LA’s most expensive neighborhoods in 2017

At the top of the list of Los Angeles’s most expensive neighborhoods this year were reliably posh Malibu and Beverly Hills. That’s according to PropertyShark, which compiled a list of the 50 neighborhoods in LA with the highest median sales prices so far in 2017.

Beachfront property dominates the ranks. Coming in at No. 1 was Malibu’s The Colony, where the median sales price was $13 million. The exclusive gated enclave sits right on the water and has counted a number of celebrities among its residents, including Tom Hanks, Rob Reiner, and John McEnroe.

Beverly Hills’s Trousdale Estates neighborhood came in second, with a median sales price of $9.3 million—an 18 percent increase over last year. The Trousdale neighborhood dates to the 1950s. It was developed for wealthy buyers who could afford custom homes, and many of those buyers hired big-name architects like A. Quincy Jones, Richard Dorman, Paul R. Williams, and Cliff May.

Those houses, many of them well-preserved midcentury moderns, still command high prices.

Malibu’s Carbon Mesa (the area around Carbon Mesa Road) came in third, with median sales for the year topping $8.5 million. Fourth was a section of Beverly Hills known as the Beverly Hills Gateway (roughly, north of Sunset Boulevard and south of Beverly Hills Post Office and Beverly Park). Beverly Hills Gateway saw median prices of $8.020 million—a 24 percent drop from last year’s median.

Courtesy Nourmand & Associates

Rounding out the top five, is another Malibu neighborhood—the beachfront Malibu Cove Colony. Malibu Cove Colony’s median sales price rose 20 percent from last year, to $8 million.

The Colony and Malibu Cove Colony sound like the same place, and both are gated neighborhoods, but Malibu Cove Colony sits east of Paradise Cove, while The Colony is south of Malibu Country Mart, off Malibu Road.