Twenty Units, Twenty Condos: A North Hills 1031 Closed in 93 Days
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The LAAA Team of Marcus & Millichap is proud to announce the successful closing of 8734-8736 Burnet Avenue, a 20-unit townhome community in North Hills, which sold for $4,100,000. Our team represented the buyer.
This deal started with a relationship, not a listing agreement. The buyer is a family we have worked with for years, a well-established mom-and-pop ownership here in the Valley. We have closed half a dozen transactions together over our careers, and they have earned a reputation with us that money cannot buy: they close on time, they perform on their word, and they treat everyone in the deal right. So when Morgan Wetmore of our team came across this listing in May and realized what it actually was, they were the first call we made.
What it actually was took a minute to see. On the surface, this was a 1990-built rental property: two ten-unit buildings on a gated half-acre site, brought to market by an outside brokerage. But every one of the twenty units is a separately mapped, legally recorded condominium. Two of them had even sold individually as bank-owned condos back in 2009 and 2010. Most value-add buyers underwrite a building like this on rents alone. This one came with something an ordinary apartment building does not have: a finished condominium map and the built-in option, someday, to sell the units one at a time. The homes themselves back it up. Each is a tri-level townhome with 2.5 bathrooms, an attached two-car garage, and in-unit laundry, in a mix of twelve two-bedroom and eight three-bedroom floor plans totaling 24,060 square feet. Built in 1990, the property sits outside the City of Los Angeles Rent Stabilization Ordinance, governed only by California's statewide AB 1482. And it rents in a deep, durable pocket of the Valley, minutes from Cal State Northridge, Kaiser Permanente Panorama City, and the 405, 118, and 5 freeways.
The rent roll was the other half of the picture. Fifteen of the twenty homes were occupied, many by residents of eight or more years paying rents well below today's market. Two units carry Section 8 voucher income at rents above what the open market pays. Five units, all in one building, were vacant, which meant a buyer could start proving out market rents on day one instead of waiting years for turnover.
A word about that condominium option, because it is easy to oversell. Unwinding an occupied rental community into individual condo sales is one of the most demanding paths in Los Angeles real estate, and we researched it in depth during this transaction. The homes are occupied, and tenant protections rightly put people's lives first, which means any future sell-off would run through relocation frameworks and potentially the Ellis Act, a process with real costs, real timelines, and real human stakes. Behind that sits a long list of specialists: subdivision and DRE counsel, HOA attorneys to reactivate a dormant association and modernize decades-old CC&Rs, landlord-tenant counsel, state-required budgets and reserve studies, a public report before a single home could be marketed for sale, utility metering that would need to be reworked, and lenders and insurers with their own requirements for individual sales. And after all of it, the for-sale market still has to cooperate. Today, it does not pay enough to justify that road. So the buyer's plan is the straightforward one: renovate the vacant townhomes, work through the deferred maintenance, lease up at market, and stabilize the community. The condominium map is not the business plan. It is quiet optionality, banked for a market that may one day pay for it.
The LAAA Team of Marcus & Millichap is proud to announce the successful closing of 8734-8736 Burnet Avenue, a 20-unit townhome community in North Hills, which sold for $4,100,000. Our team represented the buyer.
This deal started with a relationship, not a listing agreement. The buyer is a family we have worked with for years, a well-established mom-and-pop ownership here in the Valley. We have closed half a dozen transactions together over our careers, and they have earned a reputation with us that money cannot buy: they close on time, they perform on their word, and they treat everyone in the deal right. So when Morgan Wetmore of our team came across this listing in May and realized what it actually was, they were the first call we made.
What it actually was took a minute to see. On the surface, this was a 1990-built rental property: two ten-unit buildings on a gated half-acre site, brought to market by an outside brokerage. But every one of the twenty units is a separately mapped, legally recorded condominium. Two of them had even sold individually as bank-owned condos back in 2009 and 2010. Most value-add buyers underwrite a building like this on rents alone. This one came with something an ordinary apartment building does not have: a finished condominium map and the built-in option, someday, to sell the units one at a time. The homes themselves back it up. Each is a tri-level townhome with 2.5 bathrooms, an attached two-car garage, and in-unit laundry, in a mix of twelve two-bedroom and eight three-bedroom floor plans totaling 24,060 square feet. Built in 1990, the property sits outside the City of Los Angeles Rent Stabilization Ordinance, governed only by California's statewide AB 1482. And it rents in a deep, durable pocket of the Valley, minutes from Cal State Northridge, Kaiser Permanente Panorama City, and the 405, 118, and 5 freeways.
The rent roll was the other half of the picture. Fifteen of the twenty homes were occupied, many by residents of eight or more years paying rents well below today's market. Two units carry Section 8 voucher income at rents above what the open market pays. Five units, all in one building, were vacant, which meant a buyer could start proving out market rents on day one instead of waiting years for turnover.
