Rinconada Hills

Rinconada Hills is a gated community of roughly 107 acres on the western side of Los Gatos, and it is the single most useful address in this town for the clients I work with. It was built in five phases between 1968 and 1981 by the developer Brown and Kaufmann, and it contains about 394 townhomes alongside roughly 40 detached homes, with somewhere near a thousand residents. It is not a neighborhood in the usual sense so much as a self contained community with its own governance.

The reason I mention it constantly is inventory. Los Gatos is one of the hardest towns in Santa Clara County to downsize inside of, because most of what people want here comes with stairs, a hillside or a century of maintenance. Rinconada Hills is the exception. It is attached housing with an association that handles the grounds and the exteriors, behind gates, with amenities on site, in a town where almost nothing else offers that combination.

Those amenities are genuinely substantial: multiple swimming pools, tennis courts, a clubhouse and round the clock gated security, set among mature landscaping and open space. For someone selling a five bedroom house with a half acre of garden, the shift is dramatic and usually welcome. The grounds still look beautiful and none of it is your problem anymore.

Two honest caveats. First, not every unit is single level, so if stairs are the specific thing you are solving for, the floor plan matters as much as the community does and I would look carefully rather than assume. Second, an association with amenities of this scale carries real monthly dues and its own reserve and governance questions, and I read the association documents carefully on behalf of any buyer I represent here. Both are manageable; neither should be a surprise.

The location works well for daily life. Downtown Los Gatos is a short drive for restaurants, the Los Gatos Public Library and the town’s senior services, LGS Recreation runs programming for the 55 and over crowd, and El Camino Health’s Los Gatos Hospital is close by. Vasona Lake County Park and the Los Gatos Creek Trail provide flat walking a few minutes away.

Because of where this sits near the town boundary, school assignment can fall outside the Los Gatos districts, with Campbell area schools serving some of this ground. That matters less to most buyers here than it does elsewhere in town, but I confirm it on every transaction regardless.

On price, Los Gatos ran a town wide median sale of about $2.7 million through the summer of 2026, a figure driven almost entirely by detached houses. Townhomes at Rinconada Hills trade well below that, with the detached homes in the community sitting somewhere between. That gap is the whole opportunity: for many of my clients, selling a Los Gatos house and buying here releases a very large amount of capital while keeping the same town, the same schools for visiting grandchildren and the same zip code. My Los Gatos home prices page tracks the wider market and the full Los Gatos area guide covers the rest of town.

If that move sounds like something you have been circling, the order you do it in matters, and so does Proposition 19, which lets homeowners 55 and over carry their property tax basis to a replacement home. Getting that right can be worth thousands of dollars a year for the rest of your life. Walking older adults and their families through exactly this is what I do full time. Book a call with me to map it out, or read how I prepare and market a home before a move like this.