A small Gloucester County borough has been named one of the hottest zip codes in the country

One of Gloucester County’s smallest municipalities — a place created in the 19th century as a resort for wealthy Philadelphians — is a home-buying hot spot.

Realtor.com ranked Wenonah, a borough of about 2,300 people, one of the country’s 50 hottest zip codes in its annual report this week. To add geographical diversity, each metropolitan area has only one zip code on the list, so Wenonah beat out the rest of the Philadelphia metro.

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Wenonah ranks 26th on a list that chose zip codes based on home buyer demand and sales pace in the first half of the year. According to Realtor.com, many home buyers across the country are trading downtown living for more affordable places from which they can commute to big cities when necessary. With the rising costs of housing and everyday goods, home buyers are looking for properties that are good values.

Realtor.com analyzed listing data in more than 29,000 zip codes. Bethlehem, Pa., ranked sixth on the list in a top 10 dominated by New England zip codes. Many home buyers looking to move to one of these places are coming from big, expensive cities on the East Coast, according to the analysis.

In June, the median listing price for a home in the 08090 zip code, which includes Wenonah and parts of Deptford Township, was $285,000, according to Realtor.com. That’s 11% below the median listing price for homes across the Philadelphia metro area and 37% below the U.S. median. And the typical home for sale in Wenonah was about 500 square feet larger than the typical home for sale in the Philadelphia metro area, according to Realtor.com.

“More people are seeing these homes are affordable and you’re getting most of what you can get in the Haddonfield, Collingswood area,” said Jessica Verfaillie, a Realtor with eXp Realty based in Cherry Hill.

Verfaillie lives on the edge of Wenonah, which she called “a little hidden gem.” The borough is walkable and a “very close-knit” community, she said, perks that rival Philadelphia neighborhoods and entice city residents. The towns around it offer additional entertainment and shopping options.

On average, homes listed for sale in Wenonah spent just 18 days on the market in the first half of the year, according to Realtor.com. That’s about three weeks less than the U.S. median.

During the first six months of the year, each home listed for sale in Wenonah had almost four times as many viewers on Realtor.com as the typical U.S. listing. Only five zip codes on the list had more viewers per property, according to the online real estate marketplace.

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Wenonah “really embodies the demand that the market is seeing along with the market pace,” said Hannah Jones, economic data analyst at Realtor.com.

About 70% of buyers looking at homes in Wenonah already live in the Philadelphia metro area. ”This suggests that local buyers are looking to either move into a larger home or just relocate within their area,” Jones said. It’s a trend reflected nationwide as home buyers look to “perhaps get some more bang for their buck.”

Verfaillie said she wasn’t surprised by Wenonah’s place on Realtor.com’s national list. “I’m just shocked it’s been a secret for so long,” she said.

Wenonah is 15 minutes west of the Gloucester Premium Outlets and less than 15 minutes north of Rowan University. It sits between Mantua and Deptford, which almost completely surrounds it.

The 2020 Census recorded 741 households and 882 housing units in the borough. Homes within its roughly one square mile include century-old Victorians and 70-year-old ranchers, modest houses and a trio of mansions along the borough’s main road.

Residents swim and kayak at Wenonah Lake and enjoy Mantua Creek. They select produce at a farmers market in the borough square on Thursdays. They frequent Chompsky’s coffee shop on Mantua Avenue, the borough’s main drag. Many do volunteer work for the borough.

Households in Wenonah have a median income of more than $125,000, according to Census Bureau data. That’s higher than in many municipalities in the Philadelphia metro and nationwide.

Residents of Wenonah tend to stay, Verfaillie said, so some recent clients lucked out when they found a home with owners who were moving for work. The young couple’s first house together is in a neighborhood where no one had sold a home in the last decade, and everyone in the cul-de-sac knows each other by first name. The woman grew up in the small neighboring community of Oak Valley.

“When we got a home in Wenonah, they were ecstatic,” Verfaillie said. They closed July 15.

Charles Horan, president of the Wenonah Historical Society and a retired residential real estate appraiser, has lived in the borough for three decades. He and his father used to appraise properties throughout Gloucester County.

“We kept passing through this town and thought, ‘This town looks nice,’” Horan said. He had grown up in Pennsauken, which had many more people and smaller properties.

“This is much more to my liking,” said Horan, who was a firefighter in the borough’s volunteer fire department for 15 years. “Small town.”