The Malibu Gardens condo complex, near PCH and Kanan Dume Road, was built in 1975 and valued under $25,000 per unit at the time. Within 30 years, a record sale hit $700,000. Just two years later, a new record of $800,000 was established in the complex, in 2007. And then all hopes for a higher sale were set aside. The real estate market plummeted soon after.
This year has brought new heights, however, as a transaction in March hit $841,000 (the same unit that sold 11 years earlier at $800k). The Gardens has a new record.
Not far away, the Malibu West tract, including the upper mesa and lower canyon, was languishing on a $2.9 million record sale set in 2015—until this year, when the $3 million threshold was shattered in January. The new neighborhood record price was set at $3,275,000.
And so it goes throughout the 60-70 different housing neighborhoods in Malibu, as well as the 25 condo complexes of more than 10 units.
Malibu’s most famous, and earliest, neighborhood, the Malibu Colony, has seen a record sale at $36 million.
Neighborhoods—and specific streets—all around Malibu are enjoying record highs, particularly in 2018. Take Winding Way Road, for example. A sale of nearly $16 million in May was the new standard for the meandering street of equestrian estates that had seen eight-digit figures a few times, but not like that.
A sale on Bonsall topped $9 million about a year ago, beating out what had previously been a record $8.5 million sale from 2011. The property, at the back of the canyon, has a celebrity pedigree.
One of the busiest condo markets the past two years has been The Pointe, across from Point Dume. Fifteen units have sold there since the beginning of 2017. Sure enough, a recent deal of $1,360,000 nudged a new record price into the books.
This sort of news would be commonplace throughout Malibu’s history. Probably 80 percent of the time, since records have been kept, prices were going to new highs. Profoundly, that was not the case for the last 10 years. When prices plummeted nearly 50 percent from 2009-11, it took seven years to bring them back again. New records are a new phenomenon and something to celebrate, once again, after a long respite.
At the current trend, many more records are just around the corner. For example, in Malibu Cove Colony, only one home has ever topped $10 million (in April 2017). Two other current listings are poised to set a new high, perhaps at any time.
Meanwhile, the hits just keep on coming in Sea View Estates ($2.2 million, among the standard, original homes), West Saddle Peak gated neighborhood ($5.6 million in late July), Carbon Beach (the epic $110,000,000 deal that is the high water mark for the entire state this year), Malibu Country Estates ($3,750,000) and the beach at Sea Level (over $11 million in March).
The easiest way to observe the trend is in the condo complexes, like the Malibu Gardens. At such places, there are no new units built within and no dramatic changes of the individual properties. The apples-to-apples comparison is clearer. The Tapia condos in Malibu West, for example, saw their first $1.2 million sale this year. The high back in the 2005-08 market had been barely $1 million.
The small complex at Dume-Heathercliff nudged to a new high of $1,259,000 last year. The one sale this year was just under that.
Moving east, the Malibu Villas have not gotten back to the all-time high of nearly $1.1 million set in 2006, which occurred before a number of problems beset the community. The long way back, however, has seen a sale of nearly $900,000 this year. Almost all the sales at Malibu Villas from 2010-12 were in the $300-$500,000 range, by comparison.
The Malibu Canyon Village along Civic Center Way saw a record $759K sale last year and is poised to top $800,000 before long. Its neighbor above, the Maison De Ville, hit $1.3 million already this year, a new benchmark. Across the street, Toscana reached $1.8 million this year in its only sale to date though, in fairness, that remains short of a $1.947 million sale when the complex was practically new in 2006. Just to complete the quartet of adjacent complexes, Vista Pacifica, adjacent Webster School, topped $1.1 million for the first time recently.
Many neighborhoods, such as Big Rock, Corral and Latigo Canyons, and Point Dume have such a varied property selection that the majority of standard homes is offset by a few huge mansions that sell much higher. It is thus difficult to make a fair comparison judgment.
Nevertheless, in inner Point Dume, on properties that do not see the ocean or have direct access to the beach, deals over $10 million are becoming more commonplace. And one unique Point Dume property must have set some sort of record. It sits on an acre and has just one apartment bedroom—over a giant temperature-controlled car-collector garage. The new standard for buying a garage: $7.3 million.
Rick Wallace has been a Realtor in Malibu for 30 years.