In July 2015, a 118-unit multifamily property at 6262-6322 Reseda Boulevard in Tarzana sold for $22,000,000. In October 2020, the same building sold again for $27,100,000. Five years, one West Valley asset, and a $5.1 million difference between the two closing statements.
That arc is the whole story. Not a projection. Not a pro forma. Two recorded sales of the same 118 doors, both in my archive, with the second buyer paying $5.1 million more than the first paid to take the keys.
Most of what you read about San Fernando Valley apartment values is built on listing data and asking prices — what sellers hope to get. This is the rarer thing: the same building, priced by the market twice, with the difference visible in dollars rather than in commentary.
6262-6322 Reseda Boulevard is a 118-unit property in Tarzana, on the Reseda corridor that runs the spine of the West Valley. At 118 units, it sits in a category that almost no Valley seller ever occupies. The overwhelming majority of multifamily buildings in the San Fernando Valley are eight to forty units — duplex-to-small-courtyard scale, the inventory a private investor buys with one loan and one management contract.
A 118-unit asset is a different animal. It is large enough that the buyer pool narrows from "any active Valley investor" to a specific, smaller set of institutional and well-capitalized private buyers who can write a check of this size and operate at this scale. That narrowing is the single most important thing to understand about a deal this large, and it cuts in a direction most sellers expect backward.
The 2015 sale closed at $22 million. The 2020 sale closed at $27.1 million. Same address. Same 118 units. The market repriced the asset upward by roughly 23 percent over the hold.
When a sub-twenty-unit building lists in Tarzana, the buyer pool is deep and local. Operators who already own three buildings within a mile. Family offices that have held Valley product since the 1980s. The competition is for a single, financeable, manageable asset, and a clean offering at the right price can draw a stack of bids.
At 118 units, that pool thins to the buyers who can absorb a deal of this size — and that is not the disadvantage it sounds like. The buyers who play at this level are the most sophisticated, most capitalized, and most patient in the market. They underwrite institutionally. They close. They are pursuing scale, and a single asset that delivers 118 doors in one transaction is more valuable to them than three forty-unit deals that require three escrows, three loan packages, and three sets of closing risk.
Consider what a 118-unit purchase actually buys a sophisticated operator. One management contract instead of three. One insurance binder. One roof line of capital planning. One regulatory profile to underwrite rather than three. The operational efficiency of running 118 units under one roof — one address, one staff, one set of systems — is a real economic advantage that a buyer of small product never captures, and the buyers who understand that pay for it. That premium is invisible in a per-unit listing comp, which is one more reason listing data understates what large Valley assets actually trade for.
That is the part most owners of large Valley buildings get wrong. They assume that a niche of fewer buyers means weaker pricing. For institutional-scale Valley assets, the opposite is usually true: fewer buyers, but each one is competing harder, because product at this size rarely comes available and a single closing accomplishes what would otherwise take a full acquisition season. The 2020 buyer of 6262-6322 Reseda paid $5.1 million more than the 2015 buyer, and that is not the math of a thin, soft market. It is the math of a scarce asset and a serious bid.
The temptation with a number like +$5.1 million is to treat it as a prediction — to assume any Valley building will do the same over five years. It will not, and the honest version of this story has to say so.
The San Fernando Valley is priced on income, durably, rather than on the scarcity that drives the Westside. The Reseda corridor is an income story, not a trophy story. Which means the 2015-to-2020 move on this building was not Westside-style scarcity appreciation. It was a real asset, held through a real operating period, and resold into a market that valued the income stream higher in 2020 than in 2015.
Five years is also long enough to be honest about. This was not a flip. Whoever owned 6262-6322 Reseda between July 2015 and October 2020 held the asset through a full operating cycle — leasing, capital expense, management, the actual work of running 118 units in the West Valley. The $5.1 million is what showed up at the second closing after that work. The number is real precisely because it survived a five-year hold and a second buyer's underwriting, not because anyone forecasted it.
It is worth sitting with the timing. The 2020 sale closed in October — months into a year that began with a pandemic, an eviction moratorium, and more uncertainty in the rental market than any owner had faced in a generation. And still, the building resold for $5.1 million more than it had fetched in the calmer market of 2015. That is not what you would predict if you believed large Valley assets were fragile. It is what you see when an income-producing asset of genuine scale is priced by a buyer who is looking past a single rough year to the durability of 118 units of West Valley housing. The Reseda corridor did not stop being one of the deepest rental submarkets in Los Angeles because the headlines got loud.
There is a second-order lesson buried in that timing. A seller watching the news in 2020 would have been forgiven for assuming it was the worst possible moment to bring a large building to market. The recorded closing says otherwise. The gap between what a market feels like and what a serious buyer will pay is exactly the gap that costs hesitant owners money — and it is exactly the gap a recorded sale exposes.
Here is the moment of tension for any seller reading this. You have almost certainly been handed a number for your building — by a broker, by a lender, by a refinance appraisal — and that number was an opinion dressed as a fact. Asking prices, broker estimates, and online "valuations" are forecasts. They are what someone hopes or guesses a building is worth.
A recorded closing is the only number that isn't a guess. 6262-6322 Reseda has two of them. $22 million in 2015 and $27.1 million in 2020 are not opinions about what the building should fetch. They are what two different buyers actually paid, on two different days, after their own diligence and their own financing came together.
That distinction is why I won't put a self-valuation tool on this page or hand you a per-unit number to multiply against your own building. Your building is not this building. It has a different rent roll, a different age, a different regulatory profile, a different deferred-maintenance position, and a different buyer pool. The honest answer to "what is mine worth" is not a formula — it is a process of putting your specific asset in front of the specific buyers most likely to pay the most for it, and letting their offers, not a spreadsheet, set the number. The two Reseda closings are evidence that the process works at scale. They are not a multiplier you can run against your own address.
I am deliberate about this because the per-unit shortcut is where large-building owners lose the most money. Take the headline $/unit from one closing, multiply it by your door count, and you arrive at a number that feels precise and is almost always wrong — high or low, but wrong. It ignores your unit mix, your in-place income versus market, your capital position, and the specific competitive dynamic among the handful of buyers who would actually bid on your asset. The two Reseda numbers are useful as proof that the market reprices real assets upward over a real hold. They are dangerous the moment you treat them as a calculator.
If you own a large Valley building — 50 units, 100 units, more — the lesson of 6262-6322 Reseda is about the buyer pool, not the price.
The instinct of most large-building owners is to worry that their asset is "too big" for the market — that the pool of buyers who can close is so small it will suppress the bid. The Reseda arc says otherwise. The buyers who operate at 118-unit scale are the ones with capital actively looking for places to put it, and institutional capital has been decisively returning to LA multifamily after the 2023 trough. A scarce, well-run, institutional-scale Valley asset is exactly what they are hunting for. The constraint is reaching them and running a process tight enough that the bid comes in clean — which is a different problem than "no buyers," and a far better one.
That is also why a deal this large does not run like a forty-unit listing. The diligence is deeper, the financing is more complex, the buyer pool has to be qualified before they ever see the offering, and the contract has to be kept tight from the first day to protect the seller through a longer, higher-stakes escrow. A 118-unit closing is not a forty-unit closing scaled up. It is a different discipline.
Two numbers, five years apart, on the same 118 doors: $22 million, then $27.1 million. Everything else in this asset class is an opinion about value. These two are the rare exception — the market, telling you in dollars what it will actually pay, twice.
Most sellers of large Valley buildings never get to see their asset priced by the market more than once, and so they spend years trusting a valuation that was never tested against a real bid. The owners who do best are the ones who stop trusting the estimate and go find out what a serious buyer will actually pay. 6262-6322 Reseda was asked that question twice. The second answer was $5.1 million better than the first.
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Michael Sterman is Senior Managing Director Investments at Marcus & Millichap. The 6262-6322 Reseda Boulevard transactions — $22,000,000 in July 2015 and $27,100,000 in October 2020 — are part of that archive.
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