As a tax on luxury home sales kicks in and the greater Los Angeles housing market struggles, affluent property owners are looking to rent sprawling mansions for eye-popping prices.
Case in point: a nearly 13,000-square-foot, seven-bedroom, 12-bathroom Manhattan Beach mansion that the owner told Bloomberg he wants to rent for $150,000 a month. Rob DeSantis said he intends to lease the property for 90 days at a time.
“I believe leasing it out will highlight the value of the property in a much better way,” he said.
That’s a big number, but it’s not the only property in Los Angeles on the rental market at wildly high prices.
A five-bedroom, eight-bath Bel Air home is available for $55,000 per month, and a six-bedroom, six-bath home in Beverly Hills can be leased for $38,000 per month, Bloomberg reported.
The so-called “mansion tax” equals 4% of the sale price on properties sold for $5 million or more in the nation’s second-largest city. It took effect on Apr. 1 and will almost certainly push up the price of luxury real estate in the region.
But sellers and landlords face myriad problems with selling or leasing their properties, some of which are indicative of national trends, others are unique to Southern California, according to Bloomberg.
One of those problems was the lack of filming in Hollywood.
The Hollywood strikes ground productions to a halt. Writers ended their work stoppage in late September and actors came off the picket lines last week, but both strikes dragged on for months. Movie and TV studios sometimes rent luxury properties for filming, Bloomberg said.
“Because of the strikes, that well dried up,” real estate broker Zach Goldsmith told the business news outlet.
Meanwhile, sales in Southern California are on their way down.
Home sales in the Los Angeles area fell 26.6% in September of this year compared with September 2022, Bloomberg reported, citing figures from the real estate company Douglas Elliman.
