Gazillion-Dollar Listings: Inside L.A.'s Wild Post-Wildfires Real Estate Market
All-cash offers, desperate buyers lead to 'Hunger Games'. 'Purgatory,' says one evacuee, as realtors and residents reveal what is really happening
Nicole LaPorte’s previous features include a look at political documentaries as “kryptonite” under MAGA, the resurgence of the spec script market and how WFH is killing Hollywood.
This Ankler Feature is a 17-minute read.
“It’s like a badly written episode of Schitt’s Creek.”
Alison Burmeister, a make-up artist and yoga instructor whose home in the Palisades is still standing but is covered in ash, is telling me how she and her family are living in a Residence Inn in Manhattan Beach as they search for a lease through the summer, after which they’ll evaluate what to do next. “It feels like a Gold Rush,” Burmeister says of trying to find a place to live right now. “You call on something, ‘Oh, sorry, we just had a signed lease yesterday’ or ‘We’re in the process of signing something today.’”
All over greater Los Angeles, this kind of desperate frenzy has gripped the real estate market. A house in the Beverly Hills-adjacent neighborhood of Little Holmby sells for $9 million — in cash — almost $2 million more than its asking price, after just five days in escrow. A $10,500-a-month rental in sleepy Mar Vista attracts nearly 30 bids before going for nearly three times its asking price. Homeowners are rushing houses to market to capitalize on the mania brought on by the unfathomable destruction or damage of more than 18,000 structures totaling $30 billion in property value, all during a time that’s typically a real estate Dead Man’s zone.
Even when a property is available, Burmeister adds, “You really have to picture yourself living there. It’s not a vacation rental for a week. This is where you could end up for six months to a year. This place my husband and I found seemed great, but he had to pull the mirrors of his car in to get in and out of the garage, it was one of those funky beach houses. I was like, ‘I can’t do this.’”
This is the new Wild West of the Los Angeles housing market four weeks after the historic Palisades and Eaton wildfires turned miles of neighborhoods in and around the Pacific Palisades, Malibu and Altadena into a wasteland of toxic ash, leaving residents scrambling for shelter. Bold-faced names of victims in the Palisades — the seaside conclave that combines white-picket, 1950s family sitcom charm with celebrity-studded golf courses with $300,000 initiation fees — quickly made the news. But the toll on Hollywood runs much deeper.
According to reports from Otis College of Art and Design, nearly 30 percent of film and TV workers were impacted by the fires. Of the companies that have reported numbers, Disney had 64 employees lose their homes; Warner Bros. Discovery had 20 employees; and 50 staffers at Universal Music Group, which is based in Santa Monica, were totally displaced. Many hundreds more were evacuated.
In the immediate aftermath of the fires, which began on Jan. 7, people fled in all directions for short-term safety, filling up hotels, Airbnbs and friends’ couches in Santa Barbara, Palm Springs, Orange County and beyond. Some from the wealthier Westside neighborhoods holed up in hotels in Santa Monica and Beverly Hills, which lowered their rates for evacuees. Shutters on the Beach dropped its nightly rate and immediately filled to near capacity with displaced victims who milled around in the lobby trading war stories. “You’d go downstairs and just know you were all in it together,” says one entertainment executive.
But now, almost a month into the disaster, thoughts are turning more long-term as the disheartening reality is setting in that the effects of the fires are going to be felt not just for a long time, but for a very, very long time. At a Pacific Palisades Community Council meeting in mid-January with Mayor Karen Bass and other local officials, residents were told that toxin removal would take three months, followed by debris removal, which will require another 18 months. Both are necessary before any rebuilding can begin.
“Eighteen months (for debris removal) is optimistic,” says Stephen Shapiro, cofounder of Westside Estate Agency in Beverly Hills and Malibu. “If you have to rebuild, I don’t think that area will be restored for 10 to 20 years. You’re not going to want to build a house and have 30 lots around you that are potentially toxic. And then to live through construction of all these other houses. Not to mention you’re going to have to find contractors for all this and laborers. There aren’t enough to satisfy the need. So it’s going to be a long time.”
Shapiro didn’t even mention the endless process of environmental testing and rebuilding infrastructure to newer, more fire-resistant standards, or all the time it will take for insurance adjusters to assess damages — and that’s for people lucky enough to be covered. State Farm, one of the biggest insurers in California, canceled 72,000 policies in the state last spring due to the high risk of wildfires, with 1,626 of those policies in the Palisades’ 90272 zip code alone, but just this week asked the state officials to let it raise prices by 22 percent, which has people fuming yet again.
In interviews with nearly a dozen top real estate agents in the city, including Michael Nourmand and Santiago Arana, as well as direct and indirect victims of the fires, the consensus is that this is an unprecedented moment in L.A. I also learned the one factor above all guiding displaced residents’ relocation plans, what was said about the future of real estate in a private meeting led by WME’s Richard Weitz and UTA’s Jay Sures, the community most attracting people from the entertainment-heavy Palisades and why some are rebuilding and others are giving up.