Practical, operator-level guides for every stage of an LA multifamily transaction. Written by Michael Sterman — $1.37 billion closed across 246 LA multifamily transactions.
173 guides
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How to sell, when to sell, what buyers look for.
Tenant buyouts are one of the most powerful exit tools available to LA multifamily sellers — and one of the most commonly executed incorrectly. LAHD (LA Housing Department)…
LA City RSO caps your annual rent increases at 3% (through June 2026) or 4% (starting July 2026). For most landlords, those caps are absolute. But a provision in the RSO allows…
If you own a Hollywood building with apartments over open ground-floor parking, this is probably the largest discretionary decision you will make before selling it.
Three of the submarkets I work in share a word, sit within a few miles of each other, and are governed by three different sets of rules. Owners mix them up constantly. So does…
Sellers imagine negotiation as the conversation about price after an offer arrives. That conversation exists, but it is the smallest part of it and by then most of the outcome…
The honest answer is the one no website wants to give you: you cannot get a real number for your building online, and any tool that hands you one is guessing. Not because the…
Rent control reduces your sale price. That's the honest sentence most broker websites avoid because it sounds like bad news for sellers. It's bad news. It's also true, it's…
Every seller asks the same question three weeks before listing: what can I do between now and market day that will add real value? Most of the common answers are wrong.…
The sale price of your building is decided in the first three weeks of the process. Not at listing. Not during marketing. Not in negotiation. In the preparation window before…
A broker's opinion of value is the most important document in the pre-listing phase and the most commonly misread. Every broker's BOV looks authoritative. The cover page has a…
There is a moment, three to six months before a landlord calls me, when selling becomes the obvious move. Most landlords miss that moment. The ones who catch it walk away with…
You inherited an apartment building. You are not in the real estate business. Your parent or relative was — they understood the rent roll, the tenants, the capital schedule,…
If you're selling an LA multifamily building above the Measure ULA threshold, you owe an additional transfer tax that most sellers don't price into their exit math until escrow…
The single most common reason an LA apartment building comes to market is not a financial decision. It is a partnership decision. Two brothers who inherited the building. Three…
Measure ULA is not a bracket. It is a cliff, and that single structural fact creates a band of prices above each threshold that no rational seller should ever accept. A sale at…
LA RSO-covered landlords who need to vacate units have two primary tools: a voluntary buyout (tenant agrees, signs agreement, leaves with cash) or a no-fault eviction with…
Written August 2026. A market view carries a date because it stops being true.
Written August 2026. A market view carries a date because it stops being true.
Written August 2026. A market view carries a date because it stops being true.
Written August 2026. A market view carries a date because it stops being true.
Written August 2026. A market view carries a date because it stops being true.
A seller who has owned a building for thirty years is almost never offered seller financing as the first option by his broker. Most brokers don't bring it up because most…
A duplex, triplex or fourplex is not a small apartment building. It is a different asset with a different buyer pool, a different financing market, and in several respects a…
If you do not live in the building, the general guide is How to Sell an Apartment Building in Los Angeles(/guides/how-to-sell-multifamily-property-los-angeles). This page…
Retail on the ground floor with apartments above is one of the defining building types on LA's commercial corridors — Ventura, Sunset, Pico, Vermont, Sawtelle. It is also the…
A divorce sale of an LA apartment building is the only kind of sale where the people on the same side of the table are not actually on the same side. The two owners are…
Every LA multifamily owner who has held a building for fifteen years has the same list. The roof that should have been replaced two summers ago. The boiler that still works but…
Most LA multifamily sales that go sideways go sideways for the same reasons. Not unusual reasons. Not market-driven reasons. The same six mistakes, repeating transaction after…
Most of the tax planning available on a Los Angeles apartment building sale expires the moment you accept an offer. Nearly all of it expires at closing. Sellers who call their…
Disclosure is the cheapest risk management available to a seller and the thing most commonly done badly. The instinct — say as little as possible, let the buyer find what they…
Every generation of LA multifamily buyers rewrites the checklist. What made a building attractive in 2018 is not the same as what makes it attractive in 2026. Interest rates…
Sellers treat the accepted offer as the finish line. It is closer to the starting gun. Everything that determines whether the deal closes — and at what price — happens in the…
Materially lighter than a comparable sale a few miles south, and the reason is which city the building sits in.
The gap between sale price and what reaches your account is wider in Hollywood than in most Los Angeles submarkets, and the reasons are specific to this jurisdiction rather…
The stack is the same as anywhere in the City of Los Angeles. The weighting is not — and the item that dominates a Hollywood sale frequently does not apply here at all.
North Hollywood is inside the City of Los Angeles, so the whole city stack applies.
Palms is inside the City of Los Angeles, so the entire LA stack applies — unlike Glendale, West Hollywood or Santa Monica.
Reseda is inside the City of Los Angeles, so the entire LA stack applies — unlike Glendale, West Hollywood or Santa Monica, where large parts of it do not. And on buildings…
The stack here differs from a Los Angeles sale in one large way and one that is often missed.
Sherman Oaks is inside the City of Los Angeles, so the whole city stack applies.
Van Nuys is inside the City of Los Angeles, so the entire LA stack applies. One item is unusual for a Valley submarket.
Lighter than three miles east, and the reason is which side of a line the building sits on rather than anything about the building.
Sellers ask about seasonality expecting a simple answer, and the honest one is that the calendar matters far less on commercial multifamily than it does on houses. Apartment…
A building that has sat for six months without a credible offer is telling you something specific, and it is almost never the thing the owner believes. The usual explanations —…
Across the submarkets in this desk's record, the usual finding is that the median is nearly useless for a specific building. Koreatown's per-door figures span more than seven…
Across the {SUBHOLLYWOODDEALS} Hollywood apartment buildings in my own closed record — {SUBHOLLYWOODUNITS} units, {SUBHOLLYWOODVOLUME}, closings spanning {SUBHOLLYWOODYEARS} —…
Of the ten Los Angeles submarkets this desk has closed the most buildings in, Koreatown has the lowest median price per residential unit. The comparison table is on the…
Across the ten submarkets in this desk's record, the usual warning is that the median cannot price a specific building. Koreatown's per-door figures span more than seven times.…
Of the ten Los Angeles submarkets this desk has closed the most buildings in, Santa Monica's median per residential unit is {SUBSANTAMONICAMEDIAN} — roughly double the…
Most owners assume scale earns a premium. In price per unit it earns a discount, and the West Hollywood record shows it more cleanly than anywhere else in this book.
Of the ten Los Angeles submarkets this desk has closed the most buildings in, only Santa Monica prices higher per residential unit. West Hollywood's median is…
Mechanics, traps, deadlines, and replacement strategy.
Most of the 1031 exchanges I've seen go sideways went sideways for reasons that were preventable. Not complicated tax law. Not unusual IRS positions. The same seven mistakes,…
A 1031 exchange has two hard IRS deadlines. Miss either one and the exchange collapses into a taxable sale. The IRS does not grant extensions. Your qualified intermediary…
This is the most common avoidable disappointment in co-owned LA multifamily sales. Two or three owners sell a building; one wants cash, another wants to defer into a…
Most sellers know they have 45 days to identify replacement property. Far fewer know that how many properties they may identify is governed by three separate rules, that…
Most of the 1031 exchanges I have seen go sideways went sideways in the first thirty days. The seller had one hundred eighty days on the clock to close on a replacement. They…
Sellers who exchange into a larger building often expect a fresh depreciation schedule on the full purchase price. That is not the default, and the difference matters to…
The rule sellers miss is not about money they receive. It is about debt they no longer owe. If your relinquished building carried a mortgage that got paid off at closing and…
A qualified intermediary holds your entire sale proceeds — frequently several million dollars — for up to 180 days, and the industry is far less regulated than most sellers…
An improvement exchange — also called a build-to-suit or construction exchange — lets you use exchange proceeds not just to buy a replacement property but to improve it, with…
Most 1031 exchanges follow a simple sequence: sell the relinquished property first, then identify and close on a replacement within 45 and 180 days. But the IRS also allows a…
Exchanges fail. A replacement deal collapses in diligence, the identification window closes with nothing worth buying on the list, financing falls through on day 160. When it…
"Like-kind" is the most misunderstood phrase in the whole of Section 1031, because it sounds like it means "similar" and it does not. For real estate it is close to the…
Analyze, underwrite, and close LA multifamily deals.
A 1031 buyer is the most motivated buyer in any market and the most dangerous to themselves. Motivated, because the clock — 45 days to identify, 180 to close — turns "I'd like…
A large share of Los Angeles's rent-stabilized inventory is held by families who have owned it for decades, which means a large share of what comes to market arrives through an…
Almost every Los Angeles apartment building sells occupied, and the tenancies come with it. What a first-time buyer often does not appreciate is how much of what they are…
The thing that surprises first-time multifamily buyers most is that the building has to qualify for the loan, not just the borrower. A lender underwriting an apartment purchase…
The riskiest period in owning a Los Angeles apartment building is the first three months, and the risk is almost entirely self-inflicted. New owners arrive with a business…
The single most expensive mistake a first-time apartment buyer makes in Los Angeles is not overpaying. It is buying a pre-1978 building without understanding that the rent on…
Every multifamily deal in Los Angeles in 2026 fails one of three tests, and most buyers are running all three wrong. The first is whether the rent roll is real. The second is…
A building carrying a low-rate loan from 2020 or 2021 is worth more than an identical building without one, and in the current environment that gap is the most reliable edge…
Buyers spend most of their underwriting energy on income and most of their post-closing surprises on expenses. The income side is verifiable — leases, deposits, the rent…
Every buyer wants off-market deals, and most of them mean two different things by it. One is "a building nobody else knows about, priced below market" — which is largely a…
A rent roll is the single document that decides whether a Los Angeles apartment building is worth what the seller is asking. It is also the document most first-time buyers skim…
Buyers lose good buildings to lower offers constantly, and then conclude the process was unfair. Usually it was not. Sellers of Los Angeles multifamily are choosing between…
I write offering memoranda for a living, so take this in the spirit it is offered: an OM is a marketing document. It is not dishonest — the good ones are scrupulously accurate…
Most first-time multifamily buyers budget for the down payment and the closing costs and are then surprised by a third number: what it costs to find out whether the building is…
Most of Los Angeles's rent-stabilized inventory was built between the 1920s and 1977, and that vintage has a predictable failure list. A general property condition assessment…
Price per unit is the number a buyer reaches for first and trusts last. First, because it is the fastest way to know whether a listing is in the right universe. Last, because…
Sell vs. refinance, hold vs. sell, and other trade-offs.
Every LA multifamily seller eventually runs into the question: defer the tax through a 1031 or take the taxable sale and move on. The default recommendation in the brokerage…
Two owners I closed for in the same year did the same exchange and ended up in completely different lives. Both sold pre-1978 LA buildings within ninety days of each other.…
Every LA multifamily seller doing a 1031 eventually lands on the choice that defines the rest of the transaction: stay in California with the replacement, or go out of state.…
Every seller has heard that cash is king, and most accept the premise without ever asking the only question that matters: how much is it worth? A cash buyer will nearly always…
The Ellis Act(/legislation/ellis-act-los-angeles-explained) lets an LA landlord exit the rental business by withdrawing all units from the market. It is legal. It is…
Most LA sellers arrive at the exchange decision having thought hard about the sale and almost not at all about what comes next. Then the 45-day identification clock starts, and…
The reasoning behind putting a building with several brokers at once is intuitive and, on the face of it, sound: more people working on it, competing with each other, and only…
Three submarkets within a few miles of each other. Three different price levels, three different building types and three different sets of rules. Owners with buildings in more…
Two offers arrive on the same building, at the same price, from two different buyers. One is an institutional fund. The other is a local family office. Accepting either leads…
Most sellers arrive assuming the listing platform choice is administrative — list on Crexi, list on LoopNet, let the process run. It is not administrative. It is the single…
The single most consequential date in LA multifamily investing is not on any particular deal's timeline. It is 1978 — the year that became the dividing line for LA City RSO…
Los Angeles has thousands of soft-story buildings — the wood-frame walk-ups with tuck-under parking and living space over an open ground floor — carrying a mandatory retrofit…
This is the most consequential decision I am asked about, and the one most often made on instinct. A family has owned an LA apartment building for thirty or forty years. The…
The most common conversation I have with an LA multifamily owner right now starts the same way. I'd sell, but I'm waiting for rates to come down. The logic feels obvious: lower…
Most owners with more than one LA apartment building assume the portfolio commands a premium when sold together. Institutional buyers pay up for scale, the story goes — package…
A vacant unit in an LA apartment building is worth more than an occupied one. Every seller knows this, and most of them believe it so completely that they spend a year and six…
Some LA multifamily transactions don't close as sales of buildings. They close as sales of LLC or partnership interests in the entity that owns the building. The two structures…
Every owner of an LA building with a long-term tenant who runs a business in the unit, or a multi-generational family in a unit, or an heir who has been involved in the…
The arithmetic is seductive and it is the reason this question never goes away. A twelve-unit LA building sells as an income asset at a price per unit set by its capped rents.…
Most owners think the choice is binary: sell the building or keep it. When they want liquidity without a full exit, the option they reach for is a refinance — borrow against…
This question almost never comes from a single owner. It comes from siblings who inherited a building together, from a partnership where one member wants out, or from a family…
The choice between selling and refinancing an LA apartment building in 2026 is usually made on the wrong variable. Most owners decide based on sentiment — "I'm not ready to let…
Every LA multifamily seller at some point looks at their building and asks: should I put money into this before listing, or take it to market as it stands. The contractors and…
The state of LA multifamily, submarket-by-submarket.
This is the most consequential thing to understand about owning an apartment building in Glendale, and it is the thing owners and advisers most often get wrong by assuming the…
The most common apartment building in Hollywood is not the one on the postcards. It is the dingbat: a two-story wood-frame block, stucco-clad, raised on slender columns over…
Los Angeles adopted its Historic Preservation Overlay Zone ordinance in 1979 and had designated 35 HPOZ neighborhoods by 2023. Several sit in and around Hollywood — Whitley…
Hollywood has something almost no other Los Angeles submarket has: three subway stations inside a single neighborhood. The Metro B Line runs beneath it with stops at…
Koreatown has more Metro rail than any other submarket in this record. Three D Line stations sit beneath Wilshire Boulevard — Wilshire/Vermont, Wilshire/Normandie and…
Koreatown contains two distinct apartment markets, and the boundary between them is often a single street corner.
Most LA multifamily owners think "LA rent control" means one thing. It doesn't. There are at least nine different rent control regimes operating across LA County, each with its…
Every LA apartment building owner who has renewed an insurance policy in the last 24 months has had the same experience. The renewal quote arrives. The premium is 40%, 60%,…
LA multifamily in 2026 is a tale of two asset classes. The first is firming up. The second is repricing. Understanding which one you own is the first question every seller…
LA multifamily transaction volume is the single most useful indicator most sellers ignore when timing a sale. The number of buildings actually trading hands — not the pricing…
Palms is about one and a half square miles, among the densest neighborhoods in Los Angeles County, and close to nine in ten residents rent their homes. The housing stock is…
LA City's Rent Stabilization Ordinance was rewritten in late 2025 with effective date July 1, 2026. The rewrite was the most consequential change to LA rent control since the…
Seventy days.
Last quarter I told you the interest-rate environment was the variable I wasn't going to forecast. It resolved — just not the way most of the buyer pool was underwriting for.…
The 1994 Northridge earthquake struck at 4:31 a.m. on 17 January at magnitude 6.7. Its epicenter was inside Reseda — between Arminta and Ingomar streets, just west of Reseda…
Across the ten Los Angeles submarkets this desk has closed the most buildings in, Reseda has the fewest closings and the most units. Eight buildings, {SUBRESEDAUNITS} units —…
Most neighborhood history is context. West Hollywood's is the operating manual.
Koreatown holds roughly 42,600 people per square mile across about 2.7 square miles. It is among the most densely populated neighborhoods in the United States, and by a wide…
Most rent regulation in Los Angeles County is administered by a city department carrying out an ordinance. Santa Monica's is administered by an elected Rent Control Board —…
Every Glendale apartment building this desk has closed — date, size, price, price per door — generated from the transaction archive each time this page is built.
This desk's Glendale record has a hole in it. Closings in 2012, 2014 and 2015 — six buildings — and then nothing until August 2023. Since then, six more in three years.
Most brokerage pages give you a headline number. This one gives you the list.
Hollywood's apartment stock runs in three layers, and only one of them is architecture anybody crosses town to look at.
Every Koreatown apartment building this desk has closed — the date, the size, the price and the price per door. Not a selection. The list is generated from the transaction…
Across the {SUBKOREATOWNDEALS} Koreatown buildings in this desk's closed record, the price per residential unit runs from under $58,000 to over $422,000.
Glendale sits directly against the City of Los Angeles — Atwater Village and Glassell Park are its southern border — and an owner researching apartment regulation will find a…
Santa Monica is completely surrounded by the City of Los Angeles on its three land sides — Pacific Palisades to the north, Venice to the south, West Los Angeles and Brentwood…
An owner researching a West Hollywood building will find a great deal of accurate, well-written material about Los Angeles apartment regulation, and almost none of it governs…
{SUBNORTHHOLLYWOODDEALS} buildings · {SUBNORTHHOLLYWOODUNITS} units · {SUBNORTHHOLLYWOODVOLUME} · {SUBNORTHHOLLYWOODYEARS}
{SUBPALMSDEALS} buildings · {SUBPALMSUNITS} units · {SUBPALMSVOLUME} · {SUBPALMSYEARS}
{SUBRESEDADEALS} buildings · {SUBRESEDAUNITS} units · {SUBRESEDAVOLUME} · {SUBRESEDAYEARS}
3701 Westwood Blvd appears twice in this desk's Palms record. It closed in March 2020, and again in October 2020 — seven months later, at a slightly lower price.
{SUBSANTAMONICADEALS} buildings · {SUBSANTAMONICAUNITS} units · {SUBSANTAMONICAVOLUME} · {SUBSANTAMONICAYEARS}
{SUBSHERMANOAKSDEALS} buildings · {SUBSHERMANOAKSUNITS} units · {SUBSHERMANOAKSVOLUME} · {SUBSHERMANOAKSYEARS}
Pooled across all {POOLEDBUILDINGCOUNT} buildings in this record the pattern is clean: the bigger the building, the lower the price per unit, at every step. Small buildings…
West Hollywood is 1.89 square miles with about 35,750 residents. It was built out largely before the war on small lots, and it has added comparatively little since.
{SUBVANNUYSDEALS} buildings · {SUBVANNUYSUNITS} units · {SUBVANNUYSVOLUME} · {SUBVANNUYSYEARS}
Every West Hollywood apartment building this desk has closed — date, size, price, price per door. The list is generated from the transaction archive each time this page is built.
Linden Avenue runs through Glendale's older apartment stock, and three of this desk's twelve Glendale closings sit on it — spread across eleven years at three different sizes.
Franklin Avenue runs east–west along the base of the Hollywood Hills, a residential street a block off the boulevards. Three of this desk's Hollywood closings sit on it, and…
Of the twelve Van Nuys buildings in this desk's closed record, nine sit on four streets: three on Vanowen Street, and two each on Haskell Avenue, Oxnard Street and Victory…
Of the seventeen Sherman Oaks buildings in this desk's closed record, three streets carry more than one: Magnolia, Murietta Avenue and Dickens Street.
Two buildings in this desk's Hollywood record are exactly the same size. They are the cleanest illustration I have of why unit count tells you almost nothing about value.
Lexington Avenue in West Hollywood is a residential street a block off Santa Monica Boulevard. Two of this desk's closings sit on it — on opposite sides of the same street, at…
Two of this desk's Glendale closings sit on Hilda Avenue, ten doors apart, and they closed in the same month.
Los Angeles adopted its Historic Preservation Overlay Zone ordinance in 1979 and had designated 35 HPOZ neighborhoods by 2023. Across the whole San Fernando Valley there are…
Every Glendale closing from this desk as price per residential unit. {SUBGLENDALEDEALS} buildings, {SUBGLENDALEUNITS} units, {SUBGLENDALEVOLUME}.
Fourteen years of Hollywood closings from this desk, expressed as price per residential unit. {SUBHOLLYWOODDEALS} buildings, {SUBHOLLYWOODUNITS} units, {SUBHOLLYWOODVOLUME}.
Every Koreatown closing from this desk, expressed as price per residential unit. {SUBKOREATOWNDEALS} buildings, {SUBKOREATOWNUNITS} units, {SUBKOREATOWNVOLUME}.
{SUBNORTHHOLLYWOODDEALS} buildings, {SUBNORTHHOLLYWOODUNITS} units, {SUBNORTHHOLLYWOODVOLUME}.
{SUBPALMSDEALS} buildings, {SUBPALMSUNITS} units, {SUBPALMSVOLUME}.
{SUBRESEDADEALS} buildings, {SUBRESEDAUNITS} units, {SUBRESEDAVOLUME}.
{SUBSANTAMONICADEALS} buildings, {SUBSANTAMONICAUNITS} units, {SUBSANTAMONICAVOLUME}. The smallest sample in this record and the highest values in it.
{SUBSHERMANOAKSDEALS} buildings, {SUBSHERMANOAKSUNITS} units, {SUBSHERMANOAKSVOLUME}.
{SUBVANNUYSDEALS} buildings, {SUBVANNUYSUNITS} units, {SUBVANNUYSVOLUME}.
Every West Hollywood closing from this desk, as price per residential unit. {SUBWESTHOLLYWOODDEALS} buildings, {SUBWESTHOLLYWOODUNITS} units, {SUBWESTHOLLYWOODVOLUME}.
Everyone in this business repeats the same rule: larger buildings trade lower per door. It is the first thing offered when a per-unit figure looks wrong.
The Metro B Line reached North Hollywood in June 2000 and stopped there. Twenty-six years later it still does.
The Metro E Line station at Palms opened on 20 May 2016, on the extension that carried the line from Culver City to Santa Monica. In one step a neighborhood of one and a half…
Narrower than any submarket covered here, and unusually consistent. That is a feature rather than a limitation, and it is most of why Glendale's per-door figures cluster the…
Hollywood has a deeper buyer pool than most Los Angeles submarkets, and it stays deep through repricing. That is a function of location, transit and the sheer weight of…
Koreatown has one of the deepest and most consistent buyer pools in Los Angeles, and it stays deep through repricing. The mix is different from Hollywood's, and the difference…
Most Valley submarkets have one buyer profile with variations. North Hollywood has two that genuinely compete, and they value the same building differently.
Palms has the tightest pricing of the ten submarkets in this record, and the reason is the buyer pool. It is one pool, not several.
The buyer pool here is set by one fact: the average building in this desk's Reseda record holds about sixty-three units. At that scale a different set of people is in the room.
A short list, at the highest per-door values in this record. {SUBSANTAMONICADEALS} closings, {SUBSANTAMONICAUNITS} units, {SUBSANTAMONICAVOLUME} — a small number of large…
Sherman Oaks reads as one submarket and behaves as two. Ventura Boulevard is the line, and which side of it your building sits on shapes who shows up more than almost anything…
Van Nuys holds the broadest range of building sizes of any Valley submarket in this record — four units to sixty-eight — and it is the only one where all four size bands appear…
The buyer mix here is unlike anywhere else in this record, and the reason is building size. When the largest property in the market is {SUBWESTHOLLYWOODHIGH} units, the buyers…
Koreatown's ownership pattern is unlike anywhere else in this record, and it changes what a sale here actually looks like.
Glendale's ownership pattern explains more about this submarket than its zoning does.
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