Own a building here? Van Nuys multifamily broker — Michael Sterman’s closing record, comparables and process →
Van Nuys is a central Valley neighborhood serving as the San Fernando Valley's administrative center, housing the Van Nuys Courthouse, Van Nuys Airport, and substantial civic infrastructure.
North Hills to the north, Panorama City to the north-east, Valley Glen to the east, Sherman Oaks to the south, the Sepulveda Basin to the south-west, Lake Balboa to the west and Northridge to the north-west.
A City of Los Angeles neighborhood of about 8.99 square miles, historically counted at some 136,000 residents and about 11,500 people per square mile — the administrative center of the San Fernando Valley, with the courthouse, the government center and the airport all inside it.
About 110,000 residents across a large geographic footprint — working-class and middle-class Latino majority, Armenian community, African-American community, and the largest city-center commercial and civic footprint in the San Fernando Valley.
Van Nuys carries the broadest apartment inventory of any Valley submarket: every vintage and almost every size. Postwar garden courts and 1950s and 1960s stucco walk-ups fill the blocks off Van Nuys Boulevard, Sherman Way and Victory; 1970s and 1980s product sits along the wider corridors; and there is post-1995 construction near the G Line. That spread puts inventory on both sides of the October 1978 RSO line and the February 1995 Costa-Hawkins line, so vintage is the first thing to establish on any building here.
For what that looks like in practice: the 12 Van Nuys apartment buildings in our own closed record run from 4 to 68 units, with a median of 34. See every one of them →
The signature type is the postwar Valley walk-up — two stories of stucco over open tuck-under parking, built at volume through the 1950s and 1960s. Van Nuys also holds real civic architecture: the 1932 Art Deco Valley Municipal Building, and a 1935 Spanish Colonial Revival post office. Tuck-under parking is what creates a soft story — a ground floor with too few shear walls to brace the floors above — and it is the reason Los Angeles adopted Ordinance 183893 in January 2015, under which the city identified roughly 13,500 buildings needing seismic retrofit. What the retrofit ordinance means when you sell →
| Building | Year | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Valley Municipal Building (Van Nuys City Hall) | 1932 | The Art Deco tower that anchors the Valley government center, a scaled echo of Los Angeles City Hall. |
| Van Nuys Post Office | 1935 | Spanish Colonial Revival, from the same federal building program as the WPA-era civic work elsewhere in the Valley. |
| Valley Presbyterian Hospital | 1958 | Initially designed by William Pereira, the architect of the Transamerica Pyramid and much of postwar California. |
Los Angeles adopted its Historic Preservation Overlay Zone ordinance in 1979 and had designated 35 HPOZ neighborhoods by 2023. Inside one, all exterior work goes through additional review by an HPOZ board working from a published preservation plan, which constrains what a buyer can do with a building. Boundaries are parcel-specific; confirm any address against the city’s own map before assuming either way. Van Nuys is one of the 35 designated HPOZs — one of only three in the San Fernando Valley, alongside Balboa Highlands and Stonehurst — so a building here genuinely may sit inside one, which is not true of most Valley submarkets.
Aviation and aerospace-adjacent (Van Nuys Airport), automotive repair and services along Van Nuys Boulevard, government employment at civic centers, and broad Valley commercial activity.
Metrolink Ventura County station. Orange Line (G Line) bus rapid transit. Primary freeway access via the 405, 101, and 170.
The Metro G Line busway opened in October 2005 with stations at Van Nuys and Sepulveda, and Van Nuys station also serves Metrolink’s Ventura County Line and Amtrak. Freeway access is via the 405, 101 and 170. The Van Nuys corridor is a designated transit corridor, so buildings near it can fall inside a Transit Oriented Communities tier — a direct input to what a developer will pay for a site.
LAUSD. Birmingham Community Charter High School and Van Nuys High School are notable public secondary schools.
Van Nuys High School and Robert Fulton College Prep anchor the public schools, with Kittridge Street, Cohasset Street, Columbus Avenue, Sylvan Park and Van Nuys elementaries. Private options include St. Elisabeth School and Pacific Ridge School.
Van Nuys Airport, Van Nuys Civic Center, The Japanese Garden, Lake Balboa (part of the Sepulveda Basin).
Van Nuys-Sherman Oaks Park, Woodley Park, Lake Balboa, the Sepulveda Basin Recreation Area (one of LA's largest urban open spaces), the Japanese Garden at the Tillman Water Reclamation Plant, Van Nuys Airport's adjacent public spaces.
| Park | What is there |
|---|---|
| Sepulveda Basin Recreation Area | One of the largest urban open spaces in Los Angeles, on the neighborhood’s south-western edge, holding Woodley Park and the Japanese Garden at the Tillman plant. |
| Van Nuys–Sherman Oaks Recreation Center | The main neighborhood recreation center, with fields, a pool and a senior center. |
| Delano Park | A smaller neighborhood park serving the blocks east of Van Nuys Boulevard. |
Van Nuys Boulevard has a deep history as a car-culture cruising strip and retail corridor. Sherman Way and Victory Boulevard host diverse restaurants reflecting the area's immigrant populations.
| Institution | Since | Detail |
|---|---|---|
| Valley Presbyterian Hospital | 1958 | A major Valley employer since the postwar boom, and one of the reasons the local renter base is not purely commuter. |
| Van Nuys Airport | 1928 | One of the busiest general-aviation airports in the world, and a constraint on what can be built beneath its approach paths. |
| The Plant | 1999 | The shopping center built on the former General Motors assembly site. |
Valley-wide Relay for Life events, farmers markets at Van Nuys Civic Center, Great Valley Music Fest.
Van Nuys was the setting for George Lucas's American Graffiti-era Valley cruising culture. The city's Civic Center contains Los Angeles City Hall's Valley annex and the LAPD Valley Bureau.
Represented by the Van Nuys Neighborhood Council, with the Valley’s courthouse and government center inside the neighborhood.
Founded 1911 by Isaac Newton Van Nuys. Annexed to LA in 1915 to access Owens Valley water. Airport established 1928. The 1950s-60s saw Van Nuys become a major auto-row with dozens of dealerships along Van Nuys Boulevard.
| Year | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1909 | The Suburban Homes Company, led by Hobart Johnstone Whitley, buys 48,000 acres of the southern San Fernando Valley. |
| 1911 | The town is founded and named for Isaac Newton Van Nuys, one of its developers. |
| 1915 | Van Nuys is annexed to the City of Los Angeles on May 22, following the aqueduct. |
| 1932 | The Art Deco Valley Municipal Building is completed. |
| 1947 | General Motors opens its Van Nuys Assembly plant, which runs until August 1992 and shapes the local economy for 45 years. |
| 1991 | A 45-block area is redesignated from Van Nuys to Sherman Oaks — a reminder that submarket lines here are administrative, not permanent. |
| 2005 | The Metro Orange Line, now the G Line, opens in October with Van Nuys and Sepulveda stations. |
Every figure below is computed from the Sterman Multifamily Group’s own closed record in Van Nuys — 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 12 closings the median is $171,801 per unit.
| Building size | Closings | Median per unit | Range per unit |
|---|---|---|---|
| 4–10 units | 4 | $184,000 | $104,286 – $287,500 |
| 11–25 units | 1 | $130,952 (one sale, not a median) | — |
| 26–50 units | 5 | $181,667 | $111,410 – $217,500 |
| 51+ units | 2 | $142,824 | $112,500 – $173,148 |
The largest closing in the Van Nuys record is 13907 Oxnard St at $10,875,000 (50 units); the smallest is 13415 Victory Boulevard at $730,000 (7 units). The record here runs from 2012 to 2022, and the busiest single year was 2018 with 3 closings.
How these figures are calculated, and what we do not claim →
Repeat presence on one street is worth more to a Van Nuys owner than a citywide total: it means the buyer pool, the rents and the quirks of that block are already known here. These are the Van Nuys streets where the Sterman Multifamily Group has closed more than one building — 9 buildings across 4 streets.
| Street | Buildings | Units | Years |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vanowen Street | 3 | 73 | 2014–2021 |
| Haskell Avenue | 2 | 102 | 2018 |
| Oxnard Street | 2 | 94 | 2015–2017 |
| Victory Boulevard | 2 | 28 | 2012–2018 |
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.
North Hills to the north, Panorama City to the north-east, Valley Glen to the east, Sherman Oaks to the south, the Sepulveda Basin to the south-west, Lake Balboa to the west and Northridge to the north-west.
A City of Los Angeles neighborhood of about 8.99 square miles, historically counted at some 136,000 residents and about 11,500 people per square mile — the administrative center of the San Fernando Valley, with the courthouse, the government center and the airport all inside it.
The signature type is the postwar Valley walk-up — two stories of stucco over open tuck-under parking, built at volume through the 1950s and 1960s. Van Nuys also holds real civic architecture: the 1932 Art Deco Valley Municipal Building, and a 1935 Spanish Colonial Revival post office. Tuck-under parking is what creates a soft story — a ground floor with too few shear walls to brace the floors above — and it is the reason Los Angeles adopted Ordinance 183893 in January 2015, under which the city identified roughly 13,500 buildings needing seismic retrofit.
Los Angeles adopted its Historic Preservation Overlay Zone ordinance in 1979 and had designated 35 HPOZ neighborhoods by 2023. Inside one, all exterior work goes through additional review by an HPOZ board working from a published preservation plan, which constrains what a buyer can do with a building.
Across the 12 Van Nuys buildings in the Sterman Multifamily Group’s own closed record, the median is $171,801 per unit, on buildings ranging from 4 to 68 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.
Van Nuys has the broadest Valley inventory base — every vintage, every unit size, every buyer profile. It's the working Valley multifamily submarket. Transactions happen at all price points, in all cycles.
Michael Sterman will walk through comparables, buyer pool, and timing specific to your building — no obligation, no pitch.
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