Lemmon Valley

Lemmon Valley is the big, semi-rural bowl north of Reno where Lemmon Drive strings together everything from half-acre horse setups to manufactured homes to brand-new subdivisions. It is a closed hydrographic basin: water that falls here stays here, gathering in the Swan Lake and Silver Lake playas that give the valley its open, high-desert floor.

Lending in Lemmon Valley rewards homework. The 2017 storms pushed Swan Lake over its banks, and Washoe County’s updated FEMA flood maps, adopted in the 2024 to 2025 cycle, roughly doubled the residential parcels in the mapped floodplain, so flood-zone determination and flood insurance get priced into the payment on day one. Add manufactured-home title work and well and septic review on the acreage, and this is a valley where Art earns his keep before the appraisal is even ordered.

The geography splits east and west around US 395, with the airport and industrial base of Stead on the west rim and quieter acreage running north toward Silver Knolls. Downtown Reno is about fifteen minutes down 395, and the valley’s own job base keeps growing as the North Valleys logistics corridor fills in.

Per 2026 northern Nevada market guides, Lemmon Valley trades on a wide spread: manufactured homes from the 300s, site-built through the 400s, and acreage or newer builds carrying sales past $500. Ask Art where your payment lands this season.

Lemmon Valley was ranch country until the Army built Reno Army Air Base west of Swan Lake in 1942, and the postwar decades filled the valley floor with homesteads, manufactured homes and small subdivisions. The winter of 2017 wrote the hardest chapter, when a string of storms raised Swan Lake into yards and homes and kept it there for years behind flood barriers. The valley that came out of it is better mapped and better defended, and it is growing again.