Updated August 27, 2026
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.
| Closed | Building | Units | Price | Per unit |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Feb 2022 | 6700 Franklin Ave | 42 | $17,072,000 | $406,476 |
| Aug 2023 | 1784 N Sycamore Ave | 42 | $8,600,000 | $204,762 |
Identical unit count. Eighteen months apart. Almost exactly double the price per door.
An owner who prices a 42-unit Hollywood building by taking a per-door figure and multiplying by 42 could be wrong by more than eight million dollars, and would have been on one of these two.
A meaningful share, and this is measurable rather than asserted. Across this desk's Hollywood record, 2022 was the strongest year for price per door in the whole fourteen-year series, and 2023's single Hollywood closing sits far below it. The year-by-year figures are on what a Hollywood door has cost — with the sample sizes shown, because several of those years rest on one or two sales.
What changed between the two dates is not mysterious. The cost of debt moved sharply through 2022 and into 2023, which moves what a buyer can pay for the same income. Every submarket in Los Angeles repriced on that.
The rest — and here I will be careful about what I claim.
The archive holds addresses, unit counts, prices and dates. It does not hold rent rolls, condition reports or construction years, so I cannot tell you from my own records that one of these buildings had rents further below market than the other, and I will not imply it. The methodology is explicit about that limit.
What is true generally, in Hollywood, is that two same-sized buildings routinely differ by a third or more per door on three things: how far in-place rents sit below the rent-stabilized cap, what capital the building still needs, and whether a soft-story retrofit is outstanding. Any of those, or all three, can sit inside a gap this size.
Unit count is a fact about a building, not a valuation input you can multiply.
The things that actually decide a Hollywood building's price — rent position, vintage, condition, retrofit status, and when it goes to market — are all invisible in the unit count. Two buildings can be identical on the one number an owner is most likely to reach for and still be separated by eight million dollars.
That is not an argument for pessimism about either sale. It is an argument for pricing a specific building on its own facts rather than on a per-door figure borrowed from anywhere — including from this record.
The complete list is at the Hollywood closing record in full, and the banded per-door figures that make the size effect visible are on the Hollywood multifamily broker page.
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