Updated August 27, 2026
8 buildings · 100 units · $62.5M · 2016–2026
| Closed | Building | Units | Price | Per unit |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2016-05 | 1025 Ocean Ave | 21 | $22,756,000 | $1,083,619 |
| 2016-12 | 843 16th St | 13 | $8,695,000 | $668,846 |
| 2017-10 | 402 Pacific St | 6 | $3,600,000 | $600,000 |
| 2022-02 | 301 Ashland Ave | 9 | $7,100,000 | $788,889 |
| 2022-05 | 1323 14th St | 11 | $5,900,000 | $536,364 |
| 2024-01 | 1428 11th St | 10 | $3,000,000 | $300,000 |
| 2025-11 | 2601 28th St | 3 | $1,900,000 | $633,333 |
| 2026-07 | 1117 6th St | 27 | $9,500,000 | $351,852 |
Eight buildings is the fewest of the ten submarkets covered. 100 units between them is also the fewest. And the median — $616,667 per unit — is the highest by a wide margin, roughly double the second-placed submarket and close to four times the lowest.
Santa Monica is a small, expensive, tightly regulated market, and all three of those facts are the same fact.
1025 Ocean Ave sold at over a million dollars per unit — the highest per-door figure in this entire archive, across every submarket and every year. Twenty-one units on Ocean Avenue, facing Palisades Park and the bay.
That is not a typical Santa Monica number and it should not be read as one. It is what a genuinely irreplaceable location produces, and it sits at the extreme of a record whose per-door figures span more than three times from bottom to top.
Scarcity that is enforced by law. Santa Monica is 8.42 square miles, surrounded on three sides by the City of Los Angeles and on the fourth by the ocean. It cannot expand. What it builds is governed by its own planning department, and what it demolishes is governed by its own landmarks commission.
An income stream inside one of the strictest rent regimes in California. Santa Monica has had rent control since 1979, administered not by a city department but by an elected Rent Control Board, with a registered Maximum Allowable Rent recorded for each individual unit. See Santa Monica rent control, explained.
And no Measure ULA. The City of Los Angeles transfer tax does not reach a separate city. On buildings at these prices that is a very large number that is simply not owed.
No repeat sales and no street with more than one closing. Eight buildings across eight streets, which is what a small record in a small city looks like. There are no same-street pairs here to compare, and I will not manufacture one.
That is worth saying plainly, because in every other submarket covered I have been able to hold location constant and compare buildings directly. In Santa Monica the sample does not permit it — the comparison that does work is Santa Monica against the other nine.
Every figure is computed from the archive rather than typed — the methodology.
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