Danville

Danville sits in the San Ramon Valley in Contra Costa County, running along the I-680 corridor at the western foot of Mount Diablo. The Iron Horse Regional Trail — a former Southern Pacific rail alignment — runs the length of the town north to south.

The housing stock is unusually varied for a town of its size. The blocks around Hartz Avenue and Railroad Avenue hold the oldest inventory, much of it early-twentieth-century cottages on small downtown lots. Moving west and south, large tract subdivisions built between the 1960s and 1980s dominate, generally on flatter parcels with regular lot geometry. East and up toward the Mount Diablo foothills, parcels get larger and less uniform, with a higher proportion of custom and semi-custom construction.

Those three groups do not trade on the same logic. Downtown parcels are priced substantially on walkability and lot scarcity; tract inventory on square footage, condition and school-attendance boundaries; foothill parcels on view, acreage and privacy. Comparable sets rarely cross between them, which is the single most common pricing error in this market.