On August 11, Johnny Buss, the eldest son of former Lakers owner Jerry Buss, closed on a 15,000 square foot lot at 860 Via de la Paz for $7.1 million. The parcel used to hold a retail and office building where Palisades Pizza and the Kumon Math and Reading Center once operated, before the January 2025 fire reduced it to a foundation. The sale closed days before Palisades Village reopened its doors a few blocks away, and just after the Lakers themselves changed hands in a $12.5 billion sale that put the Buss name back in headlines for an unrelated reason.
That transaction is a small, specific data point. But it sits inside a much bigger puzzle. Pull up four different real estate sites right now and ask each one the same question, what is the median home price in Pacific Palisades, and you will get four different answers, some of them hundreds of thousands of dollars apart. None of those sites made an error. They are each measuring a different slice of a market that no longer behaves like one market.
The same zip code, four different numbers
Here is what the major tracking sites showed for Pacific Palisades in the same general window this year:
| Source | Figure | Period |
|---|---|---|
| Redfin | roughly $2.83M median | 3 months ending April 2026 |
| Zillow | roughly $3.04M average home value | as of May 2026 |
| Movoto (based on 174 recorded sales) | $3.35M median | May 2026 |
| Homes.com | roughly $3.445M to $3.5M median | July 2026 |
A spread of more than half a million dollars on the same underlying question is not a rounding difference. It is a signal that the thing being averaged has changed shape.
Two products are wearing one label
Before the fire, a "home sale" in Pacific Palisades almost always meant a finished house changing hands. After it, a meaningful share of what closes is a cleared, graded lot with no structure on it at all. Both get filed under the same category, residential sale, 90272, and both get folded into the same median.
That distinction matters because the two products price completely differently. A finished home reflects square footage, view, school proximity, and the emotional pull of a move-in-ready address. A vacant lot reflects dirt, slope, zoning, and how fast a buyer can get through permitting. Blend enough of the second category into a comp set built for the first, and the median falls even if every standing home on the market is holding its value.
By the fall of 2025, that blending had become impossible to ignore. Pacific Palisades went from roughly seven active vacant lot listings a year earlier to more than 300 in the final quarter of 2025, an inventory shift that essentially did not exist before the fire because there was almost no bare land to sell. Investors and developers picked up close to 40 percent of the lots that traded in the 90272 zip code that fall, a share that had been close to zero the year prior. The typical lot in that window sold for around $1.6 million, a fraction of what a finished home on the same footprint would command.
The Buss purchase shows how much range hides inside that "typical" number. His lot is larger and zoned for commercial and mixed-use development, sitting a short walk from the newly reopened Village, and it sold for more than four times the typical residential lot price from the same recovery window. A land sale in Pacific Palisades right now can mean a $1.6 million teardown-adjacent parcel or a $7.1 million commercial site next to the neighborhood's anchor retail center. Averaging those together tells you very little about what either one is actually worth.
What the finished-home numbers actually say
Separate the lot sales out and a different picture shows up. Sales volume for the neighborhood rose over the same stretch that produced the scary-looking Redfin decline, with 174 homes changing hands in May 2026 compared with 119 in May 2025. Time on market lengthened too, from a median of 48 days a year earlier to 76 days in the same May 2026 window.
Read those three facts together instead of one at a time and the story flips. A falling blended median, rising transaction count, and longer marketing periods do not describe a market in freefall. They describe more transactions happening, more of them involving land rather than finished structures, and buyers of intact homes taking their time rather than competing in a bidding war. That is a market re-sorting itself, not one collapsing.
Three buyer types are shopping for three different things
Anyone comparing Pacific Palisades to another Westside neighborhood right now benefits from knowing who is actually buying, because the pool has split along with the pricing.
- Cash investors and developers buying cleared lots as a land play, often planning to build and sell rather than occupy
- Displaced or move-in buyers who want to be back in the community while their own rebuild is underway elsewhere in the neighborhood
- Long-term residents and legacy buyers with deep ties to the area who are purchasing intact homes at what they view as fair value for the location
Each group is answering a different question when they make an offer, and each one is comparing a Pacific Palisades listing to a different set of alternatives. A developer is weighing this lot against other development sites across the Westside. A family rebuilding down the street is weighing this house against a short-term rental. Neither is behaving like a buyer in a market that portals describe as down 36 percent, because neither is actually transacting in that blended category.
The signals that will eventually pull the numbers back together
Two recent milestones point toward when the median stops behaving strangely. In mid-August, the neighborhood's rebuild tracking crossed 1,000 homes under active construction, with 35 primary residences having received a certificate of occupancy as of August 13. That same week, Palisades Village reopened after a remediation effort developer Rick Caruso put north of $50 million, a milestone that local coverage tied directly to the pace of nearby commercial recovery, including interest in redevelopment sites like the one Buss just purchased.
As more of those 1,000-plus projects finish and convert from permit status to occupied homes, the ratio of finished-home sales to lot sales should shift back toward what it looked like before the fire. Until then, anyone reading a Pacific Palisades price chart is reading a chart of two markets stacked on top of each other, and the neighborhood's real value story is easier to see by looking at what is actually closing, lot or house, than by trusting a single headline number.
FAQ
Is Pacific Palisades currently a buyer's market? It depends heavily on what you are buying. Vacant lots have more competition among investors and developers, while intact, move-in-ready homes are seeing longer marketing periods and more room to negotiate than the neighborhood saw before the fire.
Why are homes taking longer to sell than they did a year ago? Days on market lengthened from a median of 48 to 76 days between May 2025 and May 2026. That points to a more selective buyer pool weighing insurance costs, rebuild timelines on nearby parcels, and long-term value rather than a drop in genuine demand.
Should I trust the median price I see on a listing site? Treat it as a starting point, not a verdict. Ask whether the figure includes vacant lot sales, and ask for a comp set filtered to properties similar to the one you are evaluating, whether that is a finished home or a cleared parcel.
If you are trying to make sense of what a specific Pacific Palisades address is actually worth, whether it is a standing home or a lot with a rebuild ahead of it, the team at Carmody Real Estate can walk through the current comps with you and separate the headline number from the number that applies to your situation. Contact us when you are ready to talk through it.
