Every portal starts you with a city and a price, and that works right up until you know what you actually want. A house where the sand starts at the patio. A single level so the stairs never become a conversation. A lot that can carry a second unit for a parent or a grown child. A tired two-bedroom on a wide lot that someone is going to rebuild, and it may as well be you. At that point the city filter is the wrong tool, because the house you have in mind might be in the Sand Section or on the Hill, in Valmonte or in the West Torrance flats, and the only thing that matters is that it is the right house.
So we built this page the other way around. Each card below runs its own live search across the CRMLS feed, from The Strand to the Peninsula and inland through Torrance, and shows everything active this morning that fits. Nothing here is a hand-picked list that goes stale. Forty years on this coast has taught us that the best homes rarely surface under the obvious search, so pick the card that matches the house in your head, and if the one you want is not there yet, that is a conversation with Neil. The ones that never reach a card are the reason to call.
On the Water
Two different things that people often use interchangeably. Beachfront means the sand starts where the property ends, which in this market is The Strand in Manhattan Beach and Hermosa Beach and the short run in Playa del Rey that faces the water. Oceanfront means the bluff, which is The Esplanade in Redondo Beach, Paseo de la Playa above Torrance Beach, and the stretch along El Segundo.
Both searches use the MLS Ocean/Beach Front designation the listing agent applies at input, so they return the properties the listing itself claims frontage on rather than anything we have estimated from a map.
By Feature
An accessory dwelling unit is the one worth understanding if you have not shopped for one before. California law has opened these up considerably in recent years, and an ADU can be a rental, a home office, or a place for a parent to live independently on the same lot. They are still a small share of inventory here, which is why they are worth searching for directly.
The condo and townhome search covers Manhattan Beach, Hermosa Beach, Redondo Beach, Torrance and El Segundo. CRMLS files condos and townhomes under one property type, so this returns both rather than townhomes alone.
Four searches were added for the way households here actually live. Guest houses and in-law quarters, and a primary suite on the main level, are the two searches a multigenerational buyer runs first, and CRMLS flags both. Decks in this market usually mean a rooftop or an upper-floor deck facing the water, since the lots are too small for much else. Gated communities are rarer on this coast than newcomers expect and are concentrated on the Peninsula and in a handful of Redondo Beach and Torrance enclaves. Two on a lot is the beach-city form of the townhome, two detached or attached homes sharing one parcel, usually without a homeowners association. Two searches people ask for cannot be run from the MLS feed as it stands: lot size, which is how you would find a real backyard, and energy-efficiency features; both are on our list for the IDX vendor, and until then send us the criteria and we will run them by hand.
By Architectural Style
The South Bay was built in waves, and the style tells you roughly when. The Peninsula’s Spanish and Mediterranean stock is the deliberate product of a plan: Frank A. Vanderlip’s syndicate bought the land in 1913, the Olmsted Brothers laid out roughly 3,200 acres beginning under John Charles Olmsted and finishing under Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., and city planner Charles H. Cheney, who called it in 1922 the largest single piece of city planning by private enterprise ever undertaken in the country, wrote the protective restrictions. The Palos Verdes Art Jury was established in 1923 to review every building and property change, and under Myron Hunt, its president for seventeen years, a California style of stucco, light colors and tiled roofs became the rule. Hunt designed the Malaga Cove Library, completed in 1929 and opened June 3, 1930. Walter Swindell Davis, with his brother Pierpont, designed La Venta Inn in 1923 as the real estate clubhouse for the Palos Verdes Project, and Kirtland Cutter designed the beach club that opened in 1930. Old Torrance’s Spanish and Craftsman blocks belong to the same era; the Craftsman cottages of Point Fermin and the beach cities run older still.
The postwar boom brought Ranch across Torrance, the Tree Section and the Peninsula’s north slope, and it brought the modernists to the hillsides. Lloyd Wright’s Wayfarers Chapel in Rancho Palos Verdes, completed in 1951, was named a National Historic Landmark in December 2023 and disassembled in 2024 to save it from the Portuguese Bend land movement; his Lombardi House of 1965 still stands in Palos Verdes Estates, while his 1959 Moore House there was demolished in 2012. Richard Neutra, with Robert Alexander and Carrington Lewis, designed Palos Verdes High School, commissioned in 1959. The Los Angeles Conservancy notes that many of the Peninsula’s postwar houses by name architects have never been surveyed, which is one reason a Mid-Century Modern here can be undervalued by a listing that calls it a fixer. Cape Cod arrived later, as a beach-town idiom rather than a historical one, and it is the look much of the new construction in the Tree Section and the Hill Section takes.
The custom-home market today runs through a short list of local practices. Michael Lee Architects, on Highland Avenue in Manhattan Beach since 1991, carries AIA honor, merit and citation awards from 1993 through 2015 and has been published from Dwell to the Los Angeles Times. Tomaro Architecture, Louie Tomaro’s design and construction practice, dates from 1990 and is one of the names Manhattan Beach buyers hear most often on new construction. Dean Nota, a member of SCI-Arc’s first graduating class who spent ten years in Ray Kappe’s office, opened his own practice in 1982, was elevated to the AIA College of Fellows in 2010 and received the AIA Long Beach and South Bay chapter’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2023. KAA Design Group, founded in 1988 by Grant Kirkpatrick, FAIA, works from Montecito to Manhattan Beach and has two monographs to its name. Douglas Leach Architecture in Redondo Beach carried more than thirty years of custom homes in Palos Verdes Estates, Manhattan Beach and Redondo Beach, including work taken through the Palos Verdes Estates Art Jury; Doug Leach has since died, and so has Pat Killen of Studio 9one2, whom the Easy Reader described in 2015 as having helped define the modern architecture that emerged in the South Bay over the previous quarter century; DIGS later called him one of a small group of local architects applying Modernist principles to beachside homes decades before others followed. His own 10th Street house in Manhattan Beach and the Ettley house in American Martyrs remain reference points, his houses are among the most sought after on the resale market, and his name on a set of plans still moves a price. Knowing which of these names is on the plans is part of how a house here gets priced, and it is a question worth asking on any listing described as architect-designed.
By Condition
Condition works differently here than in most markets, and the difference is the land. With almost no developable ground left on the coast, a house with significant deferred maintenance is not a discount; it is the entry ticket to a lot. Flippers, wholesalers and local investors with cash compete for these, and tear-downs are sought after for the dirt underneath them. In 2026 it is common to see a 900-square-foot two-bedroom, one-bath on a 4,600-square-foot lot in the Tree Section trade at around $2,500,000, and that is the number at the beginning of a project, not the end of one. The same logic runs, at different prices, through the Hill Section, the Hermosa hillside, the Avenues in South Redondo, Lunada Bay and the Peninsula’s north slope.
That is also why the fixer category on the MLS is so small. Most of what an investor would call a fixer is never labeled one: the listing says original condition, or trust sale, or simply prices the house at land value and lets the photographs explain. The searches below pull the listings CRMLS flags as fixers or in need of cosmetic or major repair, along with trust sales and probate sales, which is where a large share of the original-condition inventory in these cities first surfaces.
How do you find flips and fixers?
Four ways, in the order they usually surface. First, the MLS condition field: CRMLS lets a listing agent tag a property as a fixer or as needing cosmetic or major repairs, and the Fixers and Opportunities search above pulls all three; on any given day that is a short list, because most agents leave the field blank. Second, trust and probate sales, which are flagged separately and which account for much of the original-condition inventory on this coast; a probate sale can carry a court confirmation step that keeps casual buyers away and gives a prepared buyer an edge. Third, the remarks: phrases like original condition, value in the land, as-is, contractor’s special and bring your architect are the listing agent telling you what the field does not. Fourth, off market. A meaningful share of the tear-downs in the beach cities never reach the MLS; they trade through wholesalers who put a property under contract and assign it, through builders who canvass owners directly, and through agents who have sold in the same neighborhoods for decades and know which houses are one conversation away from a sale. That last channel is the one we run. If you are looking for a lot or a project, tell us the streets and the budget and we will show you what is available on the MLS and what is not.
All 48 MLS areas, houses and condos, updated live from CRMLS.
Looking for something not listed here
Several things buyers ask for are recorded in CRMLS but are not exposed to us as search filters, including wine cellars, elevators, air conditioning, solar, green certification and accessibility features. A few others, basements among them, are not carried as searchable fields at all. Listing agents record what they can and it appears on the MLS detail sheet, but it cannot be searched from this page. We have asked for the ones that can be opened up. If one of those is what matters to you, call and we will run it by hand.
Neil Chhabria can be reached at the office in Palos Verdes Estates.
Have a question about this? Neil answers personally.