Beverly Hills Estates co-founder and CEO Rayni Williams was talking about Measure United to House L.A., better known as ULA or the mansion tax, when she paused to check her demeanor.
“Sorry if I’m shouting,” Williams said, a bit sheepishly.
The tax has weighed on Williams and others in real estate for more than two years. Aimed at raising funds to prevent homelessness and add more affordable housing to the market, critics say it’s done nothing but cast a pall over dealmaking.
“ULA is the biggest detriment to the market right now. More than interest rates. More than world events,” said Williams, whose Beverly Hills Estates team rose to the No. 1 spot on The Real Deal’s list of L.A. County’s top agents and teams.
“It is an additional 5.5 percent [on sales of $10.6 million or more] on top of escrow fees and commissions,” Williams said. The basis of the tax is price, not profit, which she finds especially irksome.
“You are paying a tax that has no forbearance. In other words, you could still be losing money on your property. You could be upside down on your property and you are still paying a mansion tax that, by the way, nobody even knows where the money’s going.”
Even with the headwind, L.A.’s top agents managed to close $9.7 billion in deals.
“Sorry if I’m shouting.”
The Beverly Hills Estates’ Williams & Williams Estates Group swiped the No. 1 spot from the Aaron Kirman Group on this year’s ranking of the top 25 agents and teams in Los Angeles County. The team made the jump from second place last year by closing almost $1.3 billion in sales volume across 197 transactions.
TRD analyzed the buy and sell sides of properties in the Multiple Listing Service between July 1, 2024, and July 1, 2025, for this year’s ranking. The list does not count deals of less than $1 million or off-market transactions, the latter of which would considerably alter the ranking’s makeup.
Williams & Williams enjoys a comfortable margin that sets it apart from No. 2’s Aaron Kirman Group, which had about $891 million in volume across 221 transactions. Carolwood Estates’ Bond Street Partners jumped up five spaces to No. 3 with 64 deals tallying to $635.8 million. Bond Street founders David Parnes and James Harris announced their split as business partners in September, although both remain at the brokerage.
Douglas Elliman’s The Altman Brothers Team stayed put at No. 4, closing on nearly $591.7 million in volume across 88 deals. Meanwhile, Westside Estate Agency’s Kurt Rappaport closed out the top five with 19 deals for the July-to-July period, coming out to about $568 million or nearly $30 million per transaction.
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Market paralysis
Some agents say they could have closed on more were it not for Measure ULA.
The Beverly Hills Estates’ Jack Harris and Michael Fahimian, who entered the list for the first time at No. 20, can attest to that.
The duo had been working on a recent deal for nearly two months, but it ultimately fell apart. They ended up renting the home instead of selling it.
“The seller was not netting enough due to the 4 percent ULA tax, and we couldn’t bridge the gap between the buyer and seller,” Harris said. “[The seller] would have lost money due to that 4 percent.”
Harris and Fahimian sold 18 homes in the ranking research period, which penciled out to $200.8 million.
Voters passed Measure ULA, which applies only to property transactions within the city of Los Angeles, in November 2022. The thresholds change annually, with the current tax set at 4 percent for transactions of $5.3 million and 5.5 percent for those $10.6 million or more.
Critics say that Measure ULA lacks guardrails and exclusions, akin to carveouts with the capital gains tax, that take specifics into account, like speculative developments selling at a loss or properties in the Pacific Palisades affected by the wildfires earlier this year. Instead, some in the industry argue Measure ULA punishes properties that sit on expensive dirt but are far from mansions.
Carolwood’s Linda May reported that in the over-$10 million range, the gap created by the tax crumbled her ability to close. May, who has one of the highest average prices per transaction on this year’s ranking at $20.6 million per deal, rose two slots to No. 19 with 10 trades totaling $205.6 million.
“In one case, both sides agreed on price, but once the tax was factored in, the seller wasn’t willing to absorb it, and the buyer wasn’t willing to increase their number,” she said. “In others, negotiations dragged out much longer as both parties tried to rework terms around the tax.”
Last step
If acceptance is the final stage in the grieving process, parts of the market have arrived at that point in varying gradations.
“Buyers have factored it into their offers, but sellers are still struggling to accept the hit to their net,” May said. “Unless someone has a real reason to sell, many are holding off, which keeps inventory tight and the market stagnant.”
There have been several starts and stops on attempts to modify or strike down the tax.
“There were all these glimmers of hope that maybe it was going to go away, but now I feel like generally people accept and acknowledge that it’s there,” David Berg of Compass’ Smith & Berg Partners team said. The team counted 90 deals totaling $454.9 million in volume during the ranking period to sit at No. 8.
Lawsuits came hot and heavy after the tax’s passage, with the most notable one lobbed by the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association in December 2022.
The group, along with the California Business Roundtable, sponsored the Taxpayer Protection and Government Accountability Act, which was removed from the November 2024 ballot after a California Supreme Court ruling dubbed it an all-out revision to the state constitution. It was a broad-based initiative that included invalidating Measure ULA.
For the real estate industry, the latest bright spot was Senate Bill 423, which carved out for apartment and other commercial buildings built in the past 15 years a transfer tax of no more than 1.5 percent within the city of L.A. Single-family homes built within the past five years on property destroyed by a disaster deemed a local emergency would have also seen a similar reduced transfer tax. However, that bill was pulled in September.
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