u/YannFard

Realized this morning it’s 8/18 and figured this sub should mark it. Random thing I learned recently that I liked: the 818 has only existed since 1984. Before that everybody in LA was 213. And when it started, 818 covered the San Gabriel Valley too, they didn’t split off to 626 until 1997. So the area code we’ve built an entire identity around is younger than a lot of the people using it.

For me the most Valley thing is that there is still strong feeling of community here. My kids are at Kester and SOPNS with whole network of families at the drop-off that feels like a small town dropped into the middle of LA. People act like the Valley is where you end up when you can’t afford the other side of the hill and I think they’ve got it backwards. Anyway, there’s stuff going on tonight if anyone’s looking, CityWalk and Sherman Oaks Castle Park are both doing things, and apparently they’re unveiling the design for the Valley’s first Rose Parade float.

But mostly curious what everyone else would say. What’s the thing about living here that people from outside the 818 don’t get?

I’ve been looking at cars after a recent car accident. Mentioned it around my daughter, who is three, and she immediately told me I should get a blue one or a pink one. Those are her favorite colors, obviously. I pointed at my shirt and said look, this one’s blue, is that what you mean. She said yes, blue. Then I told her I actually like black better. She thought about it for a second and said okay, then you should buy black.

And that stopped me. Because she started with what she wanted, found out what I wanted, and immediately switched. No argument, no talking me into blue, no explaining why blue is better. She just wanted me to have the one I liked. I’ve been in sales for 14 years and I watch grown adults fail at that constantly. Somebody tells you what they want and you spend the next twenty minutes explaining why the thing you’re selling is actually better for them. You’re not listening, you’re waiting to talk. The whole job is figuring out what somebody actually wants, which is usually not the first thing they say, and then helping them get it. Even when the answer is that they shouldn’t buy anything right now. My kid figured that out in about four seconds without knowing she did anything.

Anyway. She still wants me to get a pink one.

This was early 2012. I was a customer sales representative/banker and a client came in furious, ready to close every account she had with us. She’d been dealing with something for weeks and felt like nobody was listening to her. So I spent around 4 hours on it. Went through everything, fixed what I could fix, explained what I couldn’t. By the end she told me she was still unhappy with the bank but she was going to keep her accounts open because of how I handled it. I felt good about that. Thought I’d done the job. Then my the branch manager called me into her office and asked me if I have opened any new accounts and when she found out the answer is none other that keeping the current accounts, she told me I’d wasted my time. Said if I was going to sit with a client that long I should have been selling her more products, not just providing customer service. That was the feedback. Not “nice save,” but “you used hours of selling time on someone who didn’t buy anything.” She asked me to stay longer and work on getting new accounts, i did stay longer but to wrote my resignation letter. I did not have the savings for it. I was genuinely worried about rent. But something about being told that helping the client was the mistake just broke whatever was keeping me there.

Four years later the fake accounts thing blew up and everyone acted shocked. I wasn’t. That pressure was already in the building in 2012, it just hadn’t produced a headline yet. When your metrics only count products opened and nothing counts for keeping a client from walking out the door, you’re going to get what you measure. Eventually somebody starts opening accounts nobody asked for.

Anyway. Not really looking for anything here, it just comes back to me sometimes. Anybody had fake or accounts they did not apply for at any of the big banks?

What gets me is how uneven it is. Two houses a mile apart in Sherman Oaks can get completely different answers. The flats north of Ventura are basically treated as normal urban risk. Get up into the hills backing the Santa Monica Mountains and it’s a different conversation entirely, sometimes the FAIR Plan plus a separate policy on top just to have real coverage. Same neighborhood. Same schools. Same everything a buyer actually cares about. Wildly different cost of owning the house.

And it doesn’t show up in the listing price, so people don’t see it coming. You budget for the mortgage and the taxes, then find out the insurance is a few hundred a month more than you assumed and suddenly the house you qualified for isn’t the house you can afford. I don’t have a fix for this. Mostly I just think if you’re house hunting up in the hills you should be getting real quotes early instead of at the end, because the number can change what you’re even looking at.

Anyone bought recently and had insurance blow up your budget? Curious how much of a gap people are actually seeing between what they expected and what they got quoted.

This came up in another thread and it’s worth its own post since a lot of people assume conversion is a simple swap. It isn’t, and the gap between what’s now legal and what actually gets built is the whole story.

What changed? LA adopted a Citywide Adaptive Reuse Ordinance effective February 1 of this year. The old 1999 ordinance was basically a downtown program. This one goes citywide, adds zoning incentives and streamlined procedures, and buildings 15 years or older can qualify if they’re in designated zones, including commercial and multifamily. On top of that you’ve got the state layer. AB 2011, the Affordable Housing and High Road Jobs Act, plus SB 6, both from 2022. AB 2011 was later amended by AB 2243. Together they created a ministerial, no CEQA approval pathway for qualifying residential projects on commercially zoned land and along commercial corridors. Two routes under AB 2011, one for 100% affordable projects on commercial land, one for mixed-income along corridors. So between the city ordinance and the state laws, the legal path is genuinely open now.

The market conditions are there too:LA office vacancy was around 25% at the end of last year. Gensler named adaptive reuse a defining trend in their 2026 forecast. There’s a lot of building sitting empty and a lot of demand for housing. On paper it writes itself.

So why the trickle instead of a wave? A few real reasons:

Labor requirements. AB 2011 comes with prevailing wage and healthcare requirements, that’s the High Road Jobs part of the name. Land use attorneys working on these have been pretty direct that the labor stipulations are a big reason the law has produced limited results so far. It adds cost that a lot of deals can’t absorb.

Physics. This is the one people never think about. Office floor plates are deep because nobody needs a window at a desk in the middle of a floor. Apartments need light and air in every unit, so a deep floor plate means a big chunk of the building can’t become livable space. Plumbing is worse. An office has bathrooms in a central core. An apartment building needs risers running to every unit. You’re not renovating, you’re gutting to the frame and rebuilding the guts. Which is why older, narrower buildings are actually the better candidates than newer glass boxes. The 60s and 70s stock along our commercial corridors is often a better fit than a 2005 office park. Then add seismic upgrade triggers, elevator counts, and parking, and a lot of buildings that look like obvious candidates just don’t pencil.

Valley specifics: We’ve got plenty of the right raw material. The older office stock along Ventura, the Sepulveda and Van Nuys corridors, Warner Center, various aging retail. A councilmember involved in this work described the new ordinance as really permissive but said the city still needs to do more to spur conversions where they’re actually viable. That’s an honest read.

If you live near a commercial corridor with a half empty office building or a dying strip center, that parcel is now a much more likely residential site than it was a year ago. Not guaranteed, but the path exists where it didn’t before. And if you’re a small commercial owner sitting on an underperforming building, this is worth actually pricing out rather than assuming it’s a fantasy. The answer will often be no, but the analysis is different than it was two years ago. This is the pattern with all the recent housing law. SB 79 changed what can be built, SB 35 changed whether there’s a hearing, AB 2011 and adaptive reuse changed what commercial land can become. Each one removes a legal barrier. None of them fix construction cost, interest rates, or the physical realities of a building. Legal permission and financial feasibility are two different things, and right now the permission is running well ahead of the feasibility.

Anyone tracking a conversion project in the Valley? Curious whether anything’s actually moving or if it’s still mostly talk.

Following up the SB 79 thread since a few people asked how projects actually get approved,not just what’s allowed to be built.Those are two different laws doing two different jobs and mixing them up causes a lot of confusion. Today, I was at Southland Regional Board of Realtors at Commercial and investment board meeting where we discussed new changes and this was brought up and I thought it is worth sharing. SB 35 was written with a sunset date of January 1, 2026. So there are people who assume it’s gone. It isn’t. SB 423 extended it to January 1, 2036 and expanded it along the way. It’s alive and it’s the tool that matters most for how projects get through.

What it actually does? SB 35, now Government Code 65913.4, creates what the state calls the Streamlined Ministerial Approval Process. If a project qualifies, the city has to approve it ministerially. Meaning:
No CEQA review. No discretionary review. No conditional use permit. No public hearing. That last one is the part homeowners care about and don’t know until a project appears down the block. Ministerial means the city checks the project against objective standards and approves it if it complies. Your neighborhood council doesn’t get a vote. There’s no hearing to show up to. And because there’s no California Environmental Quality Act
(CEQA) document, the usual CEQA lawsuit route doesn’t exist either. That’s not an accident, it’s the whole design. The law was written specifically to remove the discretionary process that opponents use to delay or kill housing.

How a city ends up subject to it? It’s tied to Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA), the housing production targets each city gets assigned. Housing and Community Development (HCD) looks at whether a jurisdiction is keeping pace, and if it’s falling short, that city becomes subject to streamlining. Two tiers depending on which income category the city is behind on:
Subject at 10% affordability, meaning a project only needs 10% affordable units to get streamlined. Easier for developers to use. Subject at 50% affordability, meaning half the units have to be affordable. Much harder bar, so far fewer projects use it. And any jurisdiction without a housing element found in substantial compliance automatically lands in the 10% bucket.

Now, HCD has published the 2026 determination on June 30, about six weeks ago, along with an updated dashboard. The headline number: roughly 507 of 539 jurisdictions statewide are now in the 50% affordability tier. That’s a meaningful shift. Compare to the 2024 determination where it was closer to an even split, around 254 jurisdictions at 10% and 238 at 50%. So a lot of cities moved from the easy tier to the hard tier, which happens when a city is hitting its above-moderate income targets but still lagging on lower-income units.
So, SB 35 streamlining got harder to use for mixed-income and market-rate projects across most of the state this summer. Which cuts against the assumption that these laws only ever get more permissive.
Look up your own city: HCD runs a SMAP Dashboard showing every jurisdiction’s current status and threshold. It’s the authoritative source and it’s public. I’d rather point you there than tell you where LA landed this cycle, because these change annually and the dashboard is always right.

Two other SB 423 changes worth knowing: the coastal zone came into scope as of January 1, 2025, with a coastal development permit still required in certain circumstances. And the fire hazard exclusion got rewritten, moving from a blanket prohibition on high and very high fire severity zones to a state responsibility area standard.

What limits it in practice? Labor and wage requirements. Qualifying projects have to meet prevailing wage standards and, above certain thresholds, additional requirements. That’s a real cost that keeps a lot of developers from using this pathway even where they could. It’s part of why SB 35 produced roughly 18,000 units across about 156 projects in its first several years rather than the flood some people expected.

How this fits with SB 79? Simplest way I can put it. SB 79 changes what you’re allowed to build near transit. SB 35 changes whether anyone gets a hearing about it. A project can use one, both, or neither. When people say “the state took away local control,” they’re usually describing SB 35’s ministerial approval more than the zoning laws, even if they name a different bill.
Not taking a side on whether that’s good policy. Reasonable people land in different places on it. But if you’re going to be mad or relieved about something, worth being mad or relieved about the right mechanism.

Anyone tracked a project through the SMAP process locally? Curious how the timelines actually run versus what the statute says, since ministerial doesn’t always mean fast in practice.

Following up the SB 79 thread since a few people asked how projects actually get approved,not just what’s allowed to be built.Those are two different laws doing two different jobs and mixing them up causes a lot of confusion. Today, I was at Southland Regional Board of Realtors at Commercial and investment board meeting where we discussed new changes and this was brought up and I thought it is worth sharing. SB 35 was written with a sunset date of January 1, 2026. So there are people who assume it’s gone. It isn’t. SB 423 extended it to January 1, 2036 and expanded it along the way. It’s alive and it’s the tool that matters most for how projects get through.

What it actually does? SB 35, now Government Code 65913.4, creates what the state calls the Streamlined Ministerial Approval Process. If a project qualifies, the city has to approve it ministerially. Meaning:
No CEQA review. No discretionary review. No conditional use permit. No public hearing. That last one is the part homeowners care about and don’t know until a project appears down the block. Ministerial means the city checks the project against objective standards and approves it if it complies. Your neighborhood council doesn’t get a vote. There’s no hearing to show up to. And because there’s no California Environmental Quality Act
(CEQA) document, the usual CEQA lawsuit route doesn’t exist either. That’s not an accident, it’s the whole design. The law was written specifically to remove the discretionary process that opponents use to delay or kill housing.

How a city ends up subject to it? It’s tied to Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA), the housing production targets each city gets assigned. Housing and Community Development (HCD) looks at whether a jurisdiction is keeping pace, and if it’s falling short, that city becomes subject to streamlining. Two tiers depending on which income category the city is behind on:
Subject at 10% affordability, meaning a project only needs 10% affordable units to get streamlined. Easier for developers to use. Subject at 50% affordability, meaning half the units have to be affordable. Much harder bar, so far fewer projects use it. And any jurisdiction without a housing element found in substantial compliance automatically lands in the 10% bucket.

Now, HCD has published the 2026 determination on June 30, about six weeks ago, along with an updated dashboard. The headline number: roughly 507 of 539 jurisdictions statewide are now in the 50% affordability tier. That’s a meaningful shift. Compare to the 2024 determination where it was closer to an even split, around 254 jurisdictions at 10% and 238 at 50%. So a lot of cities moved from the easy tier to the hard tier, which happens when a city is hitting its above-moderate income targets but still lagging on lower-income units.
So, SB 35 streamlining got harder to use for mixed-income and market-rate projects across most of the state this summer. Which cuts against the assumption that these laws only ever get more permissive.
Look up your own city: HCD runs a SMAP Dashboard showing every jurisdiction’s current status and threshold. It’s the authoritative source and it’s public. I’d rather point you there than tell you where LA landed this cycle, because these change annually and the dashboard is always right.

Two other SB 423 changes worth knowing: the coastal zone came into scope as of January 1, 2025, with a coastal development permit still required in certain circumstances. And the fire hazard exclusion got rewritten, moving from a blanket prohibition on high and very high fire severity zones to a state responsibility area standard.

What limits it in practice? Labor and wage requirements. Qualifying projects have to meet prevailing wage standards and, above certain thresholds, additional requirements. That’s a real cost that keeps a lot of developers from using this pathway even where they could. It’s part of why SB 35 produced roughly 18,000 units across about 156 projects in its first several years rather than the flood some people expected.

How this fits with SB 79? Simplest way I can put it. SB 79 changes what you’re allowed to build near transit. SB 35 changes whether anyone gets a hearing about it. A project can use one, both, or neither. When people say “the state took away local control,” they’re usually describing SB 35’s ministerial approval more than the zoning laws, even if they name a different bill.
Not taking a side on whether that’s good policy. Reasonable people land in different places on it. But if you’re going to be mad or relieved about something, worth being mad or relieved about the right mechanism.

Anyone tracked a project through the SMAP process locally? Curious how the timelines actually run versus what the statute says, since ministerial doesn’t always mean fast in practice.

This went into effect August 3 and I’ve already had two conversations about it this week, so putting it here. If you own a condo, are thinking about buying one, or sit on a board, this one actually matters. Fannie Mae issued Lender Letter LL-2026-03 back in March, Freddie issued a matching bulletin the same day. The headline change kicked in for loan applications dated August 3 or later.
Limited Review is gone. For anyone who hasn’t dealt with it, Limited Review was the shortcut. If a buyer put down 10% or more on an established condo, the lender could skip the deep dive into the HOA’s finances and just verify basic property and insurance info. Fast, simple, and it let a lot of loans close in buildings nobody was really examining.

Established projects now go through Full Review, where the underwriter looks at the association’s budget, reserves, deferred maintenance, litigation, and insurance. And critically, a bigger down payment no longer gets you around it. Your loan approval now depends on the building’s health, not just yours. You can have an 800 score and 40% down and still get declined because of somebody else’s roof.

The good news that’s getting buried. Almost every article on this treats it as pure bad news. It isn’t:
The Waiver of Project Review expanded from 4 units to 10 units. So a small building, 2 to 10 units, can skip the review matrix entirely as long as it isn’t part of a master association or larger development, isn’t flagged unavailable in Fannie’s system, and meets basic master insurance requirements. That’s a real win, and it covers a meaningful chunk of the smaller Valley condo stock.
They also retired the 50% investment property concentration limit for established projects under Full Review. Buildings that were effectively cut off from conventional financing because too many units were rentals may now be financeable again. For certain urban buildings that’s a significant unlock. So the picture is: 10 units or fewer got easier, 11 or more got harder.

Timing detail people are getting wrong:The reserve allocation increase from 10% to 15% is real, but it does NOT apply yet. That one hits applications dated on or after January 4, 2027. What started August 3 is the Limited Review retirement and the reserve study funding requirement. I’ve seen several posts conflate those dates. Why this hits value, not just paperwork. This is the part boards don’t connect. If a project can’t clear Full Review, it’s non-warrantable. No Fannie or Freddie backing. Buyers then need cash or a portfolio loan at a higher rate with a bigger down payment. Your buyer pool shrinks hard. Comps in the building start reflecting distressed pricing, appraisals follow, and owners who need to refinance can’t. Owners who need to sell take less. So a board’s decision to hold dues flat and defer the reserve funding, which felt like saving everyone money, converts directly into reduced equity for every owner in the building. Same thing I was saying in that other thread, just with a specific mechanism now.

Local angle: A lot of our condo stock is 60s through 80s construction, which is exactly the profile where SB 326 balcony and walkway inspections turn up deferred maintenance. An engineer documenting needed repairs creates a paper trail that Full Review will now look at. If the association can’t fund identified critical repairs, that’s a warrantability problem. Also worth noting this applies to condo projects. Single family HOAs are not subject to Full Review. If you’re in an attached or mixed-use situation, confirm classification with your lender rather than assuming.

Practical stuff:

If you’re buying, have your lender check the project’s status in Fannie’s Condo Project Manager before you write the offer, not after inspections. Owners can’t look it up themselves, it’s lender access only. And build extra time into your escrow, because Full Review takes longer than what everybody’s used to. If you’re selling in a building with 11+ units, find out now whether the project clears. Discovering it mid-escrow when your buyer’s loan dies is a much worse way to learn. If you’re on a board, this is now a fiduciary issue with a measurable benchmark. Reserve study current, funding adequate, repairs documented and funded. Your owners’ ability to sell depends on it. I deal with both sides of this and it’s going to catch a lot of people over the next few months.

Anyone had a condo deal hit a snag on project review since the 3rd? Curious whether lenders are actually applying it strictly yet or if there’s a grace period in practice.

Posting this for LA City specifically since the neighboring cities have their own separate programs. Ordinance 183893 has been grinding along since 2015 and the final deadline came and went in April. If you own a small apartment building here, worth confirming where you stand, because the consequences shifted from “deadline coming” to “actively accruing” a few months ago.

Who this covers? Wood-frame buildings, 3 or more units, built before 1978, with ground floor parking or commercial space underneath creating a weak first story. That tuck-under parking look is everywhere in Van Nuys, North Hollywood, Valley Village, Reseda. About 13,500 buildings citywide got identified. The deadlines ran in two waves. Priority 1, buildings with 16+ units, was April 2024. Priority 2, everything smaller, was April 2026. So the small building owners were last in line and are the ones most likely to still be sitting on it.

What non-compliance actually costs you? The fines are real but honestly they’re not the part that hurts most. It’s the lien. Unpaid fines and enforcement costs get recorded against the property, which clouds title and blocks you from selling or refinancing. So the building becomes financially frozen while the meter runs. LADBS can also revoke the certificate of occupancy, which means vacating tenants and relocating them at your expense. And it’s a misdemeanor under the municipal code, though I’d take the criminal prosecution talk with some salt, that’s mostly on paper. Cost to actually do it runs roughly $60k to $200k depending on size, call it $10k to $30k per unit.

Two things most owners don’t know:

First, RSO lets you pass through 50% of retrofit costs to tenants as a monthly surcharge, capped at $38 a month for up to 10 years, through a capital improvement application with LAHD. Doesn’t cover it, but on a 10 unit building that’s real money over a decade and a lot of owners never file for it.
Second, and this one genuinely surprises people. Title 24’s 2025 energy code took effect January 1 of this year. When you open walls or ceilings during the retrofit, you can trigger current insulation standards, R-13 walls and R-38 ceilings for our climate zone. Any luminaires you replace have to be high efficacy LED. Replacement windows have to hit current U-factor and SHGC numbers. None of that was the point of your project and it’s not in the retrofit bid you got two years ago. Ask your engineer about scope creep before you sign.

If you are thinking about selling instead; you can. The retrofit obligation transfers to the buyer. But you eat the discount, and it’s not a clean subtraction. Expect the retrofit cost plus a risk premium on top, because the buyer is pricing in uncertainty about what the engineer finds once walls are open. Your buyer pool also narrows to investors and developers, since conventional financing gets complicated on a non-compliant building with a lien risk.

If you’re buying a small apartment building in the Valley, compliance status is a due diligence item now, same as you’d check RSO status. Ask for the LADBS compliance documentation before you’re deep in escrow, not after. An unretrofitted building is a six figure liability sitting on the other side of closing.

Neighboring cities have their own versions; Burbank, Pasadena, West Hollywood, and Beverly Hills all adopted their own soft-story programs with separate timelines. So don’t assume LA’s dates apply to a building in Burbank, and don’t assume you’re clear because you’re outside city limits.

My observation is that most of what is written about this online is published by retrofit contractors and engineering firms, and the urgency and fine figures in that content are marketing. The underlying ordinance and the deadlines are real, the daily dollar amounts I’d verify directly with LADBS rather than trusting a vendor’s landing page.

Anyone gone through a soft-story retrofit on a smaller building? Curious what it actually ran and whether LADBS has been aggressive on enforcement since April or fairly quiet.

Been getting asked about this constantly since it kicked in, and most of what people have heard is either “nothing’s happening” or “they’re bulldozing single family neighborhoods.” Neither is right.
What SB 79 actually does? Signed October 2025, effective July 1, 2026. It lets qualifying housing projects near major transit use state set standards for height, density, and floor area, even where local zoning didn’t allow apartments. The standards scale by two things, how close you are to the stop (quarter mile vs half mile) and what tier of transit service it is. It only applies in “urban transit counties,” meaning counties with 15 or more rail stations. LA obviously qualifies. The short version: proximity to transit now drives what can be built, not local zoning alone.

Why this hits the Valley hard?The G Line runs straight across us, plus the Red Line at North Hollywood and Universal City. Half mile buffers around those stops covers an enormous amount of Valley single family territory. NBC specifically called out Lankershim among the corridors seeing the biggest change. So if you assumed this was a Westside or downtown thing, check your address.

Here’s the part almost nobody knows;LA didn’t just let the state law take effect as written. On March 24 the City Council directed a phased implementation approach, with the goal of implementing SB 79 locally by 2030. Then on June 30 the Low-Rise Ordinance and the Phased Implementation Ordinance became effective.
So what’s actually operating right now is LA’s own phased version, not the full state buildout. HPOZs got excluded. The Corridor Transition program got expanded to single family and lower density residential parcels within half mile buffers.

Practical translation: the change is real but it’s staged out over the next several years, not overnight. Anyone telling you your street is getting a seven story building next spring is overselling it. Anyone telling you nothing changed is also wrong.

How to check your own property? ZIMAS has SB 79 and Low-Rise eligibility mapped now. Pull up your parcel at zimas.lacity.org and you can see whether you’re in an eligible zone and which tier. Free, takes two minutes, and it’s the actual authoritative source rather than someone’s blog post. City Planning also has a StoryMap of citywide potential eligibility. LA metro authorized about 10,000 multifamily units in 2025, down from 17,500 in 2015. Supporters argue local zoning is the binding constraint and that building near transit is the most efficient place to add housing. The case against: critics argue it strips local control over neighborhood character, that infrastructure and parking weren’t accounted for, and that a state override of local zoning is the wrong mechanism even if more housing is the right goal.
Both of those are real arguments held by reasonable people and I’m not going to pretend one side is obviously right.

What I’d actually tell a homeowner? Check ZIMAS so you know where you stand. If you’re in an eligible zone it can affect your land value, potentially meaningfully, but as I’ve said before not every eligible lot pencils for a developer. Lot size, shape, and geometry decide that, and a standard interior lot often doesn’t work even when zoning allows it. Corner lots and assemblages of two or three adjacent homes are where actual developer interest concentrates. And if you get a letter from someone offering to buy your house because “the zoning changed,” slow down. That’s a real tactic right now and the first offer is rarely the number.

Anyone pulled their parcel on ZIMAS yet? Curious how many people are finding themselves in the zone without having realized it.

First, the distinction that matters most: Not all unpermitted work is treated the same, and this trips everybody upon Los Angeles county, CA!

If it’s an ADU or a JADU (a separate living space with its own kitchen and bath, or a converted garage that functions as one), there’s now an amnesty path. If it’s a general addition to the main house, an extra bedroom, an enclosed patio, a bathroom added off the hallway, that’s the old fashioned retroactive permit route with no special protection. Different animal.

The ADU amnesty part:AB 2533 took effect January 2025. If your unpermitted ADU or JADU was built before January 1, 2020, the city generally cannot deny you a legalization permit. And the review is based on health and safety standards, not full current code compliance. So you’re not being asked to demolish and rebuild to 2026 code, you’re being asked to make it safe.

That’s a genuine shift. It used to be that raising your hand meant an order to tear it out. Now voluntarily coming forward is the protected move. Impact fees and connection fees often get waived too.

There’s also a separate provision that lets owners request a five year delay of code enforcement on pre-2020 ADUs unless there’s an actual health and safety threat. Estimates put 50,000 to 100,000 unpermitted ADUs across the state, so if this is you, you have a lot of company.
Caveat on this one: The two relevant statutes don’t perfectly line up and the City of LA actually had to ask the state for clarification, which HCD responded to last August. There’s real ambiguity about how far the protections go after permitting. So this isn’t as clean as the marketing from permit expediters makes it sound. Get actual advice before you file.

What leaving it unpermitted actually costs you?!

People underestimate this: The square footage generally doesn’t count in an appraisal. So that converted garage you spent $60k on may add nothing to your appraised value. Your buyer’s lender is valuing a smaller house than you think you’re selling. Insurance may not cover damage in unpermitted space. Fire starts in the converted garage, you may find out the hard way.
You can’t legally rent an unpermitted ADU. Which matters a lot if you’re counting on that income to qualify for a loan or to justify the price. FHA and VA buyers are stricter about it than conventional, so it narrows your buyer pool. And you have to disclose it. Known unpermitted work goes on the transfer disclosure. Sellers who stay quiet about it get sued after closing, and that’s a real and regular occurrence.

If you’re buying a house with unpermitted work, pull the permit history from LADBS and compare it to what you’re standing in. Free to do. If there’s a bedroom and bath that don’t appear anywhere in the records, that’s not a dealbreaker but it is a price conversation and a “what would it cost to legalize” conversation before you’re emotionally attached.

So, if you have a pre-2020 unpermitted ADU and you’re thinking about selling in the next few years, legalizing is probably worth pricing out now. A legal permitted unit with a certificate of occupancy is a genuinely different asset than a bootleg one, it appraises, it rents, it finances. If it’s a general addition rather than an ADU, the math is harder and worth actually running before you open that door.

Anyone gone through the legalization process in LA recently? Curious what it actually cost and how long LADBS took, because the estimates I hear are all over the place.

First, why fees are actually going up? It’s mostly not board incompetence:
Insurance: This is the big one. HOA master policies are seeing 7-10% increases statewide with worse in wildfire exposed areas, carriers have pulled out of California entirely so there’s less competition, and underwriting got stricter. Your board didn’t do that.
Construction costs: Most master policies are replacement cost based, so when materials and labor go up, so does the premium.
SB 326: Condo associations had to get professional inspections of balconies, decks, walkways, anything elevated. And when the engineer finds problems, that’s a repair bill that has to get paid. Side note, there’s a ton of bad info out there saying the deadline was January 2026. It wasn’t, that was SB 721 for apartment buildings. For condos the SB 326 deadline was January 1, 2025 and it was never extended.
Reserve requirements and new mandates generally: Seismic retrofit, fire mitigation, ADA stuff. It adds up.

Now here’s the part I actually want people to understand:

A board that raises dues 8% a year and funds reserves properly is doing its job. A board that brags about holding dues flat for six years is usually just deferring the bill and making it bigger. That second board is way more popular right up until the $25,000 special assessment letter shows up.
And here’s why that matters more than it used to:

The warrantability problem!! Fannie Mae raised the reserve funding requirement from 10% to 15% of the budget. If your association has significant deferred maintenance or identified critical repairs it can’t fund, the project gets flagged as unavailable in Fannie’s system. That means no conventional financing for anyone in the building.
Think about what that actually does. Every buyer for your unit now needs cash or a portfolio loan at a worse rate. Your buyer pool shrinks dramatically. Your value drops. And you personally didn’t do anything wrong, your board just underfunded reserves for a decade.
So the underfunded HOA doesn’t just cost you a special assessment. It can quietly make your unit hard to sell at all. That’s the connection almost nobody makes.

Couple other things changing in 2026: Limited Review is going away in August, and a master policy with a per unit deductible over $50,000 can make a project non-warrantable on its own.

What you can actually do?!

Know your rights:Under Davis-Stirling your board can’t raise regular assessments more than 20% over the prior year without a member vote, and special assessments over 5% of the annual budget need membership approval. You’re entitled to 30 to 60 days notice. And you can request the financial records, they have to give them to you.
Read the reserve study, not just the budget: Reserve study tells you what percent funded you are. Under 30% is a warning sign, under 15% is trouble coming.
If you’re buying a condo, ask for the reserve study, the SB 326 report, the last two years of board minutes, and have your lender check the project’s status before you’re deep in escrow:Minutes are where the fights and the “we’re deferring the roof again” conversations live.

So if your dues are suspiciously cheap for the building you’re in, that’s not a bargain. Somebody’s going to pay for the roof eventually and it’s going to be whoever owns the unit when the bill lands.

Anyone here gotten hit with a big special assessment recently? Curious how much warning people actually got, since the notice requirements and reality don’t always line up.

This one comes up constantly and almost everyone has the details wrong, including people who are about to get hit by it.

Measure ULA. Everyone calls it the mansion tax. That nickname has done real damage because it makes people think it only touches Bel Air estates. It doesn’t. It applies to every property type in the City of LA. Single family homes, condos, apartment buildings, retail, industrial, vacant land. All of it. The current numbers, and these just changed July 1 so anything you read from earlier this year is already outdated: 4% on sales above $5.4 million, 5.5% at $10.9 million and up. Thresholds adjust every July for inflation.

Now here’s the part that actually matters and that most people don’t understand: The fact is, it’s a cliff, not a bracket. Your income tax works in brackets, you only pay the higher rate on the amount above the line. ULA doesn’t work that way. Cross the threshold by one dollar and the tax applies to the entire sale price from dollar one. So sell at $5,399,999 and you owe zero. Sell at $5,400,001 and you owe about $216,000. Two dollars of price difference, $216,000 of tax. That’s not a typo.

It’s on gross sale price, not profit. Doesn’t matter what you paid, doesn’t matter if you’re losing money. Owned an apartment building since 2019, values dropped, you’re selling at a loss? Still owe 4% of the whole number. That’s the part that feels genuinely unfair to people and honestly I get it. And no, you can’t 1031 out of it. Hear this myth all the time. A 1031 defers capital gains. ULA is a transfer tax. Different animal entirely. It’s due at closing regardless.

Why this is a Valley issue and not just a Westside issue? Small apartment buildings. An 8 to 12 unit building in Van Nuys, Valley Village, North Hollywood can easily trade above $5.4 million. That owner isn’t a mansion owner, they’re somebody who bought a building 20 years ago and is trying to retire. They get taxed identically to a Bel Air seller. Same for hillside homes south of Ventura here in Sherman Oaks. Plenty of those are in range now.

Is it city of LA only? No, and this is the one people miss; Sherman Oaks, Studio City, Van Nuys, Encino, all City of LA, all subject. Burbank, Glendale, Calabasas, not subject. So two similar properties a few miles apart can have a $200k+ difference in closing costs purely based on which side of a city line they sit on.

Now What’s coming? ULA passed $1 billion in total revenue as of January. UCLA research found the odds of a property selling above $5 million dropped by as much as 55% since it took effect, which tells you people are just not transacting rather than paying it. And there’s a statewide ballot initiative backed by Howard Jarvis targeting this November that could repeal or significantly limit it. So if you’re sitting on a decision, that vote is three months out.

If you’re anywhere near the line, the practical thing is know exactly where the threshold sits before you price, not after. I’ve seen sellers price at $5.45M thinking they’re being aggressive and net less than if they’d priced at $5.35M. The dead zone right above the threshold is real and pricing into it is just handing money away.

Anyone here actually sold above the threshold and paid it? Curious how much it factored into the decision to sell at all, versus just sitting on the property.

Following up on the Prop 19 thing from a while back because it’s the same crowd dealing with this. A parent passes, there’s a house, and suddenly the family is trying to figure out what they’re even allowed to do with it. Nobody explains this stuff until you’re already in it.

The single biggest thing that determines how painful this gets is whether the house was in a trust or not.

Trust sale: If your parents set up a living trust and actually put the house in it, congrats, this is the easy version. The successor trustee can just sell it. No court, no judge, no hearings. Behaves basically like a normal sale, closes in a normal 30-45 days. This is the whole reason people set up trusts and it’s genuinely worth the couple thousand bucks it costs to do while your parents are alive.

No trust, so probate: Now you’re in court. And there’s two flavors depending on what authority the court grants the executor: Full authority under IAEA. The executor can sell without a court confirmation hearing. Still has to send a Notice of Proposed Action to the heirs and wait out the objection period, but it moves reasonably. Most probate sales I see are this.

Limited authority: This is the one people mean when they say “probate sale” like it’s a curse. Requires an actual court confirmation hearing, and the sale is subject to overbid.

The overbid thing is what nobody warns buyers about, You go into contract, you do your inspections, you spend money on an appraisal, and then on the hearing date anyone can show up at the courthouse and bid against you. The first overbid has to beat your price by 10% of the first $10,000 plus 5% of everything above that. So on a $700,000 accepted offer, someone has to come in at $735,500 to take it from you. After that the judge sets the increments and it’s basically a live auction.

You can lose the house you thought you bought, and you don’t get your inspection money back. Which is why buyers need to understand what they’re walking into before they write. Also on court confirmed sales, expect a 10% deposit by cashier’s check, no contingencies, sold as-is. Financing needs to be rock solid.

The change most people don’t know about. AB 2016 kicked in April 2025. If the deceased person’s primary residence is worth $750,000 or less, the family can use a simplified Petition to Determine Succession to Real Property instead of full probate. Used to be capped at $184,500, which was useless in California. Now it’s actually usable for a lot of the state.

In reality, $750k doesn’t buy much in the Valley, so a lot of Sherman Oaks and Valley homes blow past that and still land in full probate. It helps more in other counties than it does here. But if there’s a smaller condo or a property elsewhere in the estate, worth asking about.
And it only applies to a primary residence. Rentals, vacation homes, land, none of it qualifies. Full probate in LA runs 9-18 months, sometimes longer. Trust sale, 30-45 days. That gap is basically what a trust buys you.

One thing worth knowing on the tax side, and this connects back to the Prop 19 stuff: you generally get a stepped up basis to the value at date of death. So selling reasonably soon after usually means little to no capital gains. That’s often way more money than people realize and it’s a real argument against sitting on a house for years while the family argues about it. I’m not a probate attorney or a CPA. This is the “here’s the landscape so you know what questions to ask” version. If you’re actually in one of these, get an attorney, the filing fees and their cost are small compared to messing it up.

If your parents are still around and there’s no trust, that’s the actual takeaway here. That conversation is awkward and it saves families a year of their lives.

Anyone been through a probate sale in LA County recently? Curious how long yours actually took, the official timelines and reality don’t always match.

Owned outright. You’re fine. It’s an asset, adds value, nothing to do.

Solar loan. There’s usually a UCC-1 fixture filing sitting on your title. Gets paid off or handled at closing like any other lien. Annoying but routine.

Lease or PPA. This is the one. You don’t own the panels, you’re renting them or buying the power. Buyer has to qualify with the solar company and formally assume the contract. Which means a credit check, paperwork, and a company that has to actually respond to you.

PACE or HERO. Usually the least beneficial scenario for the homeowner; it’s on your property tax bill and sits ahead of the mortgage in priority. Fannie and Freddie won’t touch a loan behind one, so it basically has to get paid off at closing. Seen these turn into six figure surprises.

Here’s what’s making it worse right now. SunPower went through bankruptcy and Sunnova filed Chapter 11 in June of last year, and a huge number of those lease and PPA contracts got handed off to SunStrong for servicing. So a lot of homeowners don’t even know who services their contract anymore. Reports of people unable to reach anyone for months, monitoring going dark, warranty claims sitting unanswered. And SunStrong itself is now under investigation by a few state AGs. Meanwhile you need that company to process a transfer on a 30 day escrow. You see the problem.

Pull the actual agreement and look for the escalator. Most of these bump the payment 2-3% every year for 20-25 years. A buyer looking at year 14 of that is looking at a very different number than what you’re paying.

Start the transfer request the day you go into escrow, not the week before closing. These take weeks in a good market and longer now. Get the buyout quote even if you don’t plan to use it. You want to know the number before a buyer asks, not after.

And know that leased solar generally does not add appraised value, because you don’t own it. But the payment does count against the buyer’s debt to income. So it can hurt their qualifying without helping your value. That’s the part sellers find genuinely unfair and I don’t blame them. Not anti-solar at all, owned systems are great. It’s specifically the lease and PPA structure that creates the mess.

Anyone here sold or bought with leased solar recently? Curious how long the transfer actually took, because I’d love more data points than the handful of deals I’ve seen.

Putting this here because I mention it constantly and most homeowners have never heard of it.

Quick background on why it matters. Deed fraud is where someone forges a grant deed or quitclaim deed transferring your house into their name and records it with the county. The recorder doesn’t verify anything, they just record what gets submitted. So on paper, you no longer own your house. And you often have no idea until much later.

Here’s the part that made this real for me. Closed a deal earlier this year over in West Adams. The seller owned the place free and clear, no mortgage. Somebody stole his title. By the time he found out he was already deep in it, and he ended up spending several thousand dollars in attorney and court fees just to get his own property back. Property he already owned outright. He won, eventually, and then my investor clients bought it from him. But he burned months and real money proving he owned a house that was always his.

And that’s the pattern. Free and clear homes are the target. No mortgage means no lender monitoring the title, so nobody’s watching but you. Same reason they go after vacant land, rentals with absentee owners, and homes owned by elderly people. Especially after a death in the family when a house sits in limbo for a while.

Anyway here’s the free thing. LA County Assessor runs a Property Owner e-Notification service. You register your email and your AIN (that’s the Assessor Identification Number off your property tax bill) and you get an email within 48 hours anytime anything gets recorded against your property. Grant deed, quitclaim, deed of trust, notice of default, notice of sale. Takes like five minutes to set up at assessorportal.assessor.lacounty.gov, you create a profile and opt in for e-Notification.

There’s also an older mail version that’s been running since 1996 that sends you a paper copy, but that takes 30 days for deeds. The email version is the 48 hour one. Big difference when you’re trying to catch something early.

Two things worth knowing. There’s no limit on how many properties you can register, so register your parents place too. Honestly that’s the highest value use of this, an elderly owner with a paid off house is exactly the profile these guys go looking for.

And be clear on what it does. It does NOT prevent the fraudulent recording. Nothing does, the county records what gets handed to them. What it does is tell you in 48 hours instead of you finding out six months later when you go to refinance. That gap is the whole ballgame. My West Adams seller’s problem wasn’t that it happened, it’s that it had time to sit and get complicated before anyone noticed.

Last thing. If you’ve seen ads for paid “title lock” services, understand that most of what they’re selling is monitoring that the county already gives you for free. They can’t stop a recording either. Not telling anyone what to buy, just know what you’re paying for.

If you do get an alert for something you didn’t authorize, LA County DCBA has a homeowner line at 800-593-8222.

Anyone else run into this or know someone who has? Curious how common it actually is around here versus how much of it is just headlines.

Figured this is worth flagging since a lot of people around here got pushed onto the FAIR Plan the last couple years and haven’t looked at it since.

Starting October 15 the FAIR Plan premiums go up about 29.8% on average statewide. But the average is misleading. Roughly half of policyholders see increases in the 30-50% range, about a quarter see anything from modest bumps to genuinely brutal 50-200% spikes, and about a quarter actually see DECREASES, sometimes up to 80%, mostly in low risk urban zip codes.

That last part is the interesting one for us. Sherman Oaks isn’t one thing when it comes to fire risk. The flats north of Ventura are basically urban low risk. The hillside stuff south of Ventura backing up to the Santa Monica Mountains is a completely different animal. So you could have two neighbors a mile apart where one gets a big decrease and the other gets clobbered. Same neighborhood, opposite outcome. Worth actually checking your zip rather than assuming.

The other thing nobody seems to know: the private market is quietly coming back. Farmers committed in May to marketing to at least 300,000 policyholders in wildfire distressed areas, and FAIR Plan growth has slowed way down, about 16,000 new policies in Q1 versus 35,000-50,000 a quarter through most of 2024 and 2025. FAIR Plan share of new mortgages dropped from 8.1% to 5.6%.

Which matters because a lot of people got dumped on the FAIR Plan in 2023-2024, assumed that was permanent, and never shopped again. It might not be permanent anymore. Genuinely worth getting quotes before October, especially if you’ve done any brush clearance or hardening since you were non-renewed.

And if you are stuck on the FAIR Plan, remember it’s bare bones fire coverage, not a real homeowners policy. About 40% of FAIR Plan customers carry a second policy on top to fill the gaps, running roughly $2,000 more a year. If you don’t have a DIC policy alongside it you may be way less covered than you think. Theft, liability, water damage, that stuff isn’t in there.

I’m not an insurance agent so I’m not the guy to quote you a policy, but I’m seeing insurance blow up deals now in a way it just didn’t three years ago. Buyers are getting quotes before they even write an offer. So this stopped being a background thing and became a real part of what a house costs.

Anyone here actually gotten off the FAIR Plan recently and back with a normal carrier? Curious if that’s happening in practice or just on paper.

This one catches people totally off guard in LA county, CA and honestly it’s better to know before it’s an emergency instead of after.

So a lot of families around here have a parent in a house they bought decades ago, paying almost nothing in property tax cause Prop 13 locked it in. And everyone assumes the kids inherit the house and just keep that low tax bill. That USED to be true. Prop 19 changed it back in 2021 and a ton of people never got the memo.

Short version of how it works now:

If you inherit your parents home you only keep their low tax base if you actually move into it as your own primary residence within a year. Not rent it out, not keep it as a second home. Live in it. And you gotta file for the homeowners exemption too.

If you don’t move in, the county reassesses to current market value and the bill can jump like 4-6x overnight. I’ve seen a Valley house bought in the 80s go from around $2k a year to well over $11k basically the moment it changes hands, if the kid doesn’t move in. Brutal.

And even if you DO move in it’s capped. Only about the first $1,044,586 of value above your parents old assessed value is protected (that number adjusts for inflation every couple years, that’s the current one through early 2027). Anything over that gets partially reassessed. And for a lot of Valley homes that have gone up a ton in value, that cap actually matters.

Rentals, vacation homes, anything that wasn’t the parents primary residence, no exclusion at all anymore. Full reassessment. The old “$1 million of other property” thing is gone.

Following up on that flip conversation from a while back since a few people asked. I’m not anti-flip, some of these houses genuinely needed the work. But there’s a specific kind of flip where the money went into what you can see and not into what you can’t, and those are the ones that bite people about a year in, right after the honeymoon wears off.

Stuff I see come back to haunt people:

The pretty stuff is covering old bones. New quartz counters and white oak floors are cheap and fast. New plumbing supply lines, updated electrical panel, and a properly done roof are expensive and slow. Guess which ones a lot of flippers skip. You walk in and it looks brand new, but the guts are the same 1960s guts. First winter rain or first heat wave when everything’s running, that’s when it shows up.

Permits, or the lack of them. This is the big one. A lot of flip work gets done without pulling permits, especially added bathrooms, converted garages, and electrical. It looks great and then it becomes YOUR problem when you go to sell, or when something fails inspection, or when the city notices. Before you buy, pull the permit history on the property and see if the work that was clearly done actually matches what’s on file. Mismatch is a red flag.

Cheap fixtures dressed up nice. The faucets, the vanity, the light fixtures, the “smart” thermostat. A lot of flips use the cheapest version of everything that still photographs well. Individually small, but they all start failing around the same time and it adds up.

HVAC and water heater age. Flippers love to leave these if they technically still run, because a new AC or a repiped water heater is thousands of dollars nobody sees in listing photos. Ask how old they actually are. “It works” and “it has ten years left” are very different things.

A home buyer spending the money on a really good independent inspector, and consider a separate sewer line scope and a roof inspection on top of the general one pays off down the line. Those two alone catch most of the expensive surprises. And pull that permit history. It’s public and it’s free.

Anyone here bought a flip and hit one of these? Curious what surprised people, and whether the inspection caught it or you found out the hard way.

The window in LA County is open now through November 30. No extensions, they’re strict about it. Filing fee is small (around $46) and you do it online through the Assessment Appeals Board site. You’ll want 3 to 5 comparable sales near your place from around January 1 of this year to make the case. And do NOT use the Zillow or Redfin estimate as your evidence, the board doesn’t take those seriously. Actual closed comps or an appraisal.

Two honest caveats so nobody wastes their time:

If Prop 13 is already keeping your assessed value below what your house is worth, don’t appeal. You’d just be waving your hand and potentially inviting a fresh look. This only helps if you’re assessed ABOVE current market value, which mostly means recent buyers from the 2022 peak.

And a Prop 8 reduction isn’t permanent. The county re-checks every January 1, so if values climb back your assessment can climb back too (still capped at your original Prop 13 ceiling though).

Whoever’s most likely to benefit: people who bought condos or homes around 2022 when things were hot and have watched comparable units sell for less since.

Anyone here actually gone through the appeal? Curious how the process went and whether the informal review was enough or if you had to take it to the board.