Serrano · El Dorado Hills
The big gated one, wrapped around a golf course, with more open space than most people realize and a Mello-Roos bill that is far lower than the internet will tell you. Here is what it actually costs to own a house in Serrano, what the association does and does not cover, and the part that surprises people.
What it is
Serrano is Parker Development's master-planned community in El Dorado Hills, entitled in the early nineties and still building today, which is unusual: most of what people call a neighborhood here was finished decades ago. Parker still sells custom lots alongside completed homes.
It is organized into villages, several of them separately gated, with guard gates at the country club end. The master association's own governing documents name six: H, I, K, L, J3B and M, the last being custom lots. Which village a house sits in changes what you pay and sometimes who maintains your road, which is why two houses a mile apart can have different monthly bills.
The land is the part people underestimate. Around a thousand acres of dedicated open space, roughly seventeen miles of trails, fifty thousand trees planted on top of the centuries-old oaks that were kept. The golf course is a Robert Trent Jones Jr. par 72, and it is private.
The correction
This is the most commonly misquoted number in El Dorado Hills, and I had it wrong on this website until I went back to the source. You will find agent pages, forum posts and buyer guides putting Serrano's special tax at fifteen hundred to two thousand dollars a year. The county's own filing does not support that.
El Dorado County Community Facilities District 1992-1 levied $2,151,816 across 4,103 single-family parcels for the 2025 to 2026 fiscal year. That is an average of $524 per house. The whole district, including the non-residential parcels, came to $2,397,150 across 4,313 parcels.
Two honest caveats. The special tax is banded by lot size, across nineteen land-use classes, so a large lot pays more than the average and a small one pays less. And this is only the county district: there is a separate school facilities special tax in El Dorado Hills that is a different animal with no published end date, and it is on the same tax bill. When somebody quotes you a large Mello-Roos number for Serrano, that is usually the two added together, or a guess.
The bonds mature in 2031, with $15,070,000 outstanding as of 30 June 2025. For a buyer that matters: the county district on a Serrano house has about five years left to run.
In context
The three big El Dorado Hills districts, all from the county's continuing disclosure reports for the 2025 to 2026 year. These are averages across the whole district, not a figure for any one house.
Read against each other, Serrano is the cheapest of the three to carry and the first to fall away. That is not the reputation it has, and it is worth knowing when you are comparing a Serrano house against one somewhere else at the same asking price. The El Dorado Hills page has the rest, including the parts of town with no special tax at all.
The association
The Serrano El Dorado Owners' Association charges in layers, which is why neighbors quote different figures in good faith. From the association's own governing document disclosure: a master basic assessment paid by every village, a cost center for landscape and gates, and a further cost center for private roads inside the Greenview gates. Added together the maximum came to $178 a month.
That disclosure is dated August 2020 and the association does not publish a current figure I can find, so treat it as the shape of the bill rather than today's number and get the current assessment in writing during escrow. Six-year-old dues are not a number to make an offer on.
What it buys: the Serrano Parkway and Silva Valley Parkway landscaping and lighting, the open space, the community trails, roving security and the administration. What it does not buy is golf. The country club is a separate, optional membership with its own cost, and confusing the two is the single most common mistake buyers make here.
Schools
This catches people out. El Dorado Hills is split between Buckeye Union and Rescue Union for kindergarten through eight, and the boundary runs through Serrano rather than around it. You can see it on the tax bill: houses inside Serrano carry one of two different school special-tax codes depending on which district they fall in.
High school is El Dorado Union for the whole community, and Oak Ridge is the draw. But if the elementary school matters to you, check the specific address rather than the neighborhood, and do it before you fall in love with a house. I will pull it for any parcel you are looking at.
What they sell for
Redfin put the median sale price in Serrano at $1,084,477 in August 2026, down 5.7 percent year on year. Across El Dorado Hills as a whole, the median was $876,561 in July 2026, homes took about twenty six days to sell and closed at roughly 99 percent of asking.
The caveat: a neighborhood median in a community with as much variety as Serrano tells you very little about a specific house. A custom lot in village M and a production home elsewhere are different markets that happen to share a gate. That is what a real valuation is for, and having been an appraiser before I sold real estate, it is the part of this I am most particular about.
If you are selling one
Most buyers arriving in El Dorado Hills have been told Mello-Roos is frightening, and most of them have been told a number for Serrano that is three times what the county actually levies. If you are listing a Serrano house, that misconception is costing you buyers who ruled you out on a figure that was never true.
It belongs in the marketing, sourced, with the maturity date next to it. A buyer comparing your house against one in a district running to 2044 should be told that yours falls away in 2031.
Buying into it or selling out of it, fifteen minutes and I will tell you honestly what I would do. I will pull the special tax and the school district for any specific parcel before you offer.
Live from MetroList and updated as it changes, across every brokerage rather than only mine. No email to look.
Where these figures come from
Special tax, parcel counts, bonds outstanding and maturity: El Dorado County Auditor-Controller continuing disclosure report for Community Facilities District 1992-1 (Serrano), for the year ended 30 June 2025, filed October 2025, read 21 September 2026. The Blackstone and Promontory figures come from the county's equivalent reports for CFD 2005-1 and CFD 2001-1. The per-house averages are the levy divided by the parcel count; the county publishes the totals, not the average.
Association assessment structure and amounts: the Serrano El Dorado Owners' Association governing document disclosure dated 27 August 2020. Developer, villages, open space, trails and golf course: Parker Development Company, read 21 September 2026. Two school districts within Serrano: evidenced by the separate Buckeye and Rescue school special-tax charge codes in the county Auditor-Controller's AB 2109 letter. Prices: Redfin, Serrano August 2026 and El Dorado Hills July 2026.
None of this is tax advice, and none of it replaces the disclosure package on a specific parcel.
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