2025 was the year the loud money waited and the patient money quietly won. That is the whole headline. Anything else is a footnote.
The setup at the start of the year was a market still recovering from the 2022 rate shock, a Fed that had cut twice and signaled patience, and a buyer pool that had spent eighteen months on the sideline waiting for a clear "now is the time" signal. That signal never arrived because the macro never permitted it. Inflation prints came in mixed. The Fed cut in March, paused, cut again in September, paused. The yield curve did its own thing. Mortgage rates drifted in a quarter-point band for nine straight months.
A year of patient money winning quietly while loud money waited for a signal that never came.
What actually happened underneath the macro was that the buyers who closed in 2025 were the ones who stopped waiting for rates to drop and started buying on fundamentals. They wrote offers on the right house, not the right month. The buyers who waited for the rate cut, the price cut, the next quarter, or the next election are still waiting, and the inventory they are waiting on is mostly gone.
The Westside numbers tell the story cleanly.
| Submarket | 2025 median | YoY | Avg DOM | Sale to list |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Beverly Hills (90210) | $5.7M | +4.1% | 68 | 91.4% |
| Bel Air | $7.2M | +2.8% | 96 | 89.5% |
| Pacific Palisades | $4.4M | +3.3% | 52 | 92.7% |
| Brentwood | $3.6M | +5.0% | 44 | 93.2% |
| Marina del Rey | $2.05M | +6.1% | 38 | 94.5% |
| Trousdale Estates | $14.8M | -2.4% | 138 | 86.1% |
Beverly Hills closed the year at $5.7M median, up 4.1 percent year-over-year, with average days-on-market at 68, down from 84 at the same point in 2024. Pacific Palisades, Brentwood, and Bel Air all finished in similar territory. Inventory was thin without being scarce. Sale-to-list ratios sat in the 91 to 93 percent band citywide, which is a healthier number than 2021's 99 percent peak (the 2021 number was a bubble metric and we should stop comparing to it).
The submarket that surprised us most was Marina del Rey. Waterfront inventory under $5M moved faster in 2025 than in any year since 2018. Median DOM on the Marina Peninsula closed at 38 days. Three of our four closings in MDR this year went pending in under three weeks. The narrative had been that the Marina was a quieter, slower second-tier waterfront story. The reality in 2025 was that the buyer pool finally caught up to the supply, and the value-per-dollar story (waterfront, slip included, a real lifestyle, fifteen minutes to LAX) became impossible to argue against.
Trousdale Estates surprised us in the other direction. The trophy end of the hillside above Sunset, the $20M-plus stock, sat. Listings that came on at $28M in February were still on at $25M in October. Above $15M, the buyer pool got narrower, more cash-driven, and less in any hurry. We closed three Trousdale deals in 2025, all under $14M, all on lots where the seller had finally moved off a 2021 price.
The other surprise was Palm Springs. The desert quietly absorbed a wave of second-home demand that nobody on the LA side was watching, and median price in 92262 closed up 8 percent year over year, which is the largest single-year move in a Coachella Valley zip code since 2021. The buyers were mostly Westside, mostly cash, and mostly looking for a sub-$3M architectural mid-century that they could not get for the price in LA.
The pattern across all of it. Buyers who wrote on fundamentals won. Buyers who waited for a perfect entry are still waiting. Sellers who priced correctly in week one sold. Sellers who chased the market down spent the year doing it. Rates moved a little. Lives moved a lot.
What 2026 looks like from here is mostly more of the same. A quarter-point in either direction on the long end of the curve is the most likely outcome. Inventory will be slightly thinner in the first quarter than the last. Sale-to-list will stay where it is. The buyers who already know what they want will close. The buyers who are still watching the screen will keep watching it.
The closing line we have been saying to clients all year, and will keep saying. Rates can be refinanced. The house cannot. Move on the right property, not the right month.
