The honest answer: there is no best part of Smith Mountain Lake. There is a best part for you — and it falls out of three questions almost mechanically. What do you want from the water? How far are you willing to drive to it? And how close do you need the grocery store to be? Answer those three and the lake’s 500-plus miles of shoreline narrows itself down to a shortlist fast.
How the lake is laid out
Smith Mountain Lake spreads 20,600 acres across three Virginia counties — Bedford, Franklin, and Pittsylvania — with the deepest water near the dam, where the old Roanoke River channel runs. Locals talk about the lake in sides and corridors rather than counties: the approaches nearest Roanoke, the Westlake corridor where daily life clusters, the Franklin County countryside on the far side, and the quieter eastern reaches. Each one attracts a different buyer, and usually for the reasons they came to the lake in the first place.
The Roanoke-side approaches
If someone in the household still commutes — or you want the airport, hospitals, and city errands within easy reach — the communities on the Roanoke side of the lake, around Hardy and Goodview, offer the shortest drives to town. You give up nothing in water; you gain a workweek that still functions. This is where I point buyers who say “lake life, but I’m not retired yet.”
Moneta and the Westlake corridor
Westlake is the lake’s everyday hub — groceries, restaurants, banks, the errands of ordinary life — and the surrounding Moneta area puts you minutes from all of it. Buyers who plan to live here full time, or host a dock full of grandchildren all summer, tend to gravitate here for a simple reason: convenience compounds. The fifth summer of a twenty-five-minute milk run feels different from the first.
The Franklin County side
Cross to the far side — Wirtz, Union Hall, Penhook, Glade Hill — and the lake keeps its countryside manners. The Booker T. Washington Highway corridor runs the errands-to-water connection from Rocky Mount through Westlake, farmland rolls nearly to the shoreline in places, and the pace is a notch slower. Buyers chasing quiet water and elbow room shortlist this side first.
The eastern reaches
Out toward Huddleston, the lake gets quieter still. Longer drives to the commercial hubs, calmer water traffic, and some of the most unhurried shoreline on the map. For a certain kind of buyer — the one who wants the lake to feel like an escape every single time — this is the answer, and nothing else quite scratches it.
The question that cuts across all of it: channel or cove
Wherever you land geographically, the water itself will sort you again. Main-channel properties buy you the big view, deep water off the dock, and front-row sunsets — along with the boat traffic that comes with a main artery. Cove properties buy you calm water, safer swimming, and quieter evenings — and demand the depth questions that separate a great cove from a shallow one. Neither is better. They are different lakes that happen to share a shoreline.
Straight answers
Which part of the lake is closest to Roanoke?
The approaches around Hardy and Goodview give you the shortest drives to the city. If commuting or airport access matters, start your search there.
Where are the restaurants and groceries?
The Westlake corridor is the lake’s commercial center, with the Moneta area right on its shoulder. The farther you drift from it, the more you trade convenience for quiet — which is not a warning, just a fact worth pricing in honestly.
Is one side better for resale?
Buyers here pay for the water and the drive, not the zip code. A deep dock on good water holds value on either side of the lake; a shallow cove is a hard sell in any county. Judge the property by the factors that actually set waterfront value, and the geography will take care of itself.
How do I narrow it down from out of state?
Decide how you will actually use the lake — full-time, summers, weekends, rental — and work backward from that. Browse the community guides, then ask my AI the specific questions at whatever hour they occur to you. That is what it is there for.
Before you buy on this lake
I have spent more than twenty years matching buyers to the right corner of this lake, and I wrote The Definitive Guide to Smith Mountain Lake Real Estate to make that matching faster and harder to get wrong. The book is free — read it before the boat ride.
Paul Moore is an Associate Broker at Smith Mountain Lake, the author of The Definitive Guide to Smith Mountain Lake Real Estate, and the only lake REALTOR® featured on HGTV’s House Hunters.