A Malibu permit in 23 days — and the 18 months before it

By Opinion Columnist · Sat Jul 25 2026

By Arno Koch, Malibu Rebuild Task Force

Malibu is arguably one of the most difficult municipalities to get a building permit. People are scrambling for years; many give up. Now a permit was issued to a rebuilder in 23 days! Really? No, but close. We are still 1.5 years after the fire, and the task looked daunting in the beginning. The first question was how to design a house without spending $60,000-plus on an architect, on the low end.

I found a tool on the internet called planner5D. An online software that lets you build a 3D model of your house. So, my wife and I sat together and designed our dream house.

Now we needed someone to draft it up and do the structural engineering, so that our dream will make it through the next earthquake. We received two pieces of advice: 1. “Use a Malibu architect! They know how this city works and will get it through the fastest!” 2. “Do not use a Malibu architect! They are part of the problem why things get done so slowly!” — We did not use a Malibu architect. We used a design-build firm located in Thousand Oaks and San Diego that a neighbor recommended and that charged less than $20,000 for turning our drawings into architectural plans and doing the engineering. Planning was relatively easy, one round of corrections after 10 days, the time frame Malibu set for themselves. Corrections were minor and we were told quickly that we could proceed to plan check already, getting the stamp was a formality. That formality took about two months though. After considering different building materials for five months, we arrived back at wood framing, covered by MgO boards and stucco, and moved to plan check. 

We submitted our plan check application on June 11. Our corrections came back exactly 10 days later and were implemented quickly. Our plans then left the plan check stage on July 4, 23 days later, and our house was not visible anymore on the “in plan check map” on the city’s rebuild dashboard. We had our permit! Not so fast … We did not hold a permit in hand. What was happening? Because it was evident to the city from the paperwork that I would receive my permit, the city had moved it forward already to prepare everything required to stamp immediately, while we were cleaning up the last documents. That is one of the measures the city takes to get you your permit in hand as fast as possible.

Back to our design team choice: I do not discourage anyone from using a Malibu architect, but our design team needed a learning curve of just one permit application (my neighbor’s) to breeze through the second one. 

What are the main takeaways from our application that I would recommend to rebuilders: 

Get the approval from the fire department right after you received your planning approval. We applied only with the plan check application, which caused a surprising and preventable delay.

Don’t fear Geo. Many houses in Malibu are built on (historic) landslides. Get a versed geotechnical consultant to write your geo report and take the city’s offer for a “limited report,” essentially a desktop study, serious. Have them read the geo guidelines (New ones were published this week!) and follow the geo checklist. When you receive your corrections, don’t just run with the city’s geo consultant’s requests for deeper investigations into areas of your property that have not moved for 60-plus years! They are consultants and they do what they are supposed to do: Consult. They provide corrections and comments and point the finger on every even ever so tiny potential risk they can identify. It is not the city’s job to then stop you from running with those corrections and investing tens of thousands of dollars and months of your time and rent. But reading through the corrections with YOUR geo consultant and responding to a comment with a sentence instead of a “Ph.D.-thesis” can and will suffice in many cases and satisfy the city.

Don’t be upset about 50-100 tiny, nitpicky corrections/comments, be glad if there are no big ones. Your design team will implement them in a few hours and resubmit.

Meet the city staff in person. Putting faces to names made the process feel far more collaborative on both sides. One of the surprises of this process was discovering that the people who work for the city genuinely care for your permit to get issued. It can be a part of your healing process.

Speak with your zone captain. We are in this mess for 1.5 years now and if you are a bit like me, you’ll find it easier and it will save you time and money to go through the process with a friend and not only with those who you pay to get things done, who may even get paid more with every mistake they make. Your zone captain can help you navigate the process, select your design team, select your GC, communicate with the city, point you to resources and often even help with insurance questions.

Every item above was also, without me planning it that way, a piece of getting through this. Rebuilding this house is the biggest project I have ever had on my hands, and I know for sure that nobody but myself cares about it as much as I do. To me, being personally involved is part of the healing process.

Speaking of healing, If you lost your house and haven’t yet, take a look at the Malibu Community Long Term Recovery Group malibucommunityltrg.org/ and the Boys & Girls Club Malibu bgcmalibu.org/. Both have been a great blessing to our family, and they can be to yours. We are very grateful.