Manhattan Beach Town Home Inventory Jumps in Small Pocket

This week, I am diving into a small pocket of the Manhattan Beach Sand Section where town home inventory has jumped significantly to start off the spring buying season.

If you read my blog last month titled “South Bay Median Prices are Down Year-Over-Year,” then you would remember that, as a city, Manhattan Beach median prices fell by 2.04% in 2019 when compared to 2018 prices.

The median price of Manhattan Beach was $2.4 million in 2018, whereas prices fell to a median price of $2.351 million this past year. This was the city’s first median price drop in nearly a decade.

Some of the most coveted real estate in all of Los Angeles County is in the Manhattan Beach Sand Section. Of the 123 MLS sales in the Sand Section last year, only four sold above asking price.

This is not news to real estate professionals and current buyers and sellers. But if you watch real estate casually from afar, this is a distant cry from the madness of bidding wars experienced from 2012 to 2015 during an incredible run-up in this sub-market.

Fresh Manhattan Beach Inventory

By far, Manhattan Beach is the most sophisticated residential real estate community in the South Bay.

Most owners watch their real estate values quite closely and real estate is a normal topic of conversation around town. However, this is not normal for most home markets.

Buyers and Sellers are educated on real estate in Manhattan Beach.

The “unofficial start to spring selling season beginning the day after the Super Bowl” is well-known. This year, Manhattan Beach Sellers are jumping on that aphorism like no other…while other cities are still slow to come to bring new inventory to the market.

The week after the Super Bowl, Manhattan Beach saw 15 new listings hit the MLS. This was over a 20% increase to current inventory levels.

If you count this week (two weeks after the Super Bowl), more than a dozen additional properties have debuted.

Spring selling season is officially underway in the Manhattan Beach home market.

Very Specific Area Saw a Rush

What fascinated me the most was a specific area in the Sand Section that supplied a large part of the new inventory. There were four town home listings between 21^st and 24^th Street, surrounding Marine Avenue, that came to market.

All of these town homes offer similar locations and bedrooms but vary on age and views. Take a look…

• 2301 Grandview Avenue
  • 3 bed, 4 bath, 1,823 sq. ft.
  • Under Contract Asking: $2,399,000
• 432 23^rd Street
  • 3 bed, 4 bath, 2,000 sq. ft.
  • Under Contract Asking: $2,695,000
• 2211 Vista Drive
  • 3 bed, 4 bath, 2,250 sq. ft.
  • Asking Price: $2,799,000
• 443 23^rd Place
  • 3 bed, 4 bath, 2,460 sq. ft.
  • Asking Price: $2,919,000

I am not going to break down the values of each town home as the nuances of square footage, details on location, and the age of each building and its finishes is paramount in representing the proper valuation.

The point I am trying to make is that this was a lot of inventory for a very specific type of home in a very specific area…all in the same week!

As you can see, two of the listings made deals right away, while the other two are still on the market.

Adding to the Current Inventory

As mentioned above, those four listings came to market just last week in this small pocket. Below, are four existing listings that were already on the market and yet to close a deal.

• 432 Marine Avenue
  • 3 bed, 4 bath, 2,041 sq. ft.
  • Asking Price: $2,699,000
• 2205 Vista Drive
  • 4 bed, 4 bath, 2,600 sq. ft.
  • Asking Price: $3,499,000
• 217 21^st Place
  • 3 bed, 4 bath, 1,964 sq. ft.
  • Asking Price: $3,850,000
• 216 Marine Avenue
  • 3 bed, 4 bath, 1,951 sq. ft.
  • Under Contract Asking: $3,975,000

If you wanted one of the new listings that hit the market last week, you needed to act quickly since the market deemed them to be priced correctly. But now, there are five options ranging from $2.699 million $3.85 million that offer a wide variety of benefits in different ways to different buyers.

Perhaps a little friendly competition?

Or, will buyers see the two quick sales last week and be ready to jump in?

Last year, this small pocket closed nine town home sales between $1.85 million and $3.015 million.

All of those sales offered three bedrooms and were between 1,814 square feet and 2,710 square feet. They are not all comparable, but it can give you an idea of the sales from last year.

Presently the listings and sales in this niche look like this:

• On Market: Five Listings
• In Escrow: Three Properties
• Closed: One Property
  • 2204 Alma Avenue
    • 4 bed, 4 bath, 2,600 sq. ft.
    • Sold Price: $3,778,125

We are only about two and a half months into the year and already at a potential nine sales. There we only nine sales in this pocket in all of 2019!

That is a lot of action to start very early in the year.

What’s Next

So, what’s next? Please! Do you think I know?

It is way too early to tell.

What I can tell you is that it is the start of the spring selling season in Manhattan Beach is on. Inventory is coming.

The million dollar question is…will inventory keep flowing?

Again, it is too early to tell what will happen, but it will start to get fun watching Manhattan Beach this month. The other beach cities will be “fashionably late” and start bringing out their inventory in March.

This post was meant to simply highlight the inordinate number of town homes in a very small, specific pocket that was noteworthy last week.

Since all the action right now is in Manhattan Beach, I will do another post next week on this city to update on interesting new listings, fast new deals and maybe if there is some sort of market trend we can decipher it in different parts of the city (low chance, but we can speculate).

Have a great weekend and I’ll dig deeper next week.

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