Smokey Run Townhomes for Sale

Living in Smokey Run

Smokey Run is a small townhome community in Berlin Borough, built in 1992 on a single curving loop off Tansboro Road, a turn or two off the White Horse Pike. The whole community sits on one street — Smokey Run Drive — in clusters of attached homes set back behind a wooded edge, with a pond and the borough's shopping just across the road. It went up in one phase, which is why the homes here are as consistent as they are.

The thing worth knowing before you compare these to anything else is the size. Attached homes from the early nineties in this part of Camden County usually run small; these do not. Living space here runs roughly 1,600 to 1,765 square feet in three- and four-bedroom layouts with two full baths and a powder room, plus an attached one-car garage and a fenced rear yard. That is a detached-house footprint in an attached-house package, and it is the reason people who look here tend to stop looking. Buyers working the borough's attached market should also see the full condo and townhome inventory and the smaller Little Brooke.

There is a real difference between an interior row and an end unit here, and it is worth being deliberate about which one you want. The end units are the four-bedroom plans, and at least one of them puts a bedroom on the first floor — usable as a home office, a guest room, or a way to live on one level when stairs stop being welcome. End units also pick up the side light and the extra outdoor space that an interior row cannot have. Interior rows trade at a different number and are the easier way into the community. Ask which one you are standing in before you compare two listings side by side.

Because every home here was built the same year and most have been held a long time, condition is the variable, not layout. Owners have updated on their own schedules — hardwood floors, energy-efficient windows, replaced heating and air, kitchen upgrades, zoned sprinkler systems, gutter guards and soffits all show up in listings here. Two of these houses can be the same plan and a decade apart in practical terms. What has actually been replaced, and when, is the question that tells them apart.

The association fee here is on the higher side for the borough, and it buys a genuinely maintained community — sidewalks, exterior lighting, underground lawn sprinklers and kept common grounds, the sort of thing that is easy to overlook at a showing and obvious every day you live there. As always, get the specific breakdown of what the fee covers on the home you are considering rather than on the community, because coverage is the part that varies. The other mixed-product neighborhoods worth seeing alongside this one are Lonaconing and Carriage Stop.

On schools, the listings here look contradictory and are not. Berlin Borough runs Berlin Community School from pre-kindergarten through eighth grade, and students continue to Eastern Regional High School in Voorhees. Some records in this community name the borough district and some name Eastern — that is one district and one regional high school, not a split, and sellers here name both because both are a selling point. Location closes the argument: shopping and dining are a short walk across Tansboro Road, Route 73 and the Atlantic City Expressway are minutes out, and downtown Berlin is close enough to be your downtown. The recently sold homes across the borough are the clearest read on where these townhomes are actually landing.