Why El Segundo Houses Rarely Come Up for Sale, and What They Cost in 2026

By Neil Chhabria, Broker and CEO, Chhabria Real Estate Company. Published October 8, 2026.

Market figures from our October 3, 2026 CRMLS pull.

An El Segundo house changes hands about once every 38 years. That single number explains more about this market than any price does, and it goes unmentioned in the recent coverage of the city’s transformation. The median detached home sold there in 2026 has closed at $2,022,250, up 58.4% from 2017, on 58 sales in a city of roughly 3,029 detached houses.

Saturday morning on Main Street, and the marine layer has not burned off yet. City Hall sits at 350, the brick high school at 640, the same street running through both. Location scouts keep booking that high school as Anytown USA. The Times counts a Kohl’s commercial, the series “All American” and the movie “Superbad.” The housing market here does not work like its neighbors, and the reason is arithmetic rather than atmosphere.

What the Los Angeles Times reported

On September 9, 2026, Roger Vincent published a piece in the Los Angeles Times on El Segundo’s reinvention as a high-tech hub, anchored by SpaceX alumni companies, Mattel, white-collar firms along Rosecrans and professional sports facilities. It is worth reading in full: El Segundo, SpaceX and the transformation of an unlikely corner of L.A.

The piece quotes Mayor Chris Pimentel on the city’s civic life and infrastructure spending, and Alex Rose of Continental Development on the early-2000s shift in city policy that scrapped a gross receipts tax in favor of fees based on business size. Jason Fine of JLL supplies the line about office tenants: “The spoke is outgrowing the hub.”

What it does not cover is housing, beyond a sentence noting that apartment vacancy sits at 3.4% and that residents have watched property values rise. That is the subject below. For the employers themselves, our El Segundo community guide keeps a current list of who is based where.

How often does an El Segundo house actually change hands?

The turnover rate for detached homes in El Segundo, as verified by First American Title, is 2.65% a year. For condominiums it is 4.68%.

Those percentages do real work once translated. El Segundo contains about 3,029 detached houses. A 2.65% annual turnover rate means roughly 80 of them trade in a year. Hold that rate steady and any particular house comes up for sale about once every 38 years. A condominium comes up about once every 21 years.

We checked that figure against our own CRMLS data. Between January 1 and October 3 of this year, 58 detached homes closed in El Segundo. Annualized, that is about 77 sales, which against the city’s detached stock works out to 2.53%. Two unrelated sources landing a tenth of a percentage point apart is about as close to confirmation as this kind of figure gets.

If you own in El Segundo, that scarcity cuts toward you and against you at the same time. Roughly 80 sales a year is a thin comparable set, so each closing carries unusual weight in establishing what your house is worth, and a single unusual sale on your street can move the read on your block for a year.

If you are a South Bay buyer looking specifically at El Segundo, the same number sets your expectations. Across an entire year, about 80 houses citywide become available to you. Narrow that to a particular street, a particular school walk or a particular lot size and the annual supply can round to zero. Waiting for the right house in El Segundo is not a season-long exercise. It can be a multi-year one.

Why the public data appears to say the opposite

Anyone checking this against census figures will run into an apparent contradiction, and the two sources do genuinely disagree on the surface.

The American Community Survey reports the median year an owner moved into their home. For El Segundo that year is 2007. For Torrance it is 2004, Manhattan Beach 2005, Hermosa Beach 2006, and Los Angeles County 2006. By that measure El Segundo owners are the most recently arrived group on the list, not the longest tenured. El Segundo also has the smallest share of owners in place since before 2000, at 33.3%, against 40.7% in Torrance and 40.0% in Manhattan Beach.

That reads as a direct contradiction of a 38-year holding period. It is not, and the reason is what is being counted.

The census figure counts every owner in the city, in every kind of building. In El Segundo, 30.0% of owner households live in something other than a detached house. In Manhattan Beach that figure is 12.5%. So El Segundo’s citywide owner tenure is being pulled toward the present by a large block of condominium and apartment owners, who by First American’s own measure turn over nearly twice as fast as houses do. The houses are not moving. The rest of the ownership stock is.

No census table crosses tenure with move-in year and building type, so this cannot be resolved inside census data at all. It takes transaction records, which is why the title company figure and the MLS figure are the ones that answer the question.

The underlying distinction holds up on its own. El Segundo is 42.5% owner-occupied, against 64.8% in Manhattan Beach, 55.0% in Torrance, 53.4% in Redondo Beach and 50.6% in Hermosa Beach. It is the only one of those markets that is reliably majority renter, at 57.5%. Fewer owner households means a smaller pool of homes that can ever reach the market, before anyone’s moving decision enters into it.

One honest caveat on the census side: El Segundo is a small city and its survey margins are wide. The owner-occupancy share carries a margin of plus or minus 4.6 percentage points, which is why the comparison above names specific cities rather than reaching for a county benchmark that sits inside the error range.

What El Segundo homes have sold for, 2017 through 2026

Detached homes only, from our own CRMLS Matrix pulls.

The median is up $744,500 since 2017, or 58.4%. Put the other way around: if El Segundo had gone nowhere for nine years, the median house would still cost $1,275,000. More than a third of what the median house costs today did not exist in 2017.

The table also contains a decline that gets left out of most accounts of this market. Between 2022 and 2024 the median fell $110,000, a drop of 5.7%, before 2025 moved past the prior high. Anyone writing that El Segundo only goes up has not looked at the middle of that column.

One more thing in that table. The distance between the average and the median has widened, from 2.3% in 2017 to 4.8% now, and it reached 10.5% in 2021. The average being pulled away from the median is what it looks like when the top of a market stretches faster than the middle of it. In Neil’s experience, that pattern is the high-end rebuild and large-lot trade showing up in the numbers rather than a broad move, but that is an interpretation of the pattern and not something the figures state on their own.

For a seller, the practical consequence is that the citywide median is a weak guide to any individual house, because the spread around it is widening. For a South Bay buyer, it means the entry price and the top of the market are moving at different speeds, and which one applies depends on which third of the market a given house sits in.

Volume is the part that fits the Times piece most directly. Those 58 closings through October 3 already exceed all of 2025, which produced 56, and all of 2024, which produced 50. With three months left in the year, 2026 is tracking toward the busiest year since 2016. Turnover is accelerating against a housing stock that is not growing.

Where the new supply is supposed to come from

It is not coming from new construction, and the city says so in its own words.

El Segundo’s adopted Housing Element, certified by the California Department of Housing and Community Development on July 15, 2024, states plainly: “Residentially designated vacant land in El Segundo is virtually non-existent.” The same document goes further: “Based on just residentially designated land, the City does not offer adequate capacity for the Regional Housing Needs Assessment (RHNA).”

The geography behind that is stark. El Segundo covers 5.46 square miles. All of its residential population sits on approximately 532.8 acres west of Pacific Coast Highway, which is about 15% of the city. The rest is the refinery, Los Angeles International Airport, and the office and industrial district east of the highway where most of the companies in the Times article actually sit. The pocket of that district closest to the houses is Smoky Hollow, which has been converting from light industrial to creative office for years and is the one part of the city’s eastern side a residential buyer tends to encounter.

The state assigned El Segundo 492 units for the 2021 to 2029 cycle: 189 very low income, 88 low, 84 moderate and 131 above moderate. Four years into that eight-year cycle, the city’s own Annual Progress Report shows 122 units permitted. Every one of the 122 falls in the above-moderate category. Very low, low and moderate each stand at zero.

At that pace El Segundo finishes the cycle around 244 units, roughly half its assignment, with nothing deed-restricted. Meanwhile the median detached home that sold this year was built in 1952. The housing stock is not being added to in any quantity, and what trades is three-quarters of a century old.

One number correction worth noting, since it circulates locally: several City presentation decks show a RHNA allocation of 521 units. The figure in SCAG’s Final RHNA Allocation Plan, in the adopted Housing Element and in every Annual Progress Report the city has filed is 492. No document explains the difference. We publish 492 and cite SCAG.

Why people stay once they are in

The structural answer to that question sits in the school district’s own admission rules rather than anywhere else. Our El Segundo Unified School District page carries the full school list, addresses and enrollment figures.

El Segundo Unified serves about 3,376 students across Center Street Elementary, Richmond Street Elementary, El Segundo Middle, El Segundo High and Arena High, with Eagles’ Nest Preschool making a sixth site the district counts. The district offers Project Lead The Way from kindergarten through twelfth grade, music programs across the same span, and four pathways in grades nine through twelve: Biomedical Science, Business, Engineering, and Visual and Performing Arts.

The admission mechanics are the point. Non-residents may apply for an interdistrict permit between January 12 and July 31. The district states that “we receive more eligible applicants than we typically have space and the process goes to random lotteries,” and that “ALL permit approvals are based on space availability.” There is an academic screen before the lottery, requiring a 3.0 grade point average equivalent with no behavior or attendance issues for grades one through twelve. A release from the home district is required. There is no transportation. And working in the city buys nothing: “ESUSD does not give priority based on work permit.”

Once a student is in, they continue without reapplying as long as they hold a 2.5 grade point average with no attendance or behavior issues.

In Neil’s experience, this is a one-way door, and it is a large part of the answer to why houses here turn over once every 38 years. A household already inside the district holds something that cannot be repurchased on demand. Leaving the city means surrendering a seat whose replacement runs through a lottery with an academic screen and no guarantee. That is a reason to stay that has nothing to do with the house itself, and it compounds every year a family remains. The district’s rules are a matter of record; the connection to turnover is his interpretation of them.

A second structural factor is that El Segundo runs its own police and fire departments rather than contracting with the county, with two fire stations at 314 Main Street and 2261 E. Mariposa Avenue. The City’s adopted budget for fiscal year 2026-27 appropriates $27,213,563 to Police and $18,696,939 to Fire. Mayor Pimentel told the Times that response times for both are “both under three minutes.” We could not locate that figure in any City publication, including two budget documents, the Annual Comprehensive Financial Report and both department websites, so it stays here as the Mayor’s statement to a newspaper rather than as a verified City statistic.

The civic calendar is unusually dense for a city of this size, and the City publishes it: the Hometown Fair and Carnival on the first weekend in May, Summer Concerts in the Park beginning on Father’s Day, the Fourth of July Celebration, the Family Campout in August, the Halloween Frolic, and Joy Around the World on the first Thursday in December. Several of those appear in our roundup of South Bay annual events. The recreation inventory includes The Lakes at El Segundo, the city-owned golf course, where residents holding a current Recreation and Parks identification card get published discounts and can reserve up to 15 days ahead. The Urho Saari Swim Stadium, known locally as The Plunge, is a 1940 Works Progress Administration building currently closed for renovation with reopening stated as 2026.

Three things in the Times piece worth updating

The surf park is approved, not planned

The Times called it “a massive $175-million artificial surf park planned by a company tied to billionaire Vinny Smith’s Toba Capital.” Six days after the article ran, the City approved it. The State Clearinghouse record for the El Segundo Surf Club Project, EA 1411, shows approval on September 15, 2026 and a Notice of Determination received September 17, 2026. The project covers a 9.3-acre site at 100 to 200 South Nash Street, with four three-story buildings totaling approximately 50,236 gross square feet, member facilities, a public restaurant, surf and recreational pools, padel courts, and pedestrian connections to the Metro El Segundo Station. The developer name and the $175 million figure appear in press coverage but not in the approval record, so we attribute those to press rather than to the City.

Deloitte’s own office locator shows Manhattan Beach, not El Segundo

The article lists Deloitte among the firms on the Rosecrans corridor. Deloitte’s own locator gives a Manhattan Beach office at 1600 Rosecrans Boulevard, along with Los Angeles, Inglewood and Glendale offices, and no El Segundo location. KPMG, named in the same sentence, does publish an El Segundo office at 2101 Rosecrans Avenue.

Innocean’s headquarters move is reported, not completed

The agency’s own site still gives 180 5th Street in Huntington Beach as its headquarters. The roughly 100,000 square foot lease at 888 N. Douglas Street appears in commercial real estate trade press. A signed lease is not an occupied headquarters.

One point the Times gets right that local shorthand usually gets wrong: SpaceX is not an El Segundo company today. Its SEC filings give 1 Rocket Road, Starbase, Texas as its headquarters, and Hawthorne is the active Southern California facility. El Segundo is where it started, not where it is.

What we report next

We will pull the El Segundo detached median back to 2005, which is as far as CRMLS coverage holds up, and publish the full twenty-one-year series alongside the sale counts. The years before 2005 return between 5 and 12 sales annually against a normal range of 46 to 87, which is missing data rather than a market that stopped trading, and we will not publish those as market figures. That piece should run with the next quarterly market update on our South Bay Market Insights page. We will also report the fourth-quarter close for El Segundo once the year finishes, which will settle whether 2026 ends as the busiest year since 2016.

Buying, selling, or still working out whether El Segundo is where to set down roots? Start with the El Segundo community guide, or browse the rest of the South Bay Locals section.

This article is a study of market data against current economic data. It is not real estate, tax, lending, financial or investment advice, and it is not a recommendation to buy, sell, hold, list or price any property. Stats presented here represent the city or area as a whole, not any one individual property.

Neil Chhabria, Broker
Chhabria Real Estate Company, DRE 01821437

Sources

• Roger Vincent, “El Segundo, SpaceX and the transformation of an unlikely corner of L.A.,” Los Angeles Times, September 9, 2026. Read the article
• Turnover rates for El Segundo detached homes and condominiums, verified by First American Title, 2026.
• Sale prices, sale counts and days on market: CRMLS Matrix, closed Residential sales, Property Sub Type Single Family Residence, Property Attached No, City of El Segundo. Pulled October 3, 2026.
• Tenure, housing stock and building type: U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey 2024 5-year estimates, tables B25003, B25024, B25032, B25038 and B25039. data.census.gov
• City of El Segundo, adopted 6th Cycle Housing Element 2021-2029. California HCD
• California Department of Housing and Community Development, Housing Element certification letter to the City of El Segundo, July 15, 2024. City of El Segundo
• Southern California Association of Governments, 6th Cycle Final RHNA Allocation Plan. SCAG
• City of El Segundo, Annual Progress Report for 2025. City of El Segundo
• El Segundo Unified School District, interdistrict permit information. ESUSD
• California Department of Education, DataQuest enrollment by grade, El Segundo Unified, 2025-26. CDE DataQuest
• City of El Segundo, Recreation and Parks special events directory. El Segundo Recreation and Parks
• City of El Segundo, Fiscal Year 2026-27 Annual Operating and CIP Budget adoption. City of El Segundo
• CEQAnet, State Clearinghouse record 2012101081, El Segundo Surf Club Project (EA 1411) Notice of Determination. CEQAnet
• Deloitte US office locator. Deloitte
• KPMG Los Angeles office locations. KPMG
• Innocean USA. Innocean USA
• Space Exploration Technologies Corp, SEC filer record CIK 0001181412. SEC