Downs Farms Homes for Sale

Living in Downs Farms

Downs Farms is a detached neighborhood in the 08003 section of Cherry Hill Township, built off Walt Whitman Boulevard. Hillside Drive carries most of it, with Byron Terrace, Chaucer Place, Longfellow Drive and Dumas Road filling in around it. No association, no gate, houses on their own lots.

The street names are a literature shelf. Byron, Chaucer, Longfellow and Dumas — and the boulevard this neighborhood addresses off is named for Walt Whitman, who lived out his last years in Camden about three miles west of these houses and is buried at Harleigh. His house on Mickle Street is still standing and still open. So the poet on the main road is not a borrowed name the way the others are; he is a local, and the developer who laid this out in 1964 was building in his county. Once you notice it you cannot un-notice it on the drive in.

The housing is mid-sixties and the form is emphatic. Most of Downs Farms went up in 1964, with a handful from 1960, and the bi-level and the split level are what this neighborhood is — straight bi-levels, bi-level colonials, split levels, plus Traditional, Colonial and Contemporary plans alongside them. Four bedrooms is the standard, with five in the larger plans, and two-and-a-half baths is the common configuration running up to three full. Basements under most of them, garages on many. If the split-level layout is specifically what you want — living levels separated by a few steps rather than a full flight — this is one of the better concentrations of it in the township.

Here is the thing that makes this neighborhood simpler than most of Cherry Hill: all of Downs Farms feeds Cherry Hill High School East. That sounds unremarkable until you shop elsewhere in this township. Barclay and Brandywoods are both split down the middle, with the East-West line running between houses on the same road, so two comparable houses a few doors apart are genuinely different purchases. There is no line to find here. Every address in this pull comes up East, and a school-motivated buyer can stop checking.

Sixty years of growth has done the rest — mature canopy, established planting, and the deep rear yards that came with sixties lot layouts. A number of them have picked up in-ground pools along the way.

One filing note: the MLS records this neighborhood as Downs Farm, singular, while most people say Farms. Both versions float around in listing data and in the way buyers search, so a portal query on one can miss houses filed under the other. This page pulls the neighborhood rather than the spelling. Downs Farms trades steadily — there is usually something moving here — and buyers working this tier in 08003 generally also walk Woodcrest and Apple Hill, which has frontage on the same boulevard. Schools are Cherry Hill Township Public Schools throughout. The recently sold homes across the township are the clearest read on where this tier actually settles.