Hollywood Is Struggling. Now L.A.’s Real Estate Market Is Too
Luxury pads slash prices, houses ‘sit for months’ as execs grow cautious and industry workers pull up stakes: ‘They just saw the writing on the wall’
Nicole LaPorte wrote about the battle over Brentwood Country Club’s barbed-wire fence, the 19 press tour stops Hollywood publicists care about now, the spec script market comeback and how Hollywood DEI is now D-I-E.
There’s the DP (director of photography, commonly known as a cinematographer) in Glendale who up and left with her family to Spain in search of more work. The move was so sudden and during such a fraught time — 2025 — that “they could not muster the strength to sell their house,” says Elisa Ritt, a Compass realtor with the Rogers Stellini Ritt Group in Hollywood. So they’re going to rent it out, but Ritt predicts they’ll ultimately sell once they settle into what promises to be an easier life in Europe.
Another one of Ritt’s clients, also a DP in Glendale, is currently having conversations about moving to Ireland for the same reasons.
“I don’t know if they’re going to sell. They don’t want to rent it — they need the money,” Ritt says. “So I think it’s just pulling the Band-Aid off. It’s a lot to suddenly uproot and go somewhere completely different. But tons of shows shoot in Ireland.”
The list goes on. There’s the veteran costume designer in the San Fernando Valley for whom work “dried up,” now selling and moving to Vermont. “She’s cashing out, never coming back,” Ritt continues. “She’s just going to retire on the money and open a coffee shop or something, I don’t know.”
Brad Holmes, a Compass agent with the Dear LA group out of Highland Park has his own roster of casualties. An editor in El Cerrito and a showrunner in Mount Washington who “ended up having to sell. There just wasn’t enough work,” he says. “They’re moving back to their hometowns in the Midwest.” Another homeowner in the music industry also peaced out for the same reason.
“They just saw the writing on the wall and needed to sell,” Holmes says. “That’s the first time we’ve really come across that — three listings (due to work shortages) — and it was all in one year, 2025.”
Talk to any realtor these days — particularly those on the Eastside of Los Angeles, with its heavy concentration of mid-level creatives and production workers in film and television, as well as below-the-line employees — and the story is the same: 2025, with the continuing contraction of the entertainment business and exodus of production, uncertain economy and skyrocketing insurance costs due to the fires, which displaced thousands in the industry, caused a growing number of Hollywood workers to call it quits on L.A.
‘A Slow Drip’ Hollywood Exodus
“Pretty much everyone has the same story of $1 million to $5 million clients that are in the same boat,” Ritt says of the rising tide of homeowners looking to sell. “It hasn’t been a blood-letting. It’s not the 2008 crisis. It’s a slow drip. But we definitely think it’s going to be more of an issue. It’s not going to get any better any time soon, sadly.” Higher-end Eastside neighborhoods like Los Feliz and Silver Lake, agents tell me, have been more immune to the Hollywood exodus as they’re populated by screenwriters and producers who have owned their homes for decades and are locked into low interest rates. Still, "We are seeing an increase of inventory and longer days on market in Silver Lake and Los Feliz vs West L.A.,” Melanie Sommers, who works with Compass on the Westside, tells me, “with the only outliers being the ultra-luxury markets on the Westside where homes are listed at $15M+.” Homes in Los Feliz are spending a teeth-gritting 219 days on the market on average, according to data she shared with me, up more than 50 percent from September and well above the average in Brentwood (185) and Santa Monica (161), though every neighborhood has seen increases.
In areas like Brentwood, where C-suite Hollywood folks reside in manses that stretch into that luxury market, homes aren’t being abandoned, per se. But the residential market has cooled considerably since the frothy months of early 2025 when droves of displaced families from the Palisades fire sent rents skyrocketing — $10,000 a month suddenly became $30,000 a month until state officials cracked down — as buyers plunked down millions in cash to get a roof over their head. (Most victims of the Eaton fire on the Eastside turned to rentals.)
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Opportune owners, meanwhile, pawned their homes to meet the demand. But as inventory was sucked up, the frenzy died down and now houses are sitting on the market amongst a population of jittery “wait-and-see” buyers eager to see if interest rates will continue to drop. (Last week they dipped below six percent for the first time in more than three years.)
David Offer, a real estate agent with Berkshire Hathaway, ticks off a list of “headwinds in the market,” plus more existential concerns. “The cost of insurance, interest rates, the unpredictability of Washington and the economy and concerns about L.A. and California in general — homelessness, crime, state taxes, city services, politics, the Mansion Tax — all of these things are on people’s minds.” (More on that Mansion Tax below.)
“People with money to buy believe that prices are going to continue to go down, so they’re not ready to jump,” says Stephen Shapiro, co-founder of Westside Estate Agency in Beverly Hills and Malibu. “The house they looked at three months ago is still available today. There’s a combination of sellers wanting aspirational prices that aren’t realistic and brokers willing to take a house at any price,” meaning they’ll list a home for well above what it may draw in the current market, glutting the inventory and perpetuating the sense that every property is overpriced.
“The more expensive the home is, the more it sits,” Shapiro adds, referencing a list of celebrity properties that languished on the market before selling for much lower prices than their asking numbers. The Spelling manor in Holmby Hills sold for $110 million, 33 percent less than asking, to former Google CEO Eric Schmidt last August. An estate in Benedict Canyon formerly owned by KISS’ Gene Simmons went for $28 million from an initial price of $48 million last July. And after two years, Jim Carrey’s home in Brentwood sold for $17 million last summer down from its $28.9 million debut. Meanwhile, Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck’s 38,000-square-foot mega-mansion — 12 bedrooms, 24 bathrooms; 12-car garage; basketball and pickleball courts — in Wallingford Estates in the Beverly Hills Post Office area has been looking for a buyer since July of 2024. The couple purchased it for around $60 million, put it on the market initially for $68 million and is now asking $52 million. As of this writing, it has not sold.
Between the fires that devastated huge swaths of the city 12 months ago and the plunge in Hollywood production (and Hollywood jobs), the L.A. housing market has been rattled, and buyers, sellers and real estate pros are still waiting for their new normal. I spoke with numerous agents, developers and residents about the dramatic shift in the landscape and the costly, scary and unpredictable new realities of living — or maybe no longer living — in L.A.