We can now put Q1 2025 in the books, and it's getting its own page in the record books. As we've noted several times here since the 2025 real estate market in Manhattan Beach first rocketed in January, the number of sales and the amount of money plunked down for local properties is simply extraordinary. Yes, the tragic L.A. fires played a big role. But the market generally has been recovering, and fast. Most buyers in MB in Q1 were not displaced families. The biggest headline is the dollar volume: Over $733 million worth of homes sold between Jan. 1-March 31, 2025. There is simply no precedent for a first quarter with that kind of sales volume. The closest would be 2021, at a time when the market was responding to ultra-low interest rates, and the 2020 real estate calendar had been delayed slightly, pushing more activity into the Fall and Winter that year, right up through early 2021. That year, Q1 saw $616 million in sales. (This might be a place to mention covid-19, in case people have forgotten.) This year's sales total was 19 higher than we saw in (former) record-year 2021. The average across recent years is more like $400M, with some years a little above, some below. Year-to-year growth in sales was almost unbelievable: +95 from 2024 to 2025. And compared to anemic 2023, the jump is +185. But how does this quarter compare? We did a big data run for all MLS-reported sales going back to 2008. Grouping the data by traditional quarters, we see that Q1 this year ranked 7 in history. It's the only Q1 on the Top 10 list. That makes plenty of sense, since Q1 is ordinarily among the very slowest of any year. Rarely are there a ton of listings or sales happening in December and January to drive closings in Q1. If you take a look at the chart, you'll see that the top 5 quarters are all from the covid/low-mortgage-interest frenzy of 2020-21. Two more periods are the "last gasps" of that frenzy, in 2022. There's just one appearance each by quarters in 2017 and 2018. If we break out of traditional "quarters" and just look at rolling 3-month periods, Q1 2025 still ranks well, but it's got more competition. This chart shows 3-month periods by the final month of each block of time, so March 2025 is January, February, March, and so on. Here, the top 12 slots are taken by 2020-21, then we see the Springtime frenzy of 2017 popping in. (Remember the "Trump bump?" Boy, that seems like a distant memory.) While Q1 2025 ranks 24th on this list, we would note that it's the "earliest" block of 3 months to hit the Top 25, with just one April and two Mays on the chart. This is just another way of emphasizing how rare it is to see such a big chunk of local home sales activity in the first months of the year. We also highlighted (in green) a couple of periods from late last year, with both October and November 2024 ranking highly. That tracks. We've reported here several times on how the Manhattan Beach market firmed up and turned up around Summer and Q4 of 2024, in part on the strength of high-end buyers. Seeing all these data, there's a natural question. Was it an extraordinary number of sales, or was it prices, that pushed Q1 2025 to these heights? Yes. First, sales totals. The 87 closings in Q1 this year were the second-highest to... you guessed it, 2021's Q1 (88). And there was a surge early in 2013 that neared this year's total, with 86 closings. We calculated an average for the 18 years represented in this chart, which was 71 sales for any first quarter. So we were well above that this year, and, of course, leaps and bounds above 2023-24. The median price among all of the quarter's sales was a relatively modest $3.350M. That's based on 3 months' worth of sales, while we normally calculate the median price based on 12 months' worth of sales. For year-end 2024, the median price was $3.025M. (See this post wrapping up 2024 data.) Sales of homes priced at $5.000M or above made up 28 of all sales, while those priced at $3.000M or higher made up 67. We'll come back to the "sales mix" behind the quarter's data in a future post. So that was history-making Q1 2025. If you're alive and paying attention today, you might wonder how on-again/off-again tariffs, global trade wars and the fallout might impact the real estate market. If we could predict that accurately, we wouldn't be writing about, or selling, homes. But it's the right question ------------------------------------------------------ Here's the rest of our local real estate market update report for the period ending 3/31/25: > 65 active listings as of 3/31/25 (+11 from 3/15/25) > 50 SFRs (+10) > 15 THs (+1) See the Inventory list as of 3/31/25 here, or see the MB Dashboard for up-to-the-minute data. Active listings by region of Manhattan Beach in this report: > Tree Section: 17 actives (+7) > Sand Section: 32 actives (+1) > Hill Section: 5 actives (+1) > East MB: 11 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 3/31/25".
