Fire Refugees Scramble to Find Homes From South Bay to OC

Calling all real estate agents from the South Bay to the OC! Needed: a nifty home to replace a burned out hulk from the wildfires around L.A.

Refugees from the Los Angeles County wildfires that destroyed nearly 16,300 structures are scrambling to find housing in untouched Orange County, the South Bay and neighborhoods surrounding ashen ghost towns, the Los Angeles Daily News reported.

Prices are going up — even past legal price gouging limits. Affordable rents are harder to come by. And tony Newport Beach has had available leases claimed, seemingly overnight.

“Every one of those houses had multiple applications and most were bidded up over lease-list price,” Tim Smith of Coldwell Banker Realty, told the publication. “Fast forward to today, in most of those neighborhoods, there’s nothing available for lease.”

The wind-fueled firestorms that began Jan. 7 in the Pacific Palisades and Altadena torched more than 37,000 acres, destroying 6,837 structures in the Palisades fire and 9,418 properties in the Eaton fire, killing 29 people.

Tens of thousands of people displaced by damaged or destroyed homes now jostle for any available lease in Southern California.

Because of business ties, many search for somewhere comparable, from Brentwood and Santa Monica to the South Bay cities of Manhattan Beach, Redondo Beach and Hermosa Beach, according to Josh Altman, formerly of “Million Dollar Listing Los Angeles.”

“Demand is absolutely pressing,” echoed Dave Fratello, a broker with Edge Real Estate Agency, to the Daily News.

“I put out a listing on a single-family home offered at $14,750 a month in Manhattan Beach last week, and the first request came within 30 minutes after I put it online. Just about everything is going fast.”

So are homes in Newport Beach and Laguna Beach, hot spots on the refugee rush for homes.

Last week, Newport Beach Mayor Joe Stapleton gathered community leaders and residents at Oasis Senior Center to welcome people displaced by the fires, according to Stu News Newport.

“We live near the Palisades, and, of course, that’s a super-high-end area, but what about Altadena, Pasadena?” Altman said. “To find a lease in the price ranges between, I would say, $2,500 a month and $7,500 a month is absolutely impossible. The lower you go in price, the more difficult it is to find anything.”

Selma Hepp, chief economist at CoreLogic, said the region should expect to see rents soar. She said rent growth “will generally triple immediately following” a large-scale natural disaster like wildfires.

While there are consumer protections against rent hikes exceeding 10 percent in disaster zones, the ongoing housing crisis could push prices higher anyway, according to the Daily News.

Gov. Gavin Newsom issued an emergency order aimed at protecting fire victims in Los Angeles County from price gouging. Attorney General Rob Bonta’s office sent out more than 200 warning letters to hotels and landlords accused of price gouging, with criminal investigations underway.

“You can’t see it in the data a week or two after an event like this happens; you have to wait a little longer to see an impact in, at least, what’s reported,” Hepp told the Daily News “So, right now, a lot of us are going off of anecdotal data.”

— Dana Bartholomew