Living in Lake Victoria
Lake Victoria sits off Smithville Boulevard in Smithville, Galloway Township, laid out along East Lake Front Circle and Victoria Drive. The name is literal — the community is built around real water, with several connected lakes running through the property and homes arranged along their banks. The buildings date to 1988 and the homes are two-level townhouses of roughly 1,430 square feet, three bedrooms and two and a half baths, which makes these the largest attached homes in the Smithville area by a comfortable margin.
The lake is what you are buying and it is worth being precise about it. This is not a retention basin with a fountain in it — the aerials show open water with homes fronting it on multiple sides. But not every home in the community has the view. Some back directly onto the water, some look across at it, and some sit on the interior of the loop with no water at all. Two homes with identical floor plans and identical fees can be very different properties on that basis alone, and the difference shows up in price. Ask which side of the water a listing sits on before anything else, and go look rather than trusting a photo taken from the one angle that catches it.
The homes themselves are laid out well for the format. All three bedrooms are upstairs along with the laundry, which is the arrangement most people actually want and which a lot of townhouse communities get wrong by putting the washer in the basement. The primary bedroom carries a cathedral ceiling, a walk-in closet and its own bath. Downstairs runs a formal dining room, a large eat-in kitchen with a pass-through for bar seating, and a sunken family room with a wood-burning fireplace opening onto a patio. End units pick up light on an extra side and generally carry the better water views.
Then there is the garage, and it is a genuine differentiator here. These homes come with a detached one-car garage on a private driveway, plus additional parking nearby. Almost nothing else in the attached-home market in this township offers a private garage at all — most give you an assigned exterior space and nothing more. If you want somewhere to put a car through the winter, or a workshop, or the storage that a townhouse never has enough of, that is the reason to look here rather than at the flats down the road.
Now the money, and it works the way it does across Smithville. The monthly figure you see on a listing is a total of two separate association fees — one for Lake Victoria itself and one for the Historic Smithville master association, which is what gives you access to two clubhouses, two pools, playgrounds and the gyms. Ask for the split rather than the total, because the two are billed and governed separately. And ask about the capital contribution due at closing: Lake Victoria charges new owners a multiple of the monthly maintenance fee at settlement, on top of the price and normal closing costs. It is real money, it appears in no listing, and it is exactly the item that surfaces late and strains a tight deal.
Condition varies widely and matters more than usual here, because these homes are now nearly forty years old and the mechanical systems are at the age where they come due. Some homes have been fully updated with new flooring, stainless appliances, refreshed baths and newer systems; others carry original furnaces and air conditioning and are priced accordingly. Get the age of the HVAC and the water heater on any home you look at seriously. Pets are permitted with restrictions. You are walking distance to the Historic Towne of Smithville and its shops, restaurants and year-round festivals, and minutes from Stockton University, AtlantiCare and the Parkway. To compare against the other Smithville communities, see Hunting Run and Fox Chase, or work through every attached home in the township at once on the Galloway Township condos page.
