Most Listings Sell Within a Month -- Manhattan Beach Market Update for 7/15/25

The pace of homes sales locally is matching up pretty well with the number of new listings emerging, meaning inventory isn't growing much – in fact, it shrank by 5 listings between our two market update snapshots on July 1 and July 15. 

Still, it feels like homes are taking a little longer to sell. 

We confirmed that vibe with a quick look at a measure called "median days on market" for properties that do sell. That figure was up as of June 30 to 19 days, highest this year since January and higher than any June of the past 5 years. (Sorry, no chart on this data.) So, that general sense – it takes longer to get under contract – is correct. 

If it takes longer to sell, that means more listings gathering more days on market – whoops, that's now "Days Active in MLS." DAM!

We decided to see how the mix of inventory looks today in terms of DAM.

Here we see that half of all inventory has been on the market either less than 30 days or more than 91 days (23% newer, 27% older). 

Meantime, half of all inventory has been on for 31-90 days.

The biggest single segment of the market, broken out this way, is the 30% of all listings that are in their second month (31-60 days).  

Now, how are sales correlated with time on market?

We looked at the 30 listings pending in the MLS as of July 15, and found that two-thirds (67%) made their deal with 30 or fewer days on the market. 

That's quite a correlation. Most listings that do sell get their offers early on.

This chart shows that even more emphatically than hearing that the median DAM is 19 days (50% sell faster, 50% take more time).

Those 2nd-month listings that were 30% of current inventory make up only 10% of pending sales.

We see a similar pattern with closed sales.

Once again, we see that by far the biggest category is 0-30 days, meaning homes that proceeded all the way to closing overwhelmingly began that journey by accepting an offer within the first month of their time active in the MLS.

This figure is skewed slightly toward lower DAM totals by off-market sales posted to the MLS. We see 29 closed sales recorded with 0 "days active in MLS" – 15% of the sales – most of which were only posted to the MLS for data purposes after closing. None of those types of sales would be seen in the current inventory or pending-sales data.

Going in the other direction, a number of sales closing early in 2025 were deals made on older listings that had logged substantial time on the market in 2024. In other words, they are this year's sales, but they're from last year's lingering inventory. 

Now, if only 23% of current inventory has 0-30 days of MLS time, but that's 67% of pendings and 63% of closed sales, what that's telling you is that new listings keep coming out and getting absorbed, constantly adding to the data on "newer" listings selling. But listings that have sat on the rack for a while seem to draw fewer offers.

Is this "normal?"

We took a look at full-year 2024 data, and found only 53% of sales came on listings with 30 days or less of market time.

But 2023? Then, 68% of sold listings had fewer than 30 days on market.

A market that's healthy and moving probably should skew heavily toward sales happening within the first month.  

These data do point to the value and importance of starting out right, so that those early offers do come. 

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Nerdy notes:

1) Some listings with lower DAM counts that are pending or sold actually sold in a second listing. (A "re-list," sometimes accompanied by a price cut.) If the house was on the market previously, we adjusted raw MLS data to count the total days on market, instead of only the most recent listing's DAM count.

2) For our pendings chart, we wanted to know how fast listings drew offers. So we used the first date that the MLS status for a listing changed to show the seller had accepted a buyer's offer, whether the agent used "active under contract" status or "pending." Again, this required adjusting some raw MLS data.

3) The number of sales YTD at 182 as of July 15 is slightly fewer than an MLS search finds today. We crunched all these numbers on the 15th, before a couple of sales posted. We also ignored two sales that were duplicates.

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Here's the rest of our local real estate market update report for the period ending 7/15/25:

> 91 active listings as of 7/15/25 (-5 from 6/30/25) 

> 70 SFRs (-4)

> 21 THs (-1)

See the Inventory list as of 7/15/25 here, or see the MB Dashboard for up-to-the-minute data.

Active listings by region of Manhattan Beach in this report:

> Tree Section: 15 actives (-3)

> Sand Section: 47 actives (-3)

> Hill Section: 9 actives (-1)

> East MB: 20 actives (+2)

We're also providing a report on closed sales by region of MB.

Sales data, including PPSF for all properties, are organized by sub-region of Manhattan Beach.

Here's a link to the spreadsheet: "MB Pending/Sold as of 7/15/25".