Selling an apartment building in Venice.
Shaya Lowenstein is a multifamily broker who sells apartment buildings in Venice, Los Angeles, and holds California DRE license 01942326. Venice holds 2,335 multifamily buildings carrying 11,037 apartment units, of which 91% were built in or before 1978 and are therefore generally covered by the Los Angeles Rent Stabilization Ordinance. 104 apartment buildings recorded a sale here in 2024, at a median of $752,456 per unit.
Submarket figures from the Los Angeles County assessment roll, August 2026.
What decides price on these blocks
Venice is the submarket where the regulatory overlay matters most and where a mistake is most expensive. The parcels sit in the coastal zone, so redevelopment and in some cases substantial alteration run through Coastal Act permitting on top of city entitlement, which lengthens timelines and narrows the buyer pool for any plan that requires demolition. Rents and land values are among the highest in the county while the rent-stabilized stock is old and tightly held, which produces some of the widest gaps between in-place income and market potential anywhere in Los Angeles. That gap is the asset and it is also the thing most likely to be mispriced in either direction.
Who buys in Venice
High-net-worth private buyers, coastal specialists who already know the permitting path, and long-hold owners treating the land as the position. Very few institutional buyers, and almost no one underwriting a fast turnaround.
How I run the sale
I price the building three ways before we talk about listing it: in-place income at today's cap rates, market-rent potential after honest turnover math, and land value if the lot is worth more than the building standing on it. You get the closed comps behind each number and the ones that argue against me. If the answer is that you should refinance or hold, I will say so, and that has happened often enough that I would rather tell you early than spend six months proving it.
Interview other brokers. Give us the same rent roll and the same questions, and check what each of us tells you against the county record before you sign anything.
Before you list
- How to choose a multifamily broker in Los Angeles, including how to verify any broker's sales claims against public records.
- Recorded apartment sales in Venice, the comps themselves, with dates and prices.
- How brokers actually value an LA apartment building.
- Measure ULA, which applies to sales inside City of Los Angeles limits above the current threshold and is the seller's cost.