· 2 min read · Yuan Escusa
If you have spent any time searching the West Valley, you have noticed that the same street can appear as Canoga Park in one listing and West Hills in another. It is not a mistake, exactly. It is a boundary problem that this part of the Valley has never fully resolved, and it has real consequences for what you pay and what you net.
How the overlap happened
West Hills was carved out of Canoga Park in the 1980s. The new name stuck for the western portion, but the postal boundaries never fully caught up. Today 91304 covers parts of both Canoga Park and West Hills, and 91306 covers parts of both Canoga Park and Winnetka.
So a home in 91304 might legitimately be described as either Canoga Park or West Hills, depending on which side of an unmarked line it sits on and who is writing the listing.
Why agents lean one way
West Hills generally commands more than Canoga Park. When a property is genuinely ambiguous, the incentive is obvious: market it under the name that sounds better. Nobody is lying, but the listing description is doing work.
The result is that a buyer comparing "West Hills" listings may be comparing properties that a strict boundary reading would place in three different neighborhoods.
What this means when you are pricing
For sellers, this is the single most common source of bad comps in the West Valley. An automated valuation that pulls comparables by ZIP code will happily average a home on the West Hills side with one several streets east, and produce a number that is confidently wrong in either direction.
A defensible price here comes from looking at the specific street and the specific pocket, not the label. Two houses of similar size and condition can trade quite differently based on which side of an invisible line they sit on, and no algorithm sorting by ZIP will catch that.
For buyers, the opportunity runs the other direction. A house marketed as Canoga Park that sits on the West Hills side of the line is frequently priced against the wrong comps, which is exactly the kind of gap worth finding.
The practical advice
Judge the street, not the name in the listing. Pull up the parcel and look at what actually sold within a few blocks, rather than what sold within the ZIP.
Ask directly which neighborhood the assessor records show. It is a fair question and the answer takes thirty seconds to verify.
And if you are weighing offers or setting a list price in 91304 or 91306, get someone to walk the comps street by street with you. In most markets that is thoroughness. Here it is the difference between a price that holds and one that sits.
Guides to each of the three: Canoga Park, West Hills, and Winnetka.