If 928 rebuild permits have been issued in Pacific Palisades, why have only 15 homes actually received a Certificate of Occupancy?
That gap, reported through the Palisadian-Post's own Rebuild Dashboard as of late May 2026, is not a rounding error or a reporting lag. It is the single most useful piece of information available to anyone trying to buy, sell, or hold property in the burn area right now, and it is almost never the number that gets repeated. Local officials cite permit counts because permit counts move in the right direction. Buyers and sellers need a different number, because a permit is not a house, and the distance between the two is where the real pricing decisions are being made.
The Number Behind the Number
A permit count sounds like progress because it is easy to announce. But a single rebuild can generate a dozen or more separate permits: grading, demolition, electrical, plumbing, the primary structural permit, sometimes a separate ADU permit layered on top. Citywide totals lump all of these together, which is why the Pacific Palisades figure climbed past 3,000 building and electrical permits well before a comparable number of families had moved back in. The narrower, more honest measure is the count of new single-family building permits, which sat at 563 as tracked by Crosstown LA's analysis of Department of Building and Safety data through the end of 2025.
Even that narrower number only tells you a project has cleared paperwork. It says nothing about whether the house exists yet. That is what the Certificate of Occupancy count is for, and it is the number almost nobody quotes in press releases: 15, as of May 31, 2026, against 928 permits issued. The city's first post-fire Certificate of Occupancy was issued on November 21, 2025, roughly ten months after the fire. Construction itself, once a permit is in hand, still runs 10 to 18 months depending on scope and site conditions. Do that math against a January 2025 fire date and a buyer looking at a "rebuild in progress" listing today should expect most of these homes to finish sometime between late 2026 and well into 2027, not this year.
Two Percentages, Two Very Different Questions
Anyone reading rebuild coverage runs into two different percentage thresholds that sound similar and govern completely different things. Conflating them is an easy way to misprice a lot or misjudge a listing.
| Threshold | What it controls | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| 110% of pre-fire square footage | Whether the rebuild qualifies for the expedited, largely ministerial permitting track under the city's executive orders and the new state law covering disaster reconstruction | Stay under it and you skip most discretionary review. Go over it and you fall into standard plan check, which can add months |
| 120% of pre-fire assessed value | Whether the rebuild keeps the owner's original Prop 13 tax basis or triggers reassessment on the excess | Stay under it and property tax stays tied to the old assessed value. Cross it and only the amount above the threshold gets reassessed at current market value |
A project can qualify for the fast permitting track on the 110% size test while still tripping the 120% tax test, because square footage and construction cost do not move together, especially once a homeowner upgrades finishes or adds all-electric systems. One contractor's cost breakdown put the annual tax difference between a $1.4 million assessed base and a $4 million rebuilt value at roughly $31,000 a year at a typical Palisades effective rate near 1.2%. That is not a rounding difference. It is the kind of number that changes whether an owner rebuilds at all.
The Real Reason Lots Are Priced the Way They Are
Here is the mechanism that the permit headlines miss entirely: Prop 13 protection is not transferable at sale. An owner who rebuilds and stays under the 120% threshold keeps a tax bill from a decade or two ago. The moment that same owner sells the finished home, or sells the lot itself, the new buyer's assessment resets to current market value regardless of what the seller was paying. That asymmetry gives an owner who already holds a low tax basis a strong reason to sit on a burned lot and finish the rebuild rather than sell it, even when selling looks like the easier path on paper.
That is a big part of why the lots that do come to market skew toward the most fatigued sellers rather than a representative slice of the neighborhood, and why pricing on those listings has moved so much. By last August, a Los Angeles-based broker tracking the burn area described lot prices in parts of Pacific Palisades as having fallen as much as 45% from where they had been that spring, even as roughly 200 lot sales had closed since the fire. Falling prices alongside a slowing sales pace is not a sign of a neighborhood losing value. It is a sign that the sellers still listing a year or more out are disproportionately the ones for whom the math no longer works, whether that is insurance shortfalls, geotechnical surprises, or simply the toll of a 14 to 24 month process, from permit to move-in, that they no longer have the patience for. A buyer evaluating a lot today is underwriting that seller's specific fatigue, not the neighborhood's trajectory.
The HOA Veto That Doesn't Exist Anymore
Pacific Palisades is not governed by one set of rules. The community is divided into individual tracts, each with its own CC&Rs and its own architectural review process, and the fragmentation runs deeper than most buyers assume. The Palisades Highlands neighborhood alone contains 21 separate homeowner associations coordinated through a President's Council, according to the map maintained by the Highlands Recreation Association, and tracts elsewhere in the Palisades, like Huntington Palisades, run their own independent architectural committees on top of that. Before this year, any one of these committees could deny a rebuild on subjective grounds, a "look and feel" objection to a window style or a roofline, and that denial could sit for months even after a homeowner had already cleared the city.
Senate Bill 625, authored by Senator Aisha Wahab and effective January 1, 2026, closed that door. Under the new law, if a rebuild is substantially similar to the original structure, stays within 110% of the prior square footage, meets required setbacks, and complies with the objective design standards that were in effect when the disaster hit, the HOA's role shifts from gatekeeper to compliance check. The committee gets 30 days to declare an application complete and 45 days to decide once it is, and a homeowner who has to sue to enforce that timeline is entitled to attorney's fees if they win. For a buyer considering a lot inside one of the Palisades HOAs, that specific risk, an architectural committee stalling a compliant rebuild on aesthetics, is no longer something to price in.
What SB 625 did not fix is everything else. A contractor working a dozen fire-resistant rebuilds in the neighborhood put it plainly in an interview with Crosstown LA:
"We just did one house and had to get 16 different clearances for it."
That is the friction that remains: coordination across water and power, public works, planning, fire, sanitation, and urban forestry, each with its own queue. The HOA is off the critical path. The city departments are still on it.
What This Actually Means If You're Pricing a Lot or a Listing
If you are selling a burned lot, the discount buyers are asking for should be priced against multi-department coordination risk and construction timeline risk, not against the old fear that an HOA might block the design. That fear is largely off the table now for compliant, like-for-like rebuilds.
If you are buying a lot to build, ask whether the parcel sits in the California Coastal Zone. Emergency Executive Order 8 lets eligible like-for-like projects bypass discretionary Coastal Act review entirely, while a non-eligible project needing a full Coastal Development Permit can add three to six months or more. That single fact often matters more to your timeline than which HOA the lot belongs to.
If you are the original owner weighing whether to rebuild or sell, run the Prop 13 math before you run the design math. A rebuild that stays under 120% of pre-fire assessed value preserves a tax basis that a sale erases the moment it closes escrow.
FAQ
Does SB 625 apply to every HOA in Pacific Palisades? It applies to any common interest development processing a substantially similar reconstruction after a declared disaster, which covers the tract-level HOAs across the Palisades. It does not remove the HOA's ability to enforce objective standards that were already in place, only its ability to deny compliant rebuilds on subjective grounds.
If I buy a rebuilt home from the original owner, do I inherit their Prop 13 basis? No. A standard sale resets the assessment to current market value regardless of what the seller's basis was, which is exactly why sellers who already hold a low basis have less incentive to sell than the headlines suggest.
Is the 110% rule the same everywhere in the Palisades? The size threshold is consistent, but whether a parcel also needs Coastal Commission or Coastal Development Permit review depends on the specific lot's location within the Coastal Zone, which is a separate layer from the HOA question entirely.
Understanding which number actually predicts your timeline, and which threshold actually governs your tax bill, is the difference between pricing a Pacific Palisades property correctly and guessing. If you are weighing a lot purchase, a rebuild-in-progress listing, or the decision to sell a property you already hold, Kyle Leibovitch can walk through the specific parcel, HOA, and Coastal Zone status with you. Schedule a consultation before you price against the wrong number.
