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The scope of wildfires ravaging Los Angeles ballooned into the inconceivable by Thursday, as a fifth fire sparked in the Hollywood Hills the morning after the largest fires, the Palisades and Eaton fires, had destroyed a least 2,000 structures and left five dead.
Most of LA County remains under a red flag warning until Friday, meaning that the Santa Ana winds that have stoked fires over the last few days could continue to create challenges for firefighters.
The economic toll that the fires would take in terms of property damage, hits to the film and TV industry, and more could reach up to $57 billion, according to an estimate from weather forecaster AccuWeather. On Wednesday, CoreLogic estimated that over 456,000 homes with nearly $300 billion in reconstruction cost value were at a moderate to great risk of sustaining fire damage within LA and Riverside metro areas.
Agents pitch in
As some displaced residents began to pivot from active evacuation mode to find new housing mode, agents shifted into overdrive, reaching out to their networks to find housing options for those in need.
“Starting yesterday, my phone has been ringing non-stop with people looking for [housing] options,” Josh Altman of The Altman Brothers at Douglas Elliman told Inman.
“This is obviously the worst that anybody could imagine, as far as the destruction, as far as people losing their homes, as far as people being relocated.”
Despite the uncertainty of when fires would be contained and how far the damage might continue to spread, agents wasted no time pulling resources together for the community.
“As a company, we’ve created a short-term lease list,” Nick Segal of Carolwood Estates told Inman. “All of our associates individually populate that, and we’ve already got 30 opportunities. So I’m just impressed that we’ve been able to galvanize that and people are using that as an initial resource.”
KW Cares, a 501(c)(3) that supports Keller Williams associates and their families in times of emergency, is also working with regional and franchise-level KW leaders through ongoing prep calls as the situation unfolds. KW associates can apply for emergency grants to address basic health, welfare, housing and transportation needs at https://www.kwcares.org/.
Twenty-five members of The Agency’s agents and staff had lost their homes in the fires, CEO Mauricio Umansky told Inman on Thursday. That didn’t stop members of the firm from drawing on all their resources to find housing for clients who no longer had a place to live.
“These people are under a tremendous amount of stress,” Umansky said. “They’re homeless. They’re living in hotels or friends’ houses or whatever it is … We’re just trying to be super empathetic and provide extraordinary service right now, to go above and beyond.”
Members of the firm were also awaiting the delivery of a few dozen Starlink internet kits to distribute to people in affected communities so that they could have a source of internet access.
Yesterday, Paul Salazar of the Paul Salazar Group at Hilton & Hyland sent out a resource document to his network with temporary housing, transportation, supplies or equipment that members of the community could offer up by filling out a Google Form, or take advantage of, depending on their need.
“Today, me and my team are going to be doing a lot of calls to neighboring areas of [Pacific] Palisades,” Salazar said. “So we’re going to do a lot of work calls in Brentwood and see if anybody has vacant properties that they’re willing to lease out short-term, long-term for these families looking for a place. I’ve talked to a lot of my agent colleagues as well, and everybody’s doing the same. We’re trying to figure out how we can serve the community.”
How the fires may reshape the market
With so much still in flux, Umansky said it was hard to predict exactly how the disaster would impact the real estate market in the years to come. There was some talk about existing homes in surrounding neighborhoods going up in value with increased demand and reduced inventory available, Umansky said, but it was still hard to say at this point.
“There’s a lot of questions, very few answers at this point,” he said. “All I know is that once we finish with this disaster, we are going to figure out how to rebuild the community … and then obviously, from my perspective, we need to learn from this and make sure this doesn’t happen again.”
Large sections of Pacific Palisades have been “completely wiped out,” Salazar noted, which means that the families who once lived there will be trying to plan out their next move since it will likely take years to rebuild the homes, schools, restaurants, etc., that have been demolished. It’s unclear how many will even want to stick around to rebuild versus move to another similar neighborhood within LA or perhaps leave the city entirely. Regardless, the process will be a monumental one.
“It’s not like it’s one big piece of land where a developer can buy everything and build, like, a tract community, which can be built really fast,” Salazar explained. “We’re talking about everybody independently owns each parcel and you’re looking at hiring architects building custom homes. So that is going to be just a complete nightmare … the amount of trucks and movements in these streets on a weekly basis is already bad, but now it’s going to be … I just don’t know how it’s done. How do you organize that?”
The two alternative neighborhoods nearby that agents mentioned they anticipate many displaced residents will choose to move to, in the short- or long-term, are Brentwood, Santa Monica and Bel Air, which still have a residential feel but are not as far away from the action of the city as Malibu, for instance. Others who may not feel as tied to the area might opt for other family-friendly communities like Manhattan Beach or Palos Verdes.
The wildfires have also had the effect of spurring some homesellers to take their properties off the for-sale market for now and, instead, listing them as rentals since there’s such a demand for more temporary housing, Salazar said.
“In Brentwood, Santa Monica and surrounding areas, we’re seeing people take their houses off the market and putting them on the market for rent because there’s that option. Why sell right now? You can get a high rent value on it and sell later on.”
That run on the rental market will likely drive prices up in those higher-demand communities, Altman added, for better or worse.
“Unfortunately, I think we’re going to see lease prices go up because of demand, especially in areas like Brentwood,” Altman said. “I think in Brentwood the market, both for-lease and for-sale, is going to go through the roof because it’s close enough to the Palisades where you can sort of get back to as much normalcy as possible because a lot of their families, their kids are in school in those neighborhoods — the ones that are even left — and so they can’t just pick up and go somewhere else; their whole life is there.”
Another byproduct of the fires is that some sellers who were on the fence about going on the market this year now feel like they have the incentive to list their property, Altman added, “because there’s 1,000 new buyers and renters that have suddenly hit the market in LA.”
Even though the damage is “worse than you could imagine,” Altman said that the bright spot in the tragedy the city is facing is all the community members who are banding together and the first responders who are working tirelessly to help others in the face of unprecedented firestorms.
“They are true heroes, and they have been incredible,” Altman said.
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Email Lillian Dickerson
