Updated August 27, 2026
The stack here differs from a Los Angeles sale in one large way and one that is often missed.
The City of Los Angeles transfer tax does not apply. Santa Monica is a separate city and does not owe it.
But Santa Monica levies its own real property transfer tax, and at the values this market produces it is a real number rather than a rounding error. This is the item most often missed by owners who have read that "there is no ULA outside LA City" and stopped there.
Get the current city rates quoted for your specific price band before you model net proceeds. Do not assume the absence of one tax means the absence of all of them.
Santa Monica maintains a registered Maximum Allowable Rent for each unit. A buyer will check your rent roll against that register, and where the two disagree the register wins.
On a long-held building this reconciliation takes genuine time and it is the highest-return preparation available in this city. A discrepancy found by a buyer becomes a price concession; the same discrepancy found by the seller becomes a correction. See the elected board that sets your rent.
The LA soft-story ordinance does not reach Santa Monica, but the city operates its own seismic retrofit requirements on its own timetable. Exemption from the LA program is not exemption from an obligation, and the answer comes from Santa Monica rather than from any Los Angeles source.
Governed by Santa Monica's own ordinance and its Rent Control Board, and they are strict. Model against the city's rules, not against LA's. Most sales here are occupied, and buyers expect that.
Negotiated per engagement, paid at closing. In a market with very few transactions and very high values, what the fee funds is finding the small set of buyers who actually operate at this level and running a real process among them.
Step-down, yield maintenance and defeasance cost wildly different amounts on the same balance — and Santa Monica balances are large. On a building held a long time the loan terms are often forgotten. Establish them before listing.
Ordinary in kind, large in scale. The gain calculation belongs with your own advisor early, because at these values the decision between an outright sale and a 1031 exchange has a much bigger absolute consequence than it does elsewhere.
Pull the MAR record first, before anything else — before the valuation conversation, before the marketing, before deciding whether to sell at all. In Santa Monica that register is the income, and everything downstream depends on it being right.
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