Living in Sherwood Forest
Sherwood Forest runs along Elton Lane, Meadows Drive and Maria Loretta Lane in Galloway Township, just south of West Jimmie Leeds Road and a short run off the Galloway exit of the Garden State Parkway. It is a compact pocket rather than a sprawling development — three streets, laid out on a regular grid of sixty-by-one-hundred-twenty-foot lots, sitting inside an older established stretch of the township surrounded by the long-standing avenues around Rosemarie, Terry Lane and Father Keis Drive.
The reason to pay attention here is the age of the housing. These are newer homes — built in the last decade, not the last century — which puts Sherwood Forest in a category almost nothing else in Galloway occupies. Most of the township's single-family stock dates from the middle of the last century through the 1990s, and the newer product that does exist tends to come with an association attached to it. Sherwood Forest gives you modern construction with no homeowners association at all. Nothing to pay monthly, no board, no approval process for a fence or a shed. That combination is the whole argument for the street.
And then there is the basement. Homes here carry full basements — finished, heated, with better than six feet of head room — which is genuinely uncommon in this part of Atlantic County. Go looking anywhere else in the township and you will find crawl spaces or slabs; Absecon Highlands, for instance, is crawl-space country almost across the board. A finished basement here is not a bonus room, it is a second living floor, and buyers use it as a home office, a gym, a playroom or a guest suite. On a house whose main floors already run to ten rooms, that is a lot of usable space on a lot under an acre.
The homes themselves are two-story, four bedrooms, two and a half baths, with the primary suite on the second floor carrying its own bath. Natural gas forced-air heat, central air, public water and public sewer — no well and no septic to manage, which is not a given once you head west in this township. One-car attached garages with concrete driveways holding two more. Some homes here carry solar, which is worth asking about specifically, since whether the panels are owned outright or leased changes the picture considerably from one house to the next.
What you are really buying on these three streets is newness without the trade-offs that usually come with it. There is no phased construction going on around you, no model home, no builder still working the tract — the homes were built and the street settled. At six to ten years old the roofs, mechanicals and windows are all still well inside their service life, which is a different proposition from the thirty-and-forty-year-old inventory that makes up most of what is for sale in Galloway. Financing runs conventional and FHA here without difficulty.
Position is convenient rather than scenic. You are minutes from the Parkway, close to Stockton University and AtlantiCare, with shopping and dining along the Jimmie Leeds corridor and Atlantic City and the shore beaches a short drive east. If you are comparing across the township, Blue Heron Pines is the maintenance-included golf community on the western side, Pomona puts you next to the university, Galloway new construction shows what is actually being built right now, and the Galloway Township homes page carries everything on the market at once.
