Homes.com found that the Eaton fire destroyed about 5,560 homes located in seven neighborhoods, with an estimated value of $7.8 billion. The Palisades fire destroyed approximately 5,480 homes across 11 neighborhoods, with an estimated value of $22 billion.
Combined, the January 2025 fires have destroyed roughly 11,000 homes with an estimated value of nearly $30 billion. Neighborhoods in Altadena alone lost more than $7.5 billion in value.
“These are the two most destructive wildfires in modern California history, and probably the modern history of the country, I would imagine,” said Jesse Gundersheim, senior director of market analytics for Orange County and the Inland Empire at CoStar Group, the parent company of Homes.com.
“What we did is took all of our internal homes, data, inventory, our parcels, and we matched the fire data into that. So, that’s why we were able to come up with all the totals, acknowledging that certainly not every home within the burn zone was destroyed.”
Gundersheim added that the company’s analysis includes the value of destroyed real estate. “There’s a point to keep in mind that rebuilding would probably cost a little bit more,” he said. “And then on top of it, there’s going to be billions of dollars of infrastructure improvements that will need to be made as well.”
Mike Hardy, a Los Angeles-based managing partner for Churchill Mortgage, is concerned about the preexisting housing shortage in LA.
“The population is much greater than the homes available for sale or rent. The fire devastation will certainly cause a tight housing market to get even tighter,” Hardy told HousingWire. “Tens of thousands of folks will need to find rental housing that is already in short supply, exacerbating an already challenging situation. As prices are a function of supply and demand, we will now have less supply and more demand, so that will inevitably push up rental expenses.”
Sean Roberts, CEO of Villa Homes, estimates the total loss for the fires at $200 billion to $250 billion.
“The scale of what’s happened is pretty hard to get your head around — it’s over 16,000 structures that have been destroyed,” Roberts said. “When we compare this to the Camp Fire in California’s Butte County a few years back, the median home price there was like $275,000, and in the Palisades, the median home price there is like $3.4 million. And in Altadena, it’s like $1.3 million, so the magnitude of the dollar loss is significantly high.”
Roberts said he imagines that Pacific Palisades and Altadena will have higher pressure to rebuild due to their urban proximity, which could force people to build more creatively.
“One of the things that we’ve been intrigued by is a way for people who have had their home burned down, and perhaps they can’t recover through insurance, is using some of the land-use reform laws in California to be able to think about rebuilding their land differently,” he said.
“And so, in California, there are legal pathways to being able to carve up a single-family lot and potentially separate it into different simple properties and or build additional units there.”
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