Los Angeles Wildfire Damage Tops $50 Billion

The January Palisades and Eaton fires damaged about 11,000 residential properties in the city of Los Angeles totaling nearly $52 billion, Redfin reported, citing data from the Los Angeles City Council.

To reach its determinations, Redfin examined a list of 11,125 residential parcels that the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety inspected after the fires. The real estate platform then matched nearly 11,000 of those parcels to property value estimates as of December 2024, the month before the fires.

Most of the properties analyzed were single-family homes. Many, though not all, were completely destroyed in the firestorms. Homes that were impacted had an average value of $3.7 million prior to the blazes. The roughly 11,000 impacted properties totaled about 36.7 million square feet, per Redfin data.

Redfin’s analysis exclusively looked at homes impacted by the Palisades fire, estimated to be the third-most destructive wildfire in California history, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

Of the nearly 11,000 affected properties, the typical impacted home was built in 1957 and averaged 2,916 square feet, per Redfin. Nearly 100 properties each had a value of more than $20 million before the fires.

The damage hasn’t deterred most residents from planning to return. Project Recovery, an association of professors in the real estate graduate schools at University of Southern California and the University of California, Los Angeles, along with the Los Angeles chapter of the Urban Land Institute, released a survey in May of nearly 350 homeowners who experienced total loss or significant damage to their homes.

Nearly 80 percent of Palisades residents and almost 90 percent of those in the Eaton fire zone intend to rebuild their homes, according to Project Recovery. But 70 percent of Palisades respondents and 63 percent of Eaton fire victims said they might not return if it takes longer than three years to rebuild. For Palisades residents, the biggest concern was the “lack of leadership” from city and county officials to complete recovery and rebuilding.

In the more than six months since the fires, Los Angeles County has granted 127 rebuilding permits across the Palisades and Eaton fire burn zones, according to the county’s permitting progress dashboard.

— Chris Malone Méndez