SOUTH BAY DIGS | Digital Edition Online

ED'S VIEW | ROCKET BAY | WEEK 2 OF 16 WHAT HAPPENS WHEN 100 BUYERS WANT THE SAME 20 HOUSES? Inside the pressure building in Manhattan Beach - and how buyers, not asking prices, create the next high-water mark. "Sellers can ask for a record. Buyers are the ones who create it." 46 HOMES FOR SALE CITYWIDE 21 ACTIVE CHOICES $4M TO UNDER $6M 2 TREE SECTION CHOICES IN THAT RANGE $360K OVER ASKING 3501 MAPLE THE REAL STORY BEHIND MANHATTAN BEACH'S INVENTORY SQUEEZE Imagine having $5 million to spend on a home and discovering there is almost nothing to buy. That sounds impossible in most of America. In Manhattan Beach, it is the reality buyers are facing right now. As of September 16, there were only 46 single-family homes for sale citywide. In the MLS snapshot I pulled while preparing this article, only 21 active listings were priced from $4 million to under $6 million. Narrow the search to the Tree Section and the choices dropped to two. And that is before a buyer says: I need 3,000 square feet. I want to be west of Sepulveda. I don't want a busy street. I want move-in condition. I want a yard. I want to be near a particular school. Suddenly, a buyer with an extraordinary budget can have virtually nothing to buy. This is where a low-inventory market gets interesting - and sometimes uncomfortable. WHY SO LITTLE TO BUY? Part of the problem is the same rate-lock effect affecting housing markets around the country. Many homeowners bought or refinanced when mortgage rates were dramatically lower. If they don't have a compelling reason to move, exchanging that low-rate mortgage for today's financing can make moving considerably less attractive. Then the problem feeds on itself. Homeowners don't see enough homes they want to move to, so they don't list the homes they already own. Less inventory creates less reason to move, which creates even less inventory. Yet life doesn't wait for the perfect real estate market. People marry. Families grow. Couples divorce. Children leave home. Jobs change. Parents pass away. People relocate. Athletes get traded. Companies create wealth. Families displaced from other parts of Los Angeles need new places to live. And the South Bay continues to attract people because of the schools, weather, community and lifestyle. So buyers keep arriving even when sellers are reluctant to leave. The historical numbers help put that pressure in perspective. At the end of the second quarter of 2026, Manhattan Beach had 80 homes for sale compared with 126 in the comparable quarter of 2016 - roughly 36.5% fewer. The same report calculated only 2.4 months of inventory, and homes that sold during the quarter averaged 19 days on market. But citywide numbers only tell part of the story. Manhattan Beach is really a collection of micro-markets. A buyer may start by saying "Manhattan Beach," then narrow it to the Tree Section, then a particular school area, then a quieter street, then a minimum size, lot or condition. Every requirement makes a small market smaller. 3501 MAPLE: WHEN THE BUYERS TAKE OVER We recently represented the seller of 3501 Maple Avenue, a roughly 3,400-square-foot Tree Section home. Our early conversations around value were in the mid-$3 millions, possibly around $3.5 million. The north end of the Tree Section has real advantages - easier access toward Los Angeles, LAX and the freeways - but historically buyers can become more price-sensitive as you move closer to the Rosecrans corridor. We wanted to be careful not to confuse an ambitious asking price with actual market value. The seller worked with us to prepare the home properly. We enhanced the staging, improved the landscaping, touched up paint, produced professional photography, floor plans and video, and then launched it through the neighborhood, the brokerage community and the public market. After several strategy discussions, we listed at $3.6 million. Then the buyers took over. Two offers reached $3.96 million. A third exceeded $3.9 million. The home sold for $3.96 million - $360,000, or 10%, over asking. That distinction matters. Sellers can ask any price they want. Agents can recommend any price they want. But neither one establishes the next high-water mark simply by putting a number on a listing. Buyers do. When multiple motivated buyers independently decide that losing a house is more painful than paying more for it, that is when price discovery happens. I have seen sellers look at a record sale and immediately assume their home should now be worth more. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it isn't. Real estate doesn't trade like a stock. One sale at a new high does not mean every house on the block reprices the next morning. A property may be unique. The lot may be irreplaceable. A buyer may need that exact location. Or one person may simply be willing to pay far more than anyone else. One buyer can create an anomaly. Several buyers arriving at nearly the same number tells us considerably more. That is what makes Maple interesting. We didn't have one buyer at $3.96 million while everybody else was hundreds of thousands of dollars below. We had multiple buyers clustered at essentially the same elevated level. And the buyers who lost didn't disappear. Three buyers competed. One bought the house. Two went right back into an already limited market, still qualified, still looking and perhaps even more determined when the next good house appears. That is how scarcity creates pressure from one transaction to the next. WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU'RE THE BUYER? For buyers, this market creates the opposite problem: when the rare right property appears, how quickly do you move - and how aggressive should you be? Recently, I saw an oversized-lot property at 840 18th Street in the highly sought-after Martyrs area hit the market at $7.5 million. I believed immediately that if the property made it through the weekend, it was likely to attract serious competition. There was one problem: my client was on an airplane. Because we already had a trusted relationship and I understood what he was looking for, we were able to communicate while he was in flight. I drafted the offer, got it signed and reached the listing agent. Coincidentally, the seller was with the agent when I called, giving me the opportunity to convey the strength, seriousness and simplicity of the buyer's offer. We offered slightly above asking with very clean terms: no financing contingency, no appraisal contingency and an abbreviated inspection contingency. The seller accepted the offer before my client's plane landed. The transaction didn't end there. After the buyer had the opportunity to properly inspect and fully evaluate the property, additional negotiations took place. Through cooperative discussions, buyer and seller ultimately agreed to an adjusted price that was slightly below the initial accepted offer but still above the original asking price. Both sides felt good about the outcome. Could the seller theoretically have received more by exposing the property through the entire weekend? Possibly. Could the transaction have become more complicated? Possibly. That is exactly the point. The public eventually sees a list price and a sales price. What it doesn't see are the circumstances, timing, contingencies, occupancy issues, privacy concerns, inspection findings, certainty of closing, personalities and motivations that shaped the negotiation. A list price and a sales price are two numbers. The real story is everything that happened between them. THE STORY CONTINUES ONLINE Scan the QR code for the deeper 10-year Manhattan Beach inventory comparison, more on why inventory remains constrained. P A L O S V E R D E S R E D O N D O B E A C H H E R M O S A B E A C H M A N H A T T A N B E A C H T O R R A N C E B R O K E R E D B Y E D K A M I N S K Y | 3 1 0 . 3 0 7 . 2 2 2 4 | I T Z S O L D . C O M #1 REAL ESTATE AGENT IN THE SOUTH BAY | TOP 15 IN THE NATION (REAL TRENDS) | OVER $4 BILLION SOLD

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