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After thirty years selling real estate here, the biggest shift I’ve seen isn’t about finishes or square footage. It’s about what people want their life to feel like.
I’ve written elsewhere about what that shift means today. What’s worth laying out here is how it actually happened — because it didn’t arrive all at once, and watching it unfold decade by decade tells you something about where it goes next.
The Nineties: Size Was the Whole Argument
When I started, the questions were almost entirely numeric. Square footage, bedroom count, lot size. Value was something you could put in a column and compare.
The aspiration was scale, and the architecture followed. Two-story entries. Formal living rooms nobody sat in. Dining rooms used twice a year. Homes were built partly to be seen by people who visited occasionally, and that was neither strange nor criticized — it was simply what a successful house looked like.
The 2000s: Amenity Arms Race
The next decade added features to the scale competition. Home theaters. Wine rooms. Outdoor kitchens more elaborate than the indoor one.
The underlying logic hadn’t changed — more was still better — but “more” became more specific. I showed a lot of homes in that stretch where a genuinely impressive room had clearly never been used.
The 2010s: Location Started Winning
This is where the shift actually began, and it was gradual enough that most of us didn’t name it at the time.
Buyers started trading square footage for position. A smaller house closer in began beating a larger one further out — reversing decades of the opposite. Walkability entered the vocabulary of clients who’d never used the word before.
I noticed it first in Studio City, where people were paying real premiums to be within walking distance of Ventura Boulevard rather than a few minutes’ drive away. That premium didn’t used to exist.
The 2020s: Time Became the Luxury
Then work changed, and the shift accelerated hard.
When the office stopped being a fixed point five days a week, the whole calculation reordered. Some clients moved further out because the commute stopped mattering. Others moved closer in because if they were going to be home constantly, home needed to be somewhere they actually wanted to be.
Both groups were making the same underlying trade: optimizing for how a week feels rather than how a house looks.
What It Looks Like on the Ground Now
Buyers ask about light and noise before they ask about square footage. They ask what a street sounds like at night. They ask how long the drive really takes.
Full-service buildings in Century City attract people leaving large houses they’re tired of maintaining. Walkable pockets in West Hollywood and Studio City hold value in ways that surprise people who bought on square footage alone.
The specific price points differ enormously between Beverly Hills and the Valley. The priority shift is identical.
Where I Think This Goes
I’d be cautious predicting, but two things seem likely.
The premium on genuine walkability will keep climbing, because Los Angeles cannot manufacture much more of it. Supply is effectively fixed and demand keeps rising.
And maintenance burden will get priced more explicitly. Buyers are already asking what a property costs in hours, not just dollars — the pool, the hillside drainage, the landscaping. I expect that to become as standard a question as asking about the roof.
The Pattern I See Most Often
The move-up conversation I have most often starts with someone wanting something bigger and grander, and ends somewhere else entirely.
We tour a genuinely impressive estate — dramatic entrance, sweeping staircase, the works. And standing in the driveway afterward, the sentiment that surfaces is some version of this: not wanting to live there so much as wanting to have lived there. I’ve heard that distinction expressed enough times, in enough different words, that I now listen for it.
Those searches tend to end in a smaller, brighter home with an easy walk to coffee and dinner. And what people say afterward is that it’s the first house that’s felt like theirs rather than a stage set.
That distinction is the entire thirty-year shift compressed into a single thought, and it comes from the people who’ve lived through both ends of it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does this mean large estates have lost value?
No — the very top of the market still performs. What’s changed is that scale alone no longer guarantees demand. A large home that’s also well-located and livable does fine. A large home that’s only large has a narrower buyer pool than it did twenty years ago.
How should sellers respond to this?
Lead with lifestyle and location rather than raw size. If a home has genuine walkability, morning light, or a low maintenance burden, say so — those are now selling points rather than footnotes.
Is this shift specific to Los Angeles?
It’s national, but especially pronounced here, where indoor-outdoor living and light are so central to what people are buying, and where commute times make location decisions unusually consequential.
Will this reverse?
Parts might. Preferences move in cycles and formal spaces could return in some form. But the underlying driver — people valuing their time more explicitly — doesn’t look like a fashion to me. It looks like a durable change in what buyers think they’re purchasing.
Thirty Years In
If I had to compress it: buyers used to ask what a house would say about them. Now they ask what it will be like to live in.
That’s a better question, and it makes this job more interesting than it was in 1996.
If you’re weighing a move and want to think through what you actually want your week to look like rather than what a listing says, that’s the conversation I find most useful. Get in touch anytime.
