A Wall Street Journal report recently spotlighted a stalled multifamily development site in Venice Beach previously sold by Maher Commercial Realty. The project was planned as an eight-story, 100-unit development. It was never built — and the reason it died is the same reason hundreds of housing units across Los Angeles are quietly disappearing before a single permit is pulled.
In this video, Oron Maher and Jeremy Shore of Maher Commercial Realty break down exactly what killed this deal — and what it signals about the broader development pipeline across Greater Los Angeles.
What developers, land owners, and housing policy observers need to understand:
▶ Rising construction costs, Measure ULA transfer taxes, and increasing Ellis Act fees combined to make the exit math on this project unworkable — not the land price
▶ Oron Maher notes that many Los Angeles developers are no longer walking away because of land. They are walking away because ULA hits the finished project value at a scale that eliminates the return
▶ Jeremy Shore points out that several experienced West LA developers pursued this assemblage — and each one backed out after recalculating long-term returns under current cost and tax conditions
▶ The project that never gets permitted never shows up in a vacancy statistic. It is invisible in the data and devastating in the market
The Los Angeles housing shortage is not only a construction problem. It is an exit math problem. And Measure ULA is making that math harder to solve on every large project in the city.
📍 Maher Commercial Realty — Beverly Hills. Multifamily, land, and commercial assets across Greater Los Angeles.
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