The Sterman Transaction Index: LA Multifamily Price Per Unit

Updated June 21, 2026

A Santa Monica apartment building trades at $617K a unit. A Panorama City building, the same week, trades at $136K. That is a 4.5x gap inside a single county — and it is the first number that decides whether a seller anchors high enough or leaves a million dollars on the table.

This page is not a market overview pulled from a research desk. It is the actual book: 235 multifamily buildings I have personally closed across Los Angeles, $1.32 billion in volume, 5,444 units, every price real and recorded. CoStar and Yardi sell you the county average. I can tell you what the building two blocks from yours actually sold for, because I sold it.

One honest caveat up front, because the whole site runs on it: every figure here is price per unit — sale price divided by unit count. I do not publish cap rates on this page, because a cap rate needs the building's income and I am not going to invent income I cannot verify. Price per unit is the number I can stand behind on all 235 of these deals. Across every one of them, the median lands at $254K a unit. That single number is the worst anchor a seller can use, and I will show you why.

Price per unit by submarket

These are the 17 LA submarkets where I have closed at least 4 buildings — enough that the median means something rather than echoing one outlier. Deals, units, and total volume are shown so you can see the weight behind each row.

Submarket	Deals	Units	Volume	Median $/unit	Range
Santa Monica	8	100	$63.0M	$617K	$300K–$1.08M
West Los Angeles	6	62	$35.0M	$575K	$500K–$641K
West Hollywood	18	194	$64.9M	$351K	$219K–$525K
Toluca Lake	4	84	$36.8M	$338K	$240K–$701K
Burbank	4	47	$13.7M	$299K	$190K–$348K
Palms	13	337	$97.7M	$297K	$237K–$424K
Hollywood	21	512	$140.3M	$294K	$170K–$438K
Valley Village	4	81	$21.2M	$263K	$183K–$295K
Glendale	11	204	$50.6M	$259K	$108K–$359K
Sherman Oaks	17	349	$96.2M	$238K	$130K–$486K
North Hollywood	9	169	$41.6M	$225K	$123K–$490K
Los Angeles	36	698	$146.6M	$208K	$58K–$812K
Van Nuys	12	380	$62.0M	$172K	$104K–$288K
Koreatown	15	249	$47.5M	$167K	$87K–$310K
Reseda	8	506	$92.2M	$157K	$96K–$589K
Pacoima	4	282	$44.2M	$154K	$128K–$178K
Panorama City	5	178	$26.4M	$136K	$95K–$194K

Read the range column before the median. Santa Monica runs $300K to $1.08M a unit — the spread inside one neighborhood is wider than the gap between two neighborhoods. Vintage, rent control exposure, deferred maintenance, and whether the rents are at market or forty percent under it move a building further than its zip code does. The submarket sets the floor. The building sets the price.

How pricing moved across my closings

This is the median price per unit by year, across the deals that crossed my desk. It is my book, not a market index — some years carry more small Valley deals, some more Westside — so read the direction, not the decimal.

Year	Deals	Median $/unit
2012	9	$131K
2013	19	$192K
2014	21	$183K
2015	28	$168K
2016	25	$297K
2017	14	$337K
2018	18	$249K
2019	11	$414K
2020	14	$381K
2021	9	$288K
2022	16	$422K
2023	8	$265K
2024	13	$250K
2025	20	$285K
2026	2	$296K

The shape is the story. The step up after 2015 was real and it stuck. The 2022 print was the top of the cycle — cheap debt buying buildings at numbers that have not printed since. What every seller anchored to 2022 needs to hear: that number was a moment, not a floor. Buyers underwrite today's rates and today's rent control, not the comp you remember from the peak.

Price per unit by building size

Building size	Deals	Median $/unit
2–4 units	10	$413K
5–12 units	90	$274K
13–30 units	81	$249K
31+ units	54	$197K

Smaller buildings carry a higher price per unit — a buyer pays up per door for a four-unit they can self-manage and exit easily. Bigger buildings price for the operator, not the dreamer. If you own a 20-unit and you are comparing yourself to the fourplex that sold down the street, you are reading the wrong comp.

The thing your accountant was too polite to say

Most owners price their building off the highest number they have ever heard — a neighbor's 2022 sale, a per-unit figure from a broker who wanted the listing. The median across my whole book is $254K a unit. The honest range, submarket to submarket, runs from $136K to $617K. Where your building lands inside that is not about hope. It is about vintage, rents, condition, and timing — in that order. The brokers who win you with the highest number at the listing appointment are the ones who hand you a price cut sixty days later.

Buying rather than selling? The same numbers set what you should pay. The buyer's price-per-unit guide walks through how to use these ranges to disqualify overpriced listings without underpricing real opportunities.

Frequently asked questions

What do apartment buildings sell for per unit in Los Angeles?
Across the 235 LA multifamily buildings in this index, the median is $254K per unit, with submarket medians ranging from $136K in Panorama City to $617K in Santa Monica. Your building's number depends on its vintage, rent levels relative to market, condition, and submarket — not on the highest comp you have heard.

Why does this report show price per unit instead of cap rate?
Price per unit is computed from verified sale price and unit count on every closed deal. A cap rate requires the building's net operating income, which is not publicly verifiable, so publishing one would mean inventing numbers. This index only reports what the closings actually prove.

Is this the LA market average or your own deals?
These are Michael Sterman's own closed transactions — his book of business, not a third-party market index. That is the point: it is real, attributed, deal-level data rather than a blended county figure.

How current is this data?
The index covers closings through 2026 and is regenerated directly from the deal archive whenever new transactions close.

Methodology

Every figure is computed directly from the Sterman closed-deal archive — the 235 buildings (of 254 total closings) that carry both a verified sale price and a verified unit count, the two fields a per-unit figure requires. Price per unit is sale price divided by unit count. Submarket medians are published only where at least 4 closings exist. No cap rates, rents, or vacancy figures appear, because those require income data this index does not contain. Numbers regenerate from source on every update — they are never hand-entered.