Belmont Heights, Belmont Homes for sale, recent sales and a Property Nerd’s guide

Hallmark Drive is the spine. It leaves Ralston Avenue near Belmont Canyon Road, winds south past Benson Way, Comstock Circle, Wemberly Drive and Waltham Cross, then swings east past Soho Circle, Paddington Court and Waterloo Court to the Wakefield Drive loop and Leigh Way near the San Carlos line. St. James Road runs along the western edge past Fox Elementary, with Heritage Court, Meadow Park Circle and Rinconada Circle off it. The later streets borrow English place names (Waltham Cross, Paddington, Soho, Waterloo, Somerset, Sherborne), so a walk here reads a little like a map of England.

Lots run larger than in Belmont's older hills. About 300 parcels are zoned R-1A, with a 9,600 sq ft minimum and a median parcel near 10,600 sq ft; the planned-development streets have a median closer to 7,600 sq ft, and the R-1B blocks around Tahoe Drive about 7,000. The ground is gentler too: the city's parcel-slope estimates put the median single-family lot at about 11 percent, and only a few percent of R-1A lots average 30 percent or more.

Houses are larger than in Central, Cipriani or Plateau-Skymont, with a median of about 2,300 sq ft, and a little more than half are two-story (about 416, against 327 one-story, in assessor records). The split follows the decades: the late-1950s streets around Tahoe Drive are about three-quarters one-story, the 1960s streets are half and half, and the 1970s Wakefield and Somerset loops are about seven in ten two-story. Belmont Woods Road is a private street in the city's data, and the planned-development streets may have homeowners associations or recorded maintenance agreements, so ask.