where you could live for $35 a week

Kevin Annetts can remember paying $35 rent per week to live in a duplex along the front of one of the Coast's favourite beaches.

FLASHBACK: Alexandra Headland pictured back around the early-1980s. Picture: Contributed

KEVIN Annetts can remember paying $35 rent per week to live in a duplex along the front of Alexandra Headland.

It was the late-1970s when he drove over the Alexandra Headland hill for the first time.

Fresh in from Western Australia, he was greeted by thunderous, storm-driven surf and pouring rain.

Parked up under the awning of a service station, Mr Annetts went across the road to the old Alexandra Headland Surf Life Saving Club where he enjoyed a few beers with the friendly locals.

The rest, he said, was history.

"It was a fantastic place to live," he said.

"All I did was surf."

Kevin Annetts has loved living in Alexandra Headland for decades. Picture: Warren Lynam

The Kevin Annetts Real Estate principal started in the industry in 1979 and has lived and worked in the region for the best part of four decades.

He still owns one of the few remaining vacant blocks in Alexandra Headland.

Mr Annetts said he could remember when he arrived that a large portion of houses were owned by people from out west, or in other parts of the southeast, who bought holiday homes in the region.

Many were leased out as holiday or permanent rentals but now he said owner-occupiers were very prominent.

He remembered selling houses in the area for as little as $60,000, a far cry from the astronomical prices that dot the suburbs today.

Keen golfer and former Alexandra Headland Community Association president Josie Ryan. Picture: Patrick Woods

Renowned as a friendly, laid-back place and something of a hidden gem, Mr Annetts said there was always the sense that it would become a very sought-after pocket of the Sunshine Coast.

He said the place hadn't changed a lot.

But one place that has changed was the surf club.

Mr Annetts was one of about 100 now life members who went as guarantors to secure the funding needed for a major redevelopment of the club in the early-mid 1990s.

DRONE: 2018 Aerial photo of Alexandra Headland. Picture: Patrick Woods

Former Alexandra Headland Community Association president Josie Ryan said her husband learnt to surf at Alexandra Headland, where his parents owned a holiday home, so it'd always been a place they wanted to settle.

In the last decade Ms Ryan said amenities had improved a lot in the suburb, despite no major property developments.

Although that was changing with two apartment projects being undertaken on Alexandra Pde at the moment.

She said the streetscaping and beachfront gardens had improved the area while countless volunteer hours had gone into cleaning up the foreshore and Alexandra Headland had established itself as a destination, not just a thoroughfare, separate from Mooloolaba and Maroochydore.

"(It's changed) in small ways but the essential character has not. It's still much loved by the people who've lived here," Ms Ryan said.