The Byron Bay house you linked is a 7000sqft 7-bedroom mansion... doesn’t seem like quite a fair comparison, random little bungalows in the Bay Area cost the same.
From a quick dig around, it looks like there's not a lot under $1m in Byron Bay - which makes sense, it's a very pretty town in a beautiful location, it's small, well known and popular.
An hour up the coast at Tweed Heads (the southern end of Gold Coast), things are a lot more reasonable.
Many regional areas in Australia are going through a property boom as people rearrange their lives around remote working. Byron is right at the tip of that mountain. There are many more affordable towns both north and south of Byron.
