Lafayette Neighborhoods and Real Estate

Lafayette sits just east of the Caldecott Tunnel along Highway 24, a small city spread across valleys and oak-covered hills, with a compact downtown and a BART station at its center. Most of its homes are single-family houses on larger lots than you'll find closer to the Bay, many of them tucked into the hills.

That setting shapes almost every purchase here. Buying in Lafayette usually means weighing the lot, the slope, and the trees as carefully as the house itself.

The Saklan people, a Bay Miwok group, lived in these valleys long before Spanish colonization. In 1834, Rancho Acalanes was granted to Candelario Valencia. Elam Brown, who had led a wagon train west from Missouri, bought the rancho's roughly 3,300 acres, and in 1848 he and his wife Margaret built the first house of what became Lafayette. The settlement went by names like Brown's Corner and Brown's Mill. When storekeeper Benjamin Shreve applied for a post office in 1857, the name Centerville was already taken, so his wife Adaline suggested La Fayette, after La Fayette County, Wisconsin, where she grew up. The post office opened on March 2, 1857.

For nearly a century Lafayette stayed a farming village. The Caldecott Tunnel, opened in 1937, put it within easy reach of Oakland, and in the decades after World War II the farming village turned into a commuter town. EBMUD completed the Lafayette Reservoir in 1933 as a standby water supply and opened it to the public in 1966. Two years later, on July 29, 1968, Lafayette incorporated as a city, and BART followed in 1973.

I'm a REALTOR® with eXp Realty, and I read a home's real condition before an inspector does: foundation, drainage, retaining walls, and additions done well or badly. On a Lafayette hillside lot, those are the questions that decide whether a home is a good buy.

Lafayette also runs on Contra Costa County's rules, not the Alameda County rules most of my Oakland and Berkeley clients know. The transfer tax is lower, and for homes in certain fire hazard zones, a routine defensible space inspection is part of the sale. There's no ordinance requiring a sewer lateral certificate in Lafayette, however a sewer lateral inspection is recommended. I explain every step on the selling your home in Lafayette page.