Q3 Data - More Sales, Higher Median | Manhattan Beach Market Update for 9/30/25

The Fall market can seem wobbly. It's true every year. 

By the time the first leaves start turning, the vast majority of home sales have already happened for the year. 

But this is a good time to reflect, and to start assessing the year that was. 

In Manhattan Beach – distinct from most real estate markets nationally – this year has been very active and notable. 

Sales volume is up substantially, and the median price for Manhattan Beach homes has hit a record high. 

It's really interesting to contrast things year-over-year. Our market update at this time last year declared the market "Flat, with a Hint of Spice" and noted that the median price was "not moving much." 

In sum, we saw trends emerging, but the data weren't all there yet to make bold statements about the market.

Wow. That is NOT our report this year.

We're almost going to have to understate how high-flying the market's been.

Median Price Hits Record, Up 21% YoY

One year ago, the median home price in Manhattan Beach was $2.775M. 

As of September 30, 2025, it's up at $3.350M, a whopping $575K increase year-over-year (21%), and a rise of 11% just since Dec. 31, 2024. 

We wrote several times in Summer and Fall 2024 about how the market was recovering then, with notable sales at the higher end and increasing volume both contributing to an overall upward price trend. 

Median prices eventually began to reflect this fact, jumping to $3.025M at year end. (See our full page about median home prices in Manhattan Beach, including links to past analyses.)

You won't often see a single-month median-price jump of 7%, but we did here by the end of January 2025, as a result of extra – and pricier – sales owing to wildfire relocation purchases, after the tragic LA County wildfires.

Market prices mostly flattened out at the new plateau, rising 3% over the 8 months from Jan. 31-Sept. 30.

It is interesting today to hear people talk about, and speculate about, the impact of the early-2025 sales on the market. There is a line of thinking that the emergency relocations caused a temporary spike in prices, which is now over, and that prices are reverting. 

At the individual-house level, that may be true. (Our anec-data suggests that it's true.)

But market-wide, median prices have gone up, a bit, since the January spikes. There's no market-wide reversion, despite the rapidity with which some prices rose early this year.

Q3 Sales Typical for Recent Years, YTD Sales Up  

We hope you like the 80s, because in Q3, this was the 4th straight year with closed sales totaling something in the low 80s citywide.

We had 80 sales close this year within Q3, 81 last year, 84 in '23, 83 in '22. (We added that white dotted line to show how Q3 compares against every quarter back to 2019.)

But look beyond Q3, and you will quickly see a pattern in the 2025 data that simply does not exist in any of these other years: Flat to (very mildly) declining sales totals from Q1 to Q3. 

Take a better look at all those Q1s. They're almost always the weakest quarter. 

This year, it was very different in Manhattan Beach. With a "front-loaded" market early this year, perhaps slight declines from Q1 sales totals were not surprising.

The year's sales, overall, are up again.

With 252 sales from Q1-Q3 this year, 2025 easily bests both 2023 and 2024, and approaches 2022, a mixed bag of a year if there ever was one. (Strong first half, desolate second.)

Sales are up 16% year-over-year, close enough to the previously noted 21% jump in the median price over the same time period.

We'll continue to look at data from the first parts of this year, and report back as we see intriguing numbers.

------------------------------------------------------

Here's the rest of our local real estate market update report for the period ending 9/30/25:

> 77 active listings as of 9/30/25 (-7 from 9/15/25) 

> 60 SFRs (-4)

> 17 THs (-3)

See the Inventory list as of 9/30/25 here, or see the MB Dashboard for up-to-the-minute data.

Active listings by region of Manhattan Beach in this report:

> Tree Section: 12 actives (-3)

> Sand Section: 38 actives (flat)

> Hill Section: 7 actives (-1)

> East MB: 20 actives (-3)

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 9/30/25".