Fire victims compete to find new homes as real estate market rages in Pacific Palisades, Altadena

Thousands of families were displaced on Tuesday when fires torched homes throughout Pacific Palisades and Altadena, kicking off a regionwide house hunt as victims scoured a tight market looking for homes to rent — or even buy.

People are desperate, local agents said. Their homes are in ashes, and they’re looking for stability — somewhere for their family to go that’s not a shelter, a friend’s house or a hotel room. Some landlords are now sharply raising rent, even beyond what temporary price gouging protections allow. And some would-be renters are offering a year’s rent upfront in cash and engaging in bidding wars.

“Dozens and dozens of people are going after the same properties,” said David Berg, a Compass real estate agent with Smith & Berg Property Group. “Since Tuesday afternoon, our phones have rung hundreds of times.”

On Friday, Berg and F. Ron Smith listed a newly built home in Brentwood, just a short hop from the Palisades. An hour after hitting the market, the listing had 10,000 views on Redfin.

“We’re trying to place numerous families into properties, but it’s becoming extremely difficult,” Berg said.

Last week, the pair listed a property in Santa Monica. No one bothered to visit the home — until Tuesday. Since then, they’ve shown it seven times and have two offers already in hand.

Evan Fisher’s family fled its five-bedroom home in the Palisades. By Wednesday, he and his wife hit the rental market looking for something similar nearby to keep his three daughters — 17, 15 and 10 — at the same school. No matter the status of his house — he believes it might still be standing — he realized it would take a long time to return and wanted to provide as much normalcy for his children as possible.

“There are thousands of people trying to do the same thing,” said Fisher, a 49-year-old psychologist.

Fisher scanned through hundreds of listings online and visited nine. He’s put in applications on two homes, one in Bel Air and one in Beverly Hills.

“God willing, one of them works out,” he said.

The mass displacement from the fires already has pushed up already sky-high prices, with rentals leasing for over asking, agents said. For many, short-term leases, especially furnished ones, are the obvious answer. Volunteers have compiled spreadsheets and lists of available leases, but most are snapped up minutes or hours after listing.

Compass agent Susan Kastner said so many families are scrambling to get leases that every rental on the market is getting multiple offers.

She had a listing for sale on Las Casas Avenue in the Palisades, but she can’t take offers on it because she’s not even sure it’s still standing and hasn’t been able to check.

For others who’ve lost their homes, buying, even out of desperation, makes more sense. According to Smith, some families are already receiving insurance stipends and can choose to spend it on either rent or a new mortgage.

“The process of getting an architect and going through the planning, permitting and building process is likely going to take three years or more,” Smith said. “So families are evaluating whether to lease for three years or just buy something now.”

Natural landing spots for people fleeing the Palisades might be Malibu or Santa Monica, but Smith said people are shopping in Venice, Westchester, Mar Vista and over the pass in the San Fernando Valley.

“Real estate agents are inundated, moving families every which direction from Santa Barbara to Palm Springs to South Bay,” said real estate agent Darby Woods.

Woods has a seven-bedroom home up for rent in the Palisades that, save for the pool house, survived the fire. She hasn’t gotten any calls on it — presumably because people are assuming it burned down — so she’s planning to update the listing to clarify that it’s still standing, though probably pretty smoky.

Shana Tavangarian Soboroff, a real estate agent with the Beverly Hills Estates, evacuated from her parents’ Pacific Palisades home Tuesday — where she was staying while her own residence was under construction nearby. Even amid the tumult she was fielding calls from clients searching for new digs in the area.

“I have a long list of clients actively looking for a replacement,” Soboroff said Wednesday, just hours before she learned her parents’ house was destroyed in the fire.

Soboroff said she had listings for four rental properties — all single-family homes — some of which had been sitting for a few months. Two were in West Hollywood, one was in Beverly Hills and another in Venice. By Friday, all four were leased, at prices ranging from about $15,000 to $20,000 per month. In each instance, the new tenants are people who lost their home in the Palisades fire, she said.

In the case of the Venice listing and one in West Hollywood, the properties leased above their hoped-for prices. But, Soboroff said, that was because prospective tenants were offering increasingly high sums. “It’s the panic of the tenants who lost their home,” she said. “I feel like this happened in the last day, where all of the sudden they need to do it. So they will say, ‘I will pay all up front for a year.’ They are trying to incentivize the landlord to choose them.”

But two of Soboroff’s landlord clients opted not to raise the asking rents on their properties. One of them, personal injury attorney Andrew Alexandroff, owner of a Beverly Hills house for which Soboroff brokered a lease, said he was floored by the interest in his property after the fires. “It just felt awful to try to take advantage with a catastrophe,” he said. “I deal with catastrophe all the time as an injury attorney. When people are at their lowest, you try to help them.”

Soboroff, who grew up in the Palisades, said she is looking for homes for about 15 clients — 13 of whom she started working with after the Palisades fire began. She has listings for a handful of properties for sale, including one in Westwood and another in Century City.

Other victims are angling to rebuild as quickly as possible instead of buying something new, learning from the pandemic that delays are inevitable when thousands of people are trying to renovate their homes at the same time.

Real estate agent Bret Parsons got a call from a client at 11 a.m. on Wednesday saying his father’s house burned down, and he needed the contact information for every good architect that Parsons knew. Parsons sent over seven names, and the client was reaching out by Wednesday afternoon, less than a day after the house was destroyed.

State price gouging rules took effect Jan. 7 once Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency and are supposed to rein in rental costs.

Under those rules, landlords can generally not charge more than 10% above what they were charging or advertising before the state of emergency, according to the California attorney general’s office.

Real estate broker Michael Nourmand, however, said he estimates single-family rentals are being advertised around 20% higher than what he would have expected before the fires.

“They are getting it — and quickly,” he said of landlords.

Price gouging protections are enforced by the state attorney general’s office, as well as local district attorneys. Violators can face up to one year in jail and thousands of dollars in fines.

Anya Lawler, a policy advocate with the California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation, said landlords are bound by the 10% cap even if there is a bidding war in which someone is willing to pay more and she said authorities are likely to aggressively enforce price gouging protections, as they have in the past.

“My guess is there are some landlords who legitimately don’t know the law and are simply motivated to get as much as they can to take advantage of a terrible situation,” Lawler said. “Others are well aware and simply think they can skirt enforcement.”

One property that has seen rent change is a four-bedroom house on Dellvale Place in Encino. According to Zillow, the property was being advertised for $9,000 a month on Jan. 3.

Then, following the fires and the state of emergency, the asking rent on the listing changed, rising nearly 28% to $11,500.

In a phone interview Thursday, listing agent Soheila Mirfakhrai said she didn’t feel comfortable increasing the price, but the owner told her to do so without offering an explanation why. She said she did not know about the price gouging law.

After Mirfakhrai spoke with The Times by phone, the price was lowered to $9,800 — an increase of nearly 8.9% from the Jan. 3 asking rent.

“He agreed to bring the price down,” Mirfakhrai said in a text. “I told him that was not right and I would quit.”

Mirfakhrai said she was not allowed to provide a contact number for the owner and the owner could not be reached for comment.

“Some of the properties, they add up almost 50% to the rent,” said Heidi Jensen, a real estate agent helping families displaced from the Palisades fire.

“I think it’s just so unethical and not nice to do this with people that are in need.”