"It was crickets last month, and now this owner is getting multiple bids." An agent working Pacific Palisades and Santa Monica said that in early 2025, describing a rental listing that had gone from unanswered to overrun in the span of a few weeks. The Palisades Fire had just displaced roughly 13,000 families, and a good share of them were calling Santa Monica home while they figured out what came next.
That story is still the one most people know. It is also, as of this September, out of date for most of the city.
The Rush That Made the National News
The numbers from early 2025 were real and they were extreme. In February 2025, Santa Monica home sales climbed 166 percent year over year, and the average sale price jumped 87 percent to roughly $6 million, according to a brokerage market update covering that month. One agent working with displaced Palisades families put it plainly at the time: nine in ten of his clients who had lost homes in the fire were trying to lease in Santa Monica or Brentwood specifically.
Even that February spike didn't hold its shape for long. By March 2025, the average sold price in Santa Monica had already slipped to about $4.2 million, down 5 percent from the year before, even as homes were still moving fast, in 19 days on average versus 42 the prior March. A separate roundup of Westside activity through the spring found Santa Monica and Venice single-family home sales had more than doubled year over year, Brentwood's median single-family price had jumped nearly 47 percent to $5.1 million, and inventory across the city had grown 47.7 percent as sellers rushed to meet the demand.
That was the version of Santa Monica that got picked up by national outlets and stuck in a lot of people's heads: a market permanently repriced by fire refugees with deep pockets and nowhere else to go.
What September 2026 Actually Shows
By September 2026, the citywide data tells a different story. Apartment List's September 2026 rent report puts Santa Monica's median rent at $2,383, down 3.4 percent year over year, after the number had already fallen again the month before. Zumper's August 2026 figures show the same direction, with the citywide average down 2.7 percent year over year to $3,598.
An earlier Apartment List readout from this spring called this exactly right: the post-fire spike was real, but it was temporary, and it ended up masking a rental market that had already been softening before the fire ever started. Santa Monica posted the sharpest annual rent decline of any city in the Los Angeles metro around that time, and the trend hasn't reversed since.
For anyone with capital sitting on the sidelines waiting for Westside multifamily to reset, this matters beyond the rent line. Stabilized cap rates on Westside apartment buildings were running 5.5 to 5.75 percent as of this spring, with value-add deals trading in the 4.75 to 5.25 percent range over that same stretch. Buildings that traded at premium pricing in 2021 and 2022 were changing hands at a meaningfully lower basis by comparison. That's a correction, not a peak.
The One Zip Code Where the Fire Never Left
Here's the part the citywide average hides. Zumper's same August 2026 data shows North of Montana, Santa Monica's 90402 submarket, posting rent growth of 63.9 percent year over year, to a median of $9,000 a month. While the rest of the city cooled, this one pocket kept climbing.
The reason isn't mysterious once you separate who actually stayed from who just passed through. Renters priced out of a crunch eventually move on, and that's what happened broadly across Santa Monica once the initial emergency demand eased. But buyers and renters with the means to permanently relocate rather than wait out a rebuild didn't have the same pressure to leave once things calmed down. North of Montana offers the closest match to a Pacific Palisades lot profile inside city limits: deep parcels, quiet residential streets, real privacy. For households who decided the Palisades rebuild timeline wasn't worth waiting on, it was the obvious landing spot, and they didn't leave once they got there.
| Aug/Sept 2026 figure | Year-over-year change | |
|---|---|---|
| Santa Monica citywide (Apartment List, Sept 2026) | $2,383 median rent | down 3.4% |
| Santa Monica citywide (Zumper, Aug 2026) | $3,598 average rent | down 2.7% |
| North of Montana / 90402 (Zumper, Aug 2026) | $9,000 median rent | up 63.9% |
One city, one month, two directions.
The Legal Ceiling Nobody's Market Data Captures
There's a second number worth knowing if you own or are evaluating a rent-controlled property here, and it has nothing to do with what Zillow or Zumper is tracking. Santa Monica's Rent Control Board just announced a September 2026 General Adjustment of 2.6 percent for eligible units, capped at a maximum $70 increase for units with a current maximum allowable rent of $2,674 or above. That increase applies to existing, registered tenancies regardless of what the open market is doing in either direction.
This is a different number from the citywide asking-rent decline and the North of Montana spike, and it matters for a different reason. If you're pricing a multi-unit building's actual income, the tenant-in-place rent is governed by this annual adjustment and the property's registration history, not by whatever a vacant unit down the street is listing for. An investor running numbers off a citywide average, in either direction, is working from the wrong column.
What This Means If You're Shopping Right Now
If your search is for a single-family home or condo outside 90402, you're operating in a market that has already normalized well past the 2025 headlines. Santa Monica homes are selling in around 47 days on average as of the three months ending May 2026, and the median sale price over that window was up just 1.1 percent year over year, essentially flat. That's not a market where you need to assume a bidding war before you've even toured the house.
If North of Montana is specifically where you're looking, plan for the opposite. Single-family homes in that submarket have continued to sell in about two weeks in recent reporting, a pace that hasn't slowed the way the rest of the city has. The buyers competing for those addresses right now are largely the same profile who moved there permanently after the fire, and that pressure hasn't let up.
If you're evaluating a rental building as an investment, run two numbers side by side before you make an offer: what the unit could command vacant today, and what its current registered rent actually is under the fall General Adjustment. The gap between those two figures, not the citywide average, is usually where the real opportunity or the real risk sits.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Santa Monica still a seller's market because of the Palisades fire? Only in one submarket. Citywide, days on market and pricing have returned to something close to flat as of mid-2026. North of Montana is the exception, still moving fast and still appreciating well above the rest of the city.
Why did North of Montana keep rising while the rest of the city cooled? The initial demand shock after the fire touched the whole city, but only North of Montana kept the households with the means to relocate permanently rather than wait for a rebuild. That's a different, smaller, wealthier pool of buyers and renters than the one that drove the broader 2025 spike, and it hasn't thinned out the way the rest of the market has.
Does the September rent control adjustment affect market-rate asking rents? No. The 2.6 percent General Adjustment applies only to existing, registered tenancies under Santa Monica's rent control law. Asking rents on vacant units are set by the open market, which is the same market showing the citywide decline described above.
Santa Monica's numbers right now depend entirely on which zip code, which unit type, and which lease you're looking at. If you want a read on where your specific property or search actually sits inside this split market, Jasan Sherman can get you there. Start with an instant Westside home valuation and we'll walk you through what the current data means for your address, not just the citywide average.
