Southern California home prices are barely budging.
In April, the average home price across the six-county Southern California region rose 0.4% from March to $884,981, according to data from Zillow. Compared with April 2024, values are up only 0.7%.
Economists and real estate agents say a variety of factors are putting a lid on home prices, including high mortgage rates, rising inventory levels and economic uncertainty stemming from tariffs.
Annual price growth of less than a 1% represents a sharp slowdown from where the market was a year ago. In April 2024, prices were up 9% from April 2023.
If the Trump administration’s trade policies push the economy into a recession, some economists say home prices could drop significantly.
For now, Zillow is forecasting the economy avoids a recession and for home prices to decline only slightly. By April 2026, the real estate firm expects home prices in the Los Angeles-Orange County metro region to be 1.5% lower than they are today.
Kara Ng, a senior economist with Zillow, said the expected small dip can be attributed to a rising number of homes for sale.
As mortgage rates remain high, real estate agents say existing homeowners increasingly are choosing to move rather than hold onto their ultra-low pandemic mortgage rates. Many first-time buyers, without access to equity, remain locked out.
In April, there were 39% more homes for sale in L.A. County than a year earlier.
“Sellers are coming back more so than buyers,” Ng said.
Zillow Research, Times analysis
Note to readers
Welcome to the Los Angeles Times’ Real Estate Tracker. Every month we will publish a report with data on housing prices, mortgage rates and rental prices. Our reporters will explain what the new data mean for Los Angeles and surrounding areas and help you understand what you can expect to pay for an apartment or house. You can read last month’s real estate breakdown here.
Explore home prices and rents for April
Use the tables below to search for home sale prices and apartment rental prices by city, neighborhood and county.
Rental prices in Southern California
In 2024, asking rents for apartments in many parts of Southern California also ticked down, but the January fires in L.A. County could be upending the downward trend in some locations.
Housing analysts have said that rising vacancy levels since 2022 had forced landlords to accept less in rent. But the fires destroyed thousands of homes, suddenly thrusting many people into the rental market.
Most homes destroyed were single-family houses, and some housing and disaster recovery experts say they expect the largest increases in rent to be in larger units adjacent to burn areas in Pacific Palisades and Altadena, with upward pressure on rents diminishing for units that are smaller and farther away from the disaster zone.
In Santa Monica, which borders the hard-hit Pacific Palisades neighborhood, the median rent rose 4.5% in April from a year earlier, according to data from ApartmentList.
Across the entire city of Los Angeles, which includes the Palisades and many neighborhoods not adjacent to any fire, rents rose only 0.1% last month.
ApartmentList does not have data for Altadena, but it does for the adjacent city of Pasadena. Rents there rose 5.4% in April.
