REAL ESTATE: Manhattan Beach kicks off 2026 with a bang
by Mark McDermott Local realtors did not enter 2026 with outsized expectations. Last January was very different. A stagnant real estate market had been steadily picking up pace over the latter half of 2024, and most local real estate professionals were bullish about 2025. Then the Palisades fires happened, and the Manhattan Beach market caught fire, with a record $181.7 million in homes going into escrow in January alone — beating the old record by a cool $100 million. Most observers thought the rest of the year would follow the trend, if not reaching quite so spectacular highs, at least achieving a full rebound from the previous sluggishness. And then…a whole lot of nothing happened. By year’s end, Manhattan Beach had logged just 325 sales — barely 21 more than 2024’s depressed total of 304, and not even matching 2009’s “Great Recession” volume. Each quarter after that record Q1 saw fewer sales than the one before it — a pattern that, as broker Dave Fratello of the Edge Real Estate Agency noted, “simply never happens” in real estate. And so the New Year was not a time of great hope. Then January happened. It didn’t quite reach the heights of last January, which were driven by…
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