Bottoms Lake Homes for Sale

Living in Bottoms Lake

Bottoms Lake sits on the west side of Clementon, along Clementon-Erial Road between Audubon Avenue and Scott Avenue, with West and East Atlantic Avenue, Reading Avenue and Woodland running through it. Clementon Lake and the amusement park are just across the water to the east. It is one of the older parts of a borough that is itself among the oldest and smallest in Camden County — the housing stock here goes back to the turn of the last century, well before the park opened.

The lots are the thing to understand. These are long, narrow, deep parcels — on the order of seventy-eight feet wide by two hundred nine feet deep, better than a third of an acre — laid out when land was cheap and nobody was optimizing a subdivision yield. You do not get that shape in anything built in the last fifty years. What it gives you is real backyard depth: room for an outdoor kitchen, a fire pit, landscaped grounds, a garden, a workshop, whatever you want back there, with distance between you and whoever is behind you. In a borough under a square mile, that is the scarce thing.

The homes are traditional, detached, and genuinely old — some dating to around 1900 — typically three stories with full basements underneath. That means the finished square footage on a listing sheet can understate the house considerably, because a fully finished basement with a bedroom and full bath is common here and it does not always count above grade. Five bedrooms and three-and-a-half baths inside twenty-two hundred above-grade feet, with another eleven hundred finished below, is the kind of thing this neighborhood produces.

Condition is where the real range lives. Some of these have been taken all the way down and rebuilt — new kitchens, modern open plans, primary suites with ensuite baths, in-law setups in the finished lower level, stone-paved driveways, landscaped grounds. Others are honest originals that have been maintained but not modernized. A house from 1900 is not a house from 1980, and what matters most is not the year on the tax record but what has been replaced since: the roof, the electrical, the plumbing, the heating system, the windows. Ask for all of it, in writing, and get an inspector who works on old houses.

Systems here are better than the age suggests. Natural gas forced-air heat, natural gas hot water, central air, and public water and public sewer — no wells and no septic in this part of the borough. Basements typically have sump pumps, which is normal for a neighborhood this close to water and is a feature rather than a warning as long as it works.

On schools, Clementon's younger students attend the borough's own public school, and high school students go on to Overbrook High School under the Pine Hill School District. Clementon does not feed Eastern Regional. Route 30 is close, the PATCO station in nearby Lindenwold puts Philadelphia inside a straightforward commute, and Gloucester Township wraps most of the borough. To see the rest of the neighborhood options here, Clementon Lake and Silver Lake are the other established lakeside pockets, Clementon condos and townhomes covers the low-maintenance side of the market, and the Clementon homes page carries everything on the market at once.