Pleasant Hill Neighborhoods and Real Estate

Pleasant Hill sits in the middle of Contra Costa County, with Walnut Creek to the south, Concord to the east, Martinez to the north, and Lafayette to the southwest. Interstate 680 runs along its east side, Highway 24 is a few minutes south, and the Pleasant Hill/Contra Costa Centre BART station sits just outside the city limits. Most of the city is single-family neighborhoods from the 1950s and 1960s, gathered around an open-air downtown.

That makes Pleasant Hill one of the more consistent housing markets in the area: block after block of mid-century ranch and split-level homes, many of them remodeled over the decades, with condos and townhomes closer to downtown and the main roads.

The Bay Miwok people lived in this valley long before Spanish colonization. By the 1890s, the area around Pleasant Hill was a farming community of about 19 farms, connected by adobe trails that couldn't be traveled in winter. Among the early settlers were Patrick and Mary Ann Rodgers, who bought 149 acres in 1868 to grow wheat; their ranch survives today as the Rodgers Ranch Heritage Center. The Southern Pacific ran a rail line through the valley in 1891, and an electric railroad to the Sacramento Valley followed in 1911.

What makes Pleasant Hill's story unusual is that its parks came before the city. In 1949, a group of parents and the local grammar school principal formed a recreation council to organize activities, and on January 19, 1951, voters created the Pleasant Hill Recreation & Park District, the first local government agency in the area. The district opened Pleasant Hill Park in the mid-1950s and its pool complex in June 1956. The farmland kept filling in with homes, a post office arrived in 1948, and in November 1961 voters incorporated Pleasant Hill as a city, ten years after they created its park district. City Hall, designed by architect Charles Moore to echo the city's farming history, opened in 1991, and Downtown Pleasant Hill opened in July 2000.

I'm a REALTOR® with eXp Realty, and my specialty is reading a home's condition before an inspector does. In a city where most homes are sixty or seventy years old, that means the electrical panel, the plumbing, the roof, the foundation, and whether the family room added in 1978 was ever permitted.

Pleasant Hill runs on Contra Costa County's rules, with one City form of its own. The transfer tax is the county's alone. There's no ordinance requiring a sewer lateral certificate in Pleasant Hill, however a sewer lateral inspection is recommended. The City does require a short weatherization disclosure at sale, and a few homes on the city's west edge are in a High fire hazard zone. I walk through each step on the selling your home in Pleasant Hill page.