Encino Is Quietly Outrunning the Westside. Here’s What the Numbers Actually Say.
Two homes in the same Encino zip code closed within seventy-two hours of each other last week.
One sold nine percent over asking.
The other closed twelve percent below list.
Same zip code. Same season. Same buyer pool.
That gap is the entire story of Encino in 2026 — and it makes this the most instructive neighborhood in Los Angeles right now.
Not the flashiest. The most instructive.
If you want to understand what’s really happening to LA money this year, stop staring at the Bird Streets and look north of the Sepulveda Pass.
Here’s what the market is actually doing right now.
The Tale of Two Houses
On September 1, a five-bedroom on Woodley Avenue in 91436 listed at $2,699,000 and closed at $2,955,000 — nine percent over ask, in fifty days.
Two days later, a five-bedroom on Gloria Avenue, roughly the same square footage, in the same zip code, closed at $1,750,000 against a $1,995,000 list.
Twelve percent under. Eighty-four days on market.
These homes are minutes apart.
The difference wasn’t the market. The difference was the launch.
One was priced into the buyer pool and presented so that the first three weekends did the work. The other was priced at an aspiration and then spent three months negotiating with itself in public.
Most agents won’t tell you this, but a price reduction is not a strategy. It’s an admission.
Thirty-two percent of Encino sellers took a price cut over the last three months — up nearly two points from a year ago — while sale-to-list across the neighborhood actually improved to 98.3 percent.
Read those two numbers together and the message is unmistakable:
The market is paying full freight for correctly positioned homes and punishing everything else.
There is no middle lane anymore.
The Price-Per-Foot Argument Nobody Is Making Out Loud
Encino’s median sale price per square foot is $747, up 9.6 percent year over year, according to Redfin’s data for the three months ending July 2026.
Brentwood — eleven miles and one mountain range away — is $989 a foot.
That’s roughly a twenty-four percent discount for the same interior square footage.
And it comes with something the Westside structurally cannot manufacture: flat, wide, generous lots.
The estate pockets south of Ventura — Amestoy Estates, Royal Oaks, Encino Hills — were laid out with half-acre and acre parcels at a time when land was the cheap part.
You cannot recreate that in Brentwood or Beverly Hills at any price, because the lots simply aren’t there.
Here’s the part that should get an investor’s attention:
Encino’s price per foot is climbing faster than Brentwood’s — 9.6 percent against 7.9 percent.
Buyers who spent 2024 and 2025 insisting on a 90049 zip code are quietly running the math and discovering that a $3 million budget buys a materially different life on the north side of the hill.
I’m not telling you Encino is Brentwood. It isn’t, and the buyers moving there aren’t pretending otherwise.
I’m telling you the spread has become large enough that it’s now a real decision rather than a reflex.
Speed Came Back, and Almost Nobody Noticed
The quietest number in the Encino report is the most important one.
Median days on market is fifty-four, down from sixty-six a year ago.
A dozen days of velocity returned to this neighborhood while the national conversation was busy declaring the luxury market frozen.
Sales volume moved with it — 143 homes sold in July against 135 the year prior, with the median at $1,799,386, up 4.3 percent.
That is not a bubble.
That’s a functioning market with real depth, which is exactly the environment where preparation gets rewarded and laziness gets exposed.
The Deals You Never Saw
And then there’s Libbit Avenue.
On September 1, a seven-bedroom, 7,878-square-foot estate in 91436 traded at $7,000,000 with zero days on market.
Zero.
That house was sold before the public ever had a chance to see it.
That single line item tells you more about the top of this neighborhood than any chart.
The best inventory in Encino is moving agent-to-agent, quietly, at full price, to buyers who were already in the conversation.
If your search strategy consists of refreshing a portal app, you are shopping from the leftovers.
If your listing strategy assumes the whole market will find you on its own, you are leaving both money and speed on the table.
What to Do With This
If You’re Buying
Get positioned inside the network before you need it.
The $7 million house that never hit the market didn’t find its buyer by accident.
If You’re Selling
Your first twenty-one days are the entire negotiation.
Encino is rewarding sellers right now — only the ones who launch correctly the first time.
Positioning Matters
I don’t just list properties. I position them.
If you own in Encino, Sherman Oaks, or anywhere across the Valley’s estate pockets and you want an honest read on what your home would actually do in this market — not a flattering number designed to win your listing — let’s talk.
Amir Jawaherian, The Agency
[email protected] | (818) 561-1600
CA DRE# 01899893
Market data: Redfin, Encino neighborhood and Brentwood neighborhood housing market reports, three months ending July 2026; individual sale prices and days on market per Redfin closed-sale records, September 2026.
