Apartment buildings in 90026, Echo Park and Silver Lake, Los Angeles

What the buildings in 90026 Echo Park and Silver Lake look like.

Most of the apartment stock in 90026 Echo Park and Silver Lake is small. 3,253 of the 4,361 parcels hold two to four units, the duplexes, triplexes and fourplexes that are often bought by owner users and first-time investors.

The average parcel here holds 5.3 units. 33 parcels hold 50 units or more. The largest ones are listed further down this page, each with its own public record.

How old they are.

Half the apartment parcels in 90026 Echo Park and Silver Lake were built in 1923 or earlier. 3,978 of 4,361, about 91%, went up in 1978 or before.

Across the 255 ZIP codes on this site that share is 89%, so 90026 Echo Park and Silver Lake has about the same share of older buildings as the average. Older buildings tend to carry the questions a buyer will ask about, like plumbing, electrical, the roof and whether the building needs a seismic retrofit.

Rent control in 90026 Echo Park and Silver Lake.

4,361 of the 4,361 parcels in 90026 sit inside the City of Los Angeles by the city's zoning map. 3,978 of those were built in 1978 or earlier, and those are the buildings most likely to fall under the Los Angeles Rent Stabilization Ordinance.

That figure is worked out from the build year and the city line. It is not the Housing Department's own list, so check a single building on the LAHD lookup before you rely on it. Buildings in the city that the ordinance does not cover are often still under the state cap in AB 1482.

10 parcels here have an open soft-story retrofit permit on file with the city. That means a permit was pulled and the work had not been signed off when the city's data was read. It is not a list of every building that got an order.

How long owners hold.

The median Prop 13 base year for apartment parcels in 90026 Echo Park and Silver Lake is 2007. A base year resets when a building sells, so an old one usually means the same owner or the same family has held it a long time.

1,195 parcels, 27%, still carry a base year of 1995 or earlier. The figure for all 255 ZIP codes here is 28%, so owners in 90026 Echo Park and Silver Lake have held about as long as the average.

Long-held buildings often pay property tax on a value set decades ago. When they sell, the new owner is taxed on the price, which is part of why rents and expenses on these buildings need a close look before anyone sets a price.

How often buildings sell.

By last recorded transfer, 343 apartment parcels in 90026 Echo Park and Silver Lake changed hands in 2022, 278 in 2023 and 313 in 2024.

That is 7.2% of the parcels here, against 7.3% across all 255 ZIP codes, so buildings here turned over at about the same rate as the average.

A building that sold twice in those years shows up once, in its later year, and a transfer is not always a sale at market. A move into a trust or between family members is recorded too.

Inside the City of Los Angeles the Measure ULA transfer tax has applied to sales over about $5 million since April 2023. My study of how it changed sales is linked below.

LA apartment sales over $5 million fell by half after Measure ULA