"Let's party like it's 2008!" said no one ever, but that's only because the SoCal real estate scene is even worse today than it was during the Great Recession. That's according to Johnathan Lansner, columnist at the Los Angeles Daily News.
"It’s no secret that Southern California homes have been financially out of reach for most buyers for years," Lansner wrote earlier this week, with sales this year crashing "to a pace even slower than the real estate-wrecking Great Recession."
But here's the fun part. Even though there are hardly any buyers in a market moving like molasses uphill against a stiff breeze in winter, Lansner found that "the few buyers who close are paying near-record-high prices."
That's a broken marketplace — broken in fundamental ways that only a truly determined government can accomplish.
Lansner also found that the current "crash conditions" have endured for three years now. He then picked out the slowest 25 home sales months going back to 2005. Of those, just "seven occurred as global financial markets collapsed in 2007-08. May 2020 was another, during pandemic lockdowns."
The rest — 17 desertlike months for home sales — all happened since 2023.
This is probably where I should remind you what else happened to the Los Angeles real estate market three years ago: the so-called "mansion tax" that voters approved, purportedly to provide funds to solve the city's growing homeless crisis once and for all.
Supporters claimed the "mansion tax" would raise $900 million a year, or $2.7 billion over its first three years. "Instead," the New York Post reported earlier this month, ULA "brought in about $1.2 billion." That's less than half the expected revenues, nearly three years after passage.
Worse, the Post also reported that the tax "blocked the building of 9,100 homes, wiped out 16,650 full-time construction jobs and cost $452 million in revenue."
L.A. voters are such suckers. By which I mean idiots. By which I mean suckers.
Industry magazine MPA backs that up, finding earlier this month that "California’s housing market posted its sharpest annual sales decline in recent months, with existing single-family home transactions falling 6.5% year over year," but with Southern California posting "the steepest annual sales decline among the state’s five major regions at 9.1%."
Then there's the fallout. Last month, Lansner found that the region lost 46,800 real estate jobs during those same three years. Those jobs represent — or rather, used to represent — 6% of SoCal's entire real estate labor force. That isn't nearly the 40% job loss "enjoyed" during roughly the same period in the TV and movie production industries, but it is one more marker on L.A.'s decline.
There was no global financial panic. No world war. No recession. No pandemic.
Just Southern California stuck in a self-imposed rut from which there seems to be no escape.
You can read Lansner's full report here.
Lansner's numbers only go up to July 2026, so who knows, maybe things have improved in the last few months before voters decide whether to give Sacramento the power to wallop billionaires (and eventually millionaires, and then non-millionaires) with a "one-time" wealth tax that will somehow end up on repeat.
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