Malibu is ranked lower than some sister cities along the coast in a richest cities survey, but lower than Bannockburn, Ill.?
By David Wallace/Special to The Malibu Times
Whenever magazine publishers get worried about circulation figures, they know that all they have to do to recapture the interest of most readers is to publish some sort of rankings list. It really doesn’t make much of a difference what the list is about. Whether a ranking of the best restaurants in a community, the most eligible bachelors, the most powerful CEOs, or the hottest vacation resorts, readers seem to love, and believe in, lists.
So it may come as a shock to everyone from Armenia to Zanzibar, for whom the very name of Malibu evokes images of untold wealth and glamour, to learn that Worth magazine, a glossy that claims to be written for the top 5 percent of the population, recently ranked Malibu way down as 64th on a list of the 250 richest American cities. The magazine’s rankings are supposedly based on the average selling price of a home, and Malibu, according to its figures, comes in at $908,750.
Jupiter Island, Fla. (home of Burt Reynolds, for one), leads the list with an average home price of $3,912,500, way up from its 1999 median price of $1.7 million. That Atherton, Calif. is No. 2 on the list with an average home price of $3,400,000 isn’t particularly surprising. The community is, after all, the gilded dormitory for Silicon Valley. And, no surprise, Aspen is right up there at No. 4, despite a stagnant top-end market. Undoubtedly, the mountain resort’s numbers were helped when Enron’s disgraced honcho Ken Lay dumped two of his four residences in the mountain resort in one week. One, a 3,015 square foot “cottage” sold for $10 million, setting a local price-per-square-foot record of $3,330, triple the local rate for new construction, and more than 10 times the median rate for a home in the very upscale Rancho Santa Fe community (No. 16 on the list) near San Diego.
But Cherry Hills Village, Colo. (the Denver suburb came in at 46)? Or Hunting Valley, Ohio (51)? Or Bannockburn, Ill. (56)?
As nice as they may be, not many of us would want to live there-they’re deep in what a lot of Angelenos think of as “fly-over country.” Even worse, along with Detroit’s suburb of Bloomfield Hills (No. 122), Indian Hill, Ohio (No. 114) and the St. Louis, Missouri suburbs of Ladue (No. 200), and Clayton (No. 212), they’re also buried in what some think of as the rust belt of fly-over country. But two things seem clear from the Worth survey. Homes, once romanticized as the family’s nest, have become the family’s nest egg. And, second, seawater provides the alchemy that can transform land into gold. Many communities near the top of the list-both in California and Florida-are situated near or actually on the ocean.
“Florida’s richest towns,” the magazine observes, “are situated on barrier islands and keys, fragile spits and dollops of land that scarcely rise above the sea. Geologically, these places are newly born and liable to be gone just as quickly … [but] people don’t worry about the next 5,000 years because property values have tripled in the past five.” (Hundreds of Malibu beach residents could easily fill Floridians in on dangers of such overconfidence.)
So do residents of Laurel Hollow, NY. (No. 42) know something Malibuites don’t?
Not necessarily. A close reading of the story reveals that, other than running a picture of a Malibu house, apparently Worth never took the trouble to speak with anyone here. Rick Wallace, a local Realtor and a real estate columnist for The Malibu Times,” took issue with a similar Worth survey two years ago, and finds the same error in the new list.
“Their numbers are way off,” Wallace says, “because they rely on a statistical service that includes condominiums. That lowers the averages. There are a lot of condos in Malibu, but there are certainly not very many on those Florida islands. The truth is that the average home sale in Malibu’s 90265 zip code is about $1,400,000.”
Kate Craig of Prudential Malibu Realty adds, “And there are a large number of mobile homes in Malibu, which skews the averages they are using even more.”
Using the $1.4 million figure, Malibu comes in at No. 25, right below Purchase, N.Y., and above Saratoga, Calif.
But Malibuites can take heart; they still live in a terrific place.
And, either way you look at it, the somewhat startling fact remains that, compared to such places as Rolling Hills on the Palos Verdes Peninsula (No. 15) or Montecito (No 3) near Santa Barbara, living in the ‘Bu is actually a bargain.
Who’d have thought?