Own a building here? Santa Monica multifamily broker — Michael Sterman’s closing record, comparables and process →
Santa Monica is an independent beach city of about 92,000 on Los Angeles County's western coast, with a global brand as a tourism and tech destination. Home to Silicon Beach's original cluster and some of the strongest rent stabilization protections in California.
Completely surrounded by the City of Los Angeles on three sides and by Santa Monica Bay on the fourth: Pacific Palisades to the north, Venice to the south, and West Los Angeles and Brentwood to the east, with about three miles of coastline west.
A separate incorporated city of 8.42 square miles of land and 93,076 residents at the 2020 census — about 11,070 people per square mile. **72.9% of occupied housing units were renter-occupied** at that census, one of the highest shares of any city in the county, and the reason its politics and its rent rules look nothing like the Valley’s.
About 92,000 residents. Mix of long-time Santa Monica rent-control-era residents, affluent coastal professionals, tech-industry workers (Silicon Beach), and a smaller population of Santa Monica College students.
Santa Monica’s apartment stock is older, smaller and more tightly regulated than almost anything comparable in the region. Much of it is prewar and early postwar: Spanish Colonial Revival and Art Deco courtyard buildings north of Wilshire, 1950s and 1960s walk-ups through the Pico and Ocean Park districts. What governs it is not the LA City RSO but **Santa Monica’s own rent control, in place since 1979 and administered by an elected Rent Control Board** with a registered Maximum Allowable Rent for every unit. For a buyer the MAR record, not the rent roll, is the authoritative document — see the site’s Santa Monica rent control explainer.
For what that looks like in practice: the 8 Santa Monica apartment buildings in our own closed record run from 3 to 27 units, with a median of 10. See every one of them →
Prewar courtyard buildings, Spanish Colonial Revival and Streamline Moderne apartment blocks, and postwar walk-ups — with a strong modernist thread running through the city’s civic and commercial architecture. Santa Monica runs its own building and seismic programs rather than Los Angeles City’s, so retrofit status on a specific building must be confirmed with the city rather than inferred from the LA soft-story ordinance.
| Building | Year | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Santa Monica Pier | 1909 | Built in 1909; the most recognizable structure on the Los Angeles County coast. |
| Santa Monica City Hall | 1938 | Designed by Donald Parkinson, with entrance mosaics by Stanton Macdonald-Wright. |
| Parkhurst Building | 1927 | Spanish Colonial Revival, on Third Street. |
| Santa Monica Civic Auditorium | 1958 | A mid-century civic landmark that hosted the Academy Awards through the 1960s. |
Santa Monica is a separate city, so the Los Angeles HPOZ program does not apply. The city maintains its own landmarks ordinance, its own Landmarks Commission and its own designated historic districts — and a landmark designation here constrains alteration and demolition in ways that materially affect what a buyer can do. Confirm status with the city before pricing a redevelopment assumption into a Santa Monica building.
Snap Inc., Edmunds, Universal Music Group, Hulu, and a dense cluster of tech, media, and professional services. Tourism economy anchored by the Pier, Third Street Promenade, and Santa Monica Beach.
Metro E Line (Expo) terminates at Downtown Santa Monica. The Big Blue Bus serves most of the city. Ocean Avenue, Lincoln, and the 10 Freeway handle primary vehicular access.
The Metro E Line terminates at Downtown Santa Monica, reached on May 20, 2016. The city also runs the Big Blue Bus, one of the oldest municipal transit systems in the state. Transit Oriented Communities incentives are a City of Los Angeles program and do not apply here; Santa Monica sets its own downtown and Bergamot-area density rules.
Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District. Santa Monica College is one of the largest community colleges in California.
Served by the Santa Monica–Malibu Unified School District, with Santa Monica High School — whose Barnum Hall is a city landmark — as the public secondary anchor, and Santa Monica College as the post-secondary institution.
Santa Monica Pier, Pacific Park, Third Street Promenade, Palisades Park, Santa Monica Place, Annenberg Community Beach House.
Santa Monica Pier and Pacific Park, Palisades Park (the bluff-top strip along Ocean Avenue), Santa Monica State Beach, Clover Park, Virginia Avenue Park, Douglas Park, Memorial Park, Joslyn Park. The Marvin Braude Bike Trail runs along the beach.
| Park | What is there |
|---|---|
| Palisades Park | Founded in 1892 by Arcadia Bandini de Baker; the bluff-top strip running along Ocean Avenue above the beach. |
| Tongva Park | Six acres between Ocean Avenue and Main Street, opened on former surface parking. |
| Santa Monica State Beach | The city’s three miles of coastline, with the pier at its center. |
| Ishihara Park | Opened in 2017 beside the Expo bike path in the eastern part of the city. |
The Third Street Promenade pedestrian mall, Montana Avenue boutique shopping, Main Street's independent retail and restaurants, Ocean Avenue hotel-and-dining corridor, and Downtown Santa Monica's restaurant density all anchor the dining and retail economy.
| Institution | Since | Detail |
|---|---|---|
| Santa Monica Pier | 1909 | Built 1909; Pacific Park’s amusement pier sits on it today. |
| Santa Monica College | 1929 | One of the largest community colleges in California and a significant driver of local rental demand. |
| Third Street Promenade | 1989 | The pedestrian mall that reset downtown retail and, with it, downtown rents. |
Twilight Concerts on the Pier (seasonal), the Santa Monica Festival, the Santa Monica College-affiliated art and music programming, and the annual Cinco de Mayo celebration at the Pico Branch Library.
Santa Monica's history includes Muscle Beach's role in mid-century American fitness culture, the Shangri-La hotel's Art Deco landmark status, and the city's decades-long position as one of the nation's most-studied municipal rent-control jurisdictions.
Governed by its own City Council, with an elected Rent Control Board, its own planning department and its own Landmarks Commission — none of the Los Angeles City machinery applies.
Founded 1875 and shaped by the Pacific Electric Red Car, Muscle Beach in the 1930s-40s, and the 1970s rent-control movement that produced Santa Monica's famously tight regulatory regime. The tech boom starting in the 2010s reshaped the commercial core.
| Year | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1769 | The Portolá expedition camps in the area on August 3. |
| 1839 | Rancho San Vicente y Santa Mónica is granted to the Sepúlveda family. |
| 1875 | Robert Baker and John P. Jones found the town of Santa Monica. |
| 1886 | Santa Monica incorporates as a city on November 30. |
| 1892 | Palisades Park is founded by Arcadia Bandini de Baker along the bluff above the beach. |
| 1909 | The Santa Monica Pier is built. |
| 1922 | Douglas Aircraft establishes its plant at Clover Field, making the city an aviation center for four decades. |
| 1966 | The Santa Monica Freeway is completed, cutting the city’s street grid and reshaping its southern districts. |
| 1979 | Santa Monica adopts rent control under an elected Rent Control Board — the regulatory fact that still governs every apartment transaction in the city. |
| 2016 | The Metro E Line reaches Downtown Santa Monica on May 20, restoring rail to the city for the first time since the Pacific Electric. |
Every figure below is computed from the Sterman Multifamily Group’s own closed record in Santa Monica — not from a market report. Price per door falls as buildings get bigger, which is why this is banded by size rather than given as one number: comparing a six-unit building to a forty-unit building on price per unit compares two different products. Across all 8 closings the median is $616,667 per unit.
| Building size | Closings | Median per unit | Range per unit |
|---|---|---|---|
| 4–10 units | 4 | $616,667 | $300,000 – $788,889 |
| 11–25 units | 3 | $668,846 | $536,364 – $1,083,619 |
| 26–50 units | 1 | $351,852 (one sale, not a median) | — |
The largest closing in the Santa Monica record is 1025 Ocean Ave at $22,756,000 (21 units); the smallest is 2601 28th St at $1,900,000 (3 units). The record here runs from 2016 to 2026, and the busiest single year was 2022 with 2 closings.
How these figures are calculated, and what we do not claim →
These are the 26 Los Angeles submarkets where the group has closed the most buildings, on our own record rather than a published index. The spread is the reason a citywide per-unit figure is close to useless for pricing a specific building.
| Submarket | Buildings | Units | Median per unit | Size range |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hollywood | 24 | 562 | $282,589 | 3–75 |
| Koreatown | 21 | 465 | $158,958 | 4–96 |
| West Hollywood | 21 | 206 | $354,286 | 2–22 |
| Sherman Oaks | 17 | 349 | $237,708 | 6–47 |
| Palms | 13 | 337 | $296,875 | 7–118 |
| Glendale | 12 | 224 | $258,854 | 5–92 |
| Van Nuys | 12 | 380 | $171,801 | 4–68 |
| North Hollywood | 11 | 191 | $271,429 | 5–46 |
| Santa Monica | 8 | 100 | $616,667 | 3–27 |
| Reseda | 8 | 506 | $156,639 | 10–138 |
| West Los Angeles | 6 | 62 | $575,000 | 7–16 |
| Hancock Park | 6 | 129 | $230,519 | 7–35 |
| Los Feliz | 5 | 123 | $225,000 | 6–48 |
| Panorama City | 5 | 178 | $135,849 | 22–53 |
| Fairfax | 5 | 31 | $425,000 | 3–13 |
| Burbank | 4 | 47 | $298,917 | 10–15 |
| Toluca Lake | 4 | 84 | $337,625 | 5–40 |
| Mid-City | 4 | 26 | $256,458 | 6–8 |
| Valley Village | 4 | 81 | $263,472 | 9–34 |
| Pacoima | 4 | 282 | $153,691 | 52–100 |
| Silverlake | 3 | 38 | $243,333 | 10–16 |
| Venice | 3 | 30 | $425,000 | 3–17 |
| Mar Vista | 3 | 21 | $354,167 | 5–10 |
| Studio City | 3 | 51 | $322,857 | 5–39 |
| Tarzana | 3 | 266 | $229,661 | 30–118 |
| Winnetka | 3 | 90 | $250,000 | 12–52 |
The place facts on this page — founding dates, acreages, opening years, boundaries — were checked against these sources on 2026-08-27. The closing figures are computed from the group’s own transaction archive. Where two sources disagreed on a number, the claim is stated only to the level both support.
Completely surrounded by the City of Los Angeles on three sides and by Santa Monica Bay on the fourth: Pacific Palisades to the north, Venice to the south, and West Los Angeles and Brentwood to the east, with about three miles of coastline west.
A separate incorporated city of 8.42 square miles of land and 93,076 residents at the 2020 census — about 11,070 people per square mile. **72.9% of occupied housing units were renter-occupied** at that census, one of the highest shares of any city in the county, and the reason its politics and its rent rules look nothing like the Valley’s.
Prewar courtyard buildings, Spanish Colonial Revival and Streamline Moderne apartment blocks, and postwar walk-ups — with a strong modernist thread running through the city’s civic and commercial architecture. Santa Monica runs its own building and seismic programs rather than Los Angeles City’s, so retrofit status on a specific building must be confirmed with the city rather than inferred from the LA soft-story ordinance.
Santa Monica is a separate city, so the Los Angeles HPOZ program does not apply. The city maintains its own landmarks ordinance, its own Landmarks Commission and its own designated historic districts — and a landmark designation here constrains alteration and demolition in ways that materially affect what a buyer can do.
Across the 8 Santa Monica buildings in the Sterman Multifamily Group’s own closed record, the median is $616,667 per unit, on buildings ranging from 3 to 27 units. Price per door falls as buildings get larger, so the figure for a specific building depends on its size, vintage and in-place rents.
Santa Monica multifamily trades with the tightest regulatory constraint and the deepest buyer pool of any LA coastal submarket. Rent Stabilization has been in place since 1979 — nothing about it is new, but the December 2025 LA City RSO rewrite has refocused buyer attention on how much more established and defined Santa Monica's framework is by comparison.
Michael Sterman will walk through comparables, buyer pool, and timing specific to your building — no obligation, no pitch.
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