Serra Highlands & Buri Buri, South San Francisco Homes for sale, recent sales and a Property Nerd’s guide

This is the part of town that carries the old rancho's name. BART's page for South San Francisco station notes that the area came from a portion of old Rancho Buri Buri, and the postwar tracts reused the name: city subdivision records list Rancho Buri-Buri maps No. 1, 2, 3 and 3A, Serra Highlands maps 1A through 3B and Sterling Manor maps 1 and 2, all recorded between 1940 and 1959.

The city's neighborhood story map follows the build-out in photos: Buri Buri in 1946, a 1948 photo captioned as a Doelger subdivision, a 1949 aerial of the Buri Buri tract, Serra Highlands in 1954, a 1956 price sheet for new Serra Highlands homes and a 1970 aerial of the finished neighborhood. Census estimates match that timeline: in tract 6018, which covers the bulk of the area, about 59 percent of homes date from the 1950s and 19 percent from the 1940s. A 1983 city map in the public library's history collection still labels Serra Highlands, Sterling Manor and Rancho Buri-Buri separately.

Later pieces filled the edges. Promenade, a 1980s map, added Cymbidium Circle and Orchid, Freesia, Hibiscus and Miltonia drives next to McLellan Drive, and BART's South San Francisco station opened at El Camino Real and McLellan Drive in 2003, per the story map. East of El Camino Real, the strip between McLellan Drive, Mission Road and the Colma line holds a manufactured-home community, an apartment complex and a shopping center; Census maps put part of that strip in the Town of Colma.