Home appraisals in Claremont

The oldest blocks surround Claremont Village and the Colleges along Indian Hill Boulevard and College Avenue: Victorian, Colonial Revival, Spanish Colonial Revival and Craftsman bungalow houses, with a scattering of 1930s and 1940s modernist homes. West of Indian Hill, the Village expansion on the former citrus packing plant site added newer mixed-use and residential infill. Arbol Verde, an early-1950s intercultural housing tract, is its own small chapter of Claremont's modernist history.

North of Foothill Boulevard, the old Route 66, the city is largely postwar single-story ranch tracts on wider lots, reaching toward Base Line Road. Above them the foothills hold Claraboya and Padua Hills, near the Padua Hills Theatre, where custom and hillside homes sell on view, grade and access, and Northeast Claremont, where the Stone Canyon Preserve homes sit beside the Wilderness Park. South of the 10 the stock shifts again to later tracts, townhomes and condominiums.

Comparables cross Claremont's pockets only with stated reasoning. A reviewer rejects a Village Craftsman compared with north-of-Foothill ranch houses on bedroom count alone, a Claraboya view home compared with flat lots below with no view or grade adjustment, and a townhome south of the 10 used for a detached house near the Colleges.

The same reviewer rejects a Montclair or Upland tract sale used for a Claremont house with no location adjustment, and gross living area copied from public records on older houses whose porches and back rooms were enclosed decades ago. Measured living area and a pocket-by-pocket comparable search are what hold up.