With 325 homes sold last year, Manhattan Beach did outdo its own sales totals from the prior 3 years.
But that was only a jump of 6.9% in the number of homes sold, from 304 the year before.
So, how does that compare?
We took a big view in one our data deep dives.
Our first chart shows how 15 SoCal real estate markets performed relative to their 2024 sales totals.
The headliner: Brentwood, at +31.7%. That's well over 4 times the year-to-year increase in Manhattan Beach.
La Canada Flintridge is also up there, at +20%.
Both of those pricey housing markets are adjacent to areas heavily impacted by the tragic LA County wildfires last year.
While MB certainly had its own real estate rush in 2025, we're still a bit off the beaten path for many families who lost homes – or access to their homes – due to the fires. So it's logical that we saw a lesser impact.
Why did MB lag Redondo Beach's 11.7% increase, though? That is a curious comparison.
With its much larger market, and generally lower prices, we'd speculate that Redondo was simply recovering from the slump that most SoCal markets experienced recently, and was able to jump faster in 2025 because more buyers can afford it.
There is really is a tale of two cities between Redondo and Manhattan Beach. In 2024, MB's notable "recovery year," sales rose 20% year-over-year, while Redondo's rose only 1%. Even with the early wildfire-relocation surge in sales in 2025, Manhattan had a relatively more calm upward sales trend after that more substantial bounce the year before.
Of all the markets we pulled out for study, Hermosa Beach fell the most, with 8% fewer sales. (This was a difference of 14 sales, on 154 total sales.) Torrance also fell year-over-year, by almost 5%, which is a minor shocker – that city's real estate seems always to be turning over fast.
We heard plenty in 2025 about how some fire-impacted families were buying down in some of the Orange County beach cities, in numbers not normally seen. If true, that movement could help account for the 7-13% increases in several of those markets, on par with MB's increase. Newport, CDM and Dana Point all performed similarly, while Laguna Beach did the best.
And yet, in southernmost South County, the very large market of San Clemente saw almost 6% fewer sales in 2025, compared with 2024.
Regardless of their year-to-year sales fluctuations, how did all these markets perform compared to a typical year?
That's our next chart.
What you should see right away here is that most markets are about 20% below average in sales totals. That includes Manhattan Beach, which was 19.6% below average with its 2025 sales total.
Brentwood didn't suffer that fate because of the rush they had, ending up only 2.9% below average. But still, notably, not a single market we studied was average or above-average.
Nerdy note: We chose the time period of 2010-2019 for the 10-year average because every year in that dataset would be pre-pandemic. There was such weirdness to the market during and after that period, we figured that early period would be the smoothest, most reliable base for comparison. The truth is, however, when we also calculated a 10-year average using 2013-22 (still skipping laggy 2023-24), the percentage changes for almost every city or market on the chart were still very similar.
Both Hermosa and Redondo were notably further behind their average sales totals, at -25% and -26%, respectively. Torrance was also down 26%.
Perhaps a surprise on this list is La Canada Flintridge, which was second-highest in its year-to-year improvement. But that market saw 23% fewer homes sold than average anyway. It's a smaller market than here, with about 250 homes sold on average per year.
Now we'll look at prices.
On this chart, Manhattan Beach finally joins the leaderboard, placing third with a median price increase of 9.9% (which we've also called 10%).
This is our third out of three charts with Brentwood up there in first place.
Not only did they see sales go up 30%+, they saw median prices rise a whopping 33.5%!
We know what you're thinking of when we talk about Brentwood, and you imagine Palisades families relocating there, but the median price for the market is below MB's.
In 2024, Brentwood's median price was $2.140M. In 2025, it rose to $2.857M. It's a diverse market, with significant numbers of moderately prices properties, in addition to the big estate-type homes.
While we're talking Brentwood, we'll share an anecdote. We were recently helping a family looking at homes in Santa Monica north of Montana, a pricey and exclusive market if there is one – and adjacent, of course, to Brentwood. We had occasion to look at some early-2025 sales data, and, whew, there was a big rush. At the higher end ($8-$15M), several homes sold between $1M-$2.5M over asking (!!!).
Everything is a little different on this chart: Encino had flat sales year-over-year and was 25% below average, but its median price rose 12.5%, good for second place.
And in an odd turnabout, Laguna Beach, which had the third-highest year-to-year sales increase, also suffered an 8% decline in median home prices. More sales at lower prices? How often do you see that?
Our South Bay bretheren in Hermosa and Redondo saw prices rise between 5-7%, with Torrance also up 7%.
TL;DR
To recap: How'd Manhattan Beach do relative to other SoCal markets last year?
Despite that early surge of sales in 2025, our annual sales total rose modestly. We're still lagging average sales totals by 20%, but so are a lot of markets.
Our price increase was among the highest, and MB ended up behind only three other markets from this list (Newport, CDM and Beverly Hills) in its overall median price.
