Pull three tabs open in the same week this August and search for the Studio City median home price. You will get three different answers, and none of them are wrong.
One public data feed puts the three-month trailing median sale price at $1.81 million as of July 2026, down 5.6 percent from the same period last year. A second source, tracking closed sales for the single month of July 2026, lands at $1.995 million. A third monthly market read reports a median of roughly $1.36 million for its latest reported month, a headline drop of nearly 19 percent year over year that the same report immediately flags as misleading, driven by which specific homes happened to close rather than any real shift in value. A fourth broader neighborhood guide cites $2.18 million for July 2026. A fifth puts the figure north of $2.8 million for the year.
If you are comparing Studio City against Sherman Oaks or Valley Village before you write an offer, that spread is not a rounding error. It is the most useful piece of information in the entire search, if you know how to read it.
Three Markets Wearing One ZIP Code
Studio City is not one housing market. It is three, stacked into a single set of MLS boundaries that every automated tracker treats as one.
The flats, generally described as the stretch from Coldwater Canyon to Vineland, hold the neighborhood's most accessible inventory: established homes on tree-lined streets, generally priced from the high $1 million range into the low $3 millions depending on condition and lot. This is where entry-level detached buyers land, often in the $1.5 million range for a smaller home that moves quickly, in two to three weeks, when it is priced to current comparables.
The hillside pockets tell a different story. Areas like Fryman Canyon Estates, Wrightwood Estates, and Ridgeback Ridge above Mulholland carry design-forward architectural homes that regularly clear $5 million, with entry points to hillside living starting closer to $3.5 million. Local pricing patterns show hillside properties appreciating faster than flats, generally in the 2 to 3 percent range annually, a premium tied to privacy, views, and land that behaves less like a commodity and more like a one-off.
Then there is the condo and townhome layer, concentrated near Moorpark, Colfax, and the Laurel Canyon corridor. HOA dues here typically run $400 to $700 a month, and closed sales in early 2026 for one and two-bedroom units landed in the low to mid $600,000s, with larger townhomes trading into the $700,000s.
Fold a condo trading in the low $600,000s near Moorpark into the same monthly median as a Wrightwood Estates architectural clearing well past $5 million, and you get exactly what the trackers are showing you: a number that is technically accurate and practically useless without knowing which slice of Studio City it actually describes.
The More Honest Number Is Per Square Foot, and Even That Argues With Itself
If the median sale price bounces around because Studio City closes only about 20 to 25 homes in a typical month, the price per square foot is supposed to be the steadier read, since it smooths for the mix of what happened to sell. Even that number disagrees with itself depending on the window. One public feed shows $802 per square foot over the trailing three months to July 2026, down half a percent year over year. A separate monthly report for roughly the same period shows $788 per square foot, up 5.3 percent year over year. Two numbers, two directions, both drawn from the same neighborhood in the same season.
The honest range, once you strip out the headline averages, is wide by design: single-family pricing across Studio City runs from roughly $700 to $1,400 per square foot depending on pocket and condition. A flats home near the commercial core and a canyon architectural near Fryman Canyon Park are not competing for the same buyer, and they should not be judged against the same per-foot benchmark.
Days on market tells a similar story. Well-priced flats homes under 2,000 square feet are moving in 14 to 21 days. Canyon and hillside listings near Fryman Canyon Park are taking 28 to 40 days, even while commanding $850 to $1,100 per square foot. Average the two together and you land somewhere in the mid-50-day range that most trackers report, a number that describes neither market particularly well.
The Construction Underneath the Number
While the pricing data argues with itself, a different kind of change is arriving on Ventura Boulevard, and it will not touch the numbers above in the way most buyers assume.
Three multifamily projects are now converging on the same half-mile of the boulevard, a stretch that has seen no residential construction in more than 30 years under the Ventura-Cahuenga Boulevard Corridor Specific Plan. The largest is Riverwalk, an 814-unit project at 12555 Ventura Boulevard that also includes roughly 76,000 square feet of retail space, according to Urbanize LA's reporting on the project. The second is the Residences at Sportsmen's Lodge, a 520-unit development at 12825 Ventura Boulevard that will replace a 190-room hotel built in the 1960s. The Los Angeles City Council approved that project 13-1, denying appeals from the Studio City Residents Association, the grocery chain Erewhon, which sits next door, and Unite Here Local 11, according to CBS News Los Angeles and ABC7's coverage of the vote. At 94 feet, the new building will stand taller than anything else currently on that stretch of the boulevard. A third, smaller project called Sunswept Place adds roughly 27 more units nearby.
Together, the three projects add somewhere around 1,361 residential units and close to 139,000 square feet of new commercial space to a corridor that has functioned, for a generation, almost entirely as low-rise retail and single-family neighborhoods behind it. More than 120 of those new units are set aside as affordable housing, made possible through density bonus provisions that let the buildings rise higher than standard zoning would otherwise allow.
Construction on the Sportsmen's Lodge building is expected to run through 2027. Riverwalk, having cleared its planning entitlement on June 11, 2026, is projected to start construction in late 2027 and finish as late as 2033. That puts the corridor under some form of active construction for roughly seven more years, not a single disruptive season.
Why the New Supply Won't Move the Number You're Comparing
Here is the piece that gets missed when a buyer sees "1,300 new units in Studio City" and assumes it will loosen up the market they are shopping in.
Every one of those units is rental apartment inventory with ground-floor retail underneath it. None of it is detached, single-family housing. The flats, the hillside pockets, and the existing condo stock, the three markets that actually generate the median prices buyers compare against Sherman Oaks or Valley Village, are structurally untouched by this construction. The corridor is not adding competing inventory to the segment a house-hunting buyer is shopping in. It is adding an entirely different product type next to it.
What the construction will change is texture, not comps. Retail energy at the eastern gateway of the boulevard is already shifting, with the apparel retailer Marine Layer opening at the Shops at Sportsmen's Lodge in late May 2026, a sign that the corridor's daytime foot traffic is expanding even before the residential towers deliver. Traffic patterns around the Coldwater Canyon and Ventura intersection will feel the excavation years, particularly for homes within a few blocks of either site. And once the buildings are occupied, walkability along that stretch will improve for everyone nearby, whether they rent in the new towers or own a bungalow three streets back.
None of that shows up in a median sale price. It shows up later, in how a specific block feels to live on, and in the pool of renters and condo buyers who will eventually compete for the corridor's smaller units, a pool your current single-family comp set does not touch.
What the new supply is likely to affect:
- Retail and dining density at the eastern end of Ventura Boulevard near Coldwater
- Construction-year traffic and noise for homes within a few blocks of either site
- Long-term walkability once the projects deliver between 2027 and 2033
- Competition in the condo and rental segment specifically, not detached homes
What it is not likely to affect:
- Pricing in the flats between Coldwater and Vineland
- Hillside inventory in Fryman Canyon Estates, Wrightwood Estates, or Ridgeback Ridge
- The existing single-family comp set a buyer uses to compare Studio City against Sherman Oaks or Valley Village
A Few Straight Answers
Which Studio City number should I actually trust when comparing neighborhoods? None of them alone. Ask which submarket the figure describes, flats, hillside, or condo, before you compare it to a number from another neighborhood. A flats-only comparison against Sherman Oaks tells you something. A blended ZIP-wide median tells you very little.
Will the Sportsmen's Lodge and Riverwalk construction hurt resale value nearby? The short-term disruption, dirt hauling, traffic reroutes, and years of active construction, is real for homes within a few blocks of either site. The projects add rental and retail inventory, not competing single-family homes, so the long-term effect on detached-home values in the flats or hills is a separate question from the construction-year discomfort.
Studio City rewards buyers who ask better questions than the portals do. If you are trying to figure out which submarket actually fits your budget and timeline, or how a specific block will be affected by what is rising a few streets away, Harris & Partners can walk you through the comparables that matter for your search. Request a confidential consultation to talk through what your number should actually be.
