Cross Overland Avenue and you don’t just change neighborhoods, you change which city government regulates your rent, and that distinction is worth understanding before you price a building on either side of it.
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Median price per unit
Median GRM
Median price / sq ft
Avg rent, Culver City
Avg rent, Palms
Sale data: CoStar, multifamily 5+ units, Palms/Culver City cluster, 2-year medians through July 2026. Updated quarterly.
Palms and Culver City sit right next to each other, share a CoStar pricing cluster, and get compared constantly by buyers cross-shopping the area, but they are legally two different places. Palms is a Los Angeles neighborhood, governed by the City of LA and its RSO. Culver City is its own incorporated municipality with its own city council, its own housing department, and its own rent control ordinance entirely separate from anything Los Angeles does.
Most owners assume “next door” means “same rules.” It doesn’t, and the gap between what a buyer can do with a Palms building versus a Culver City building shows up directly in how each one gets underwritten.
Sony Pictures Studios anchors Culver City’s economy, and its presence, along with the Culver City Arts District, the Downtown revitalization around Washington and Culver Boulevards, and Metro E Line access, has kept the city one of the more expensive rental markets on this side of LA, averaging around $3,211 a month even after a recent pullback of roughly 6% over the past year. Palms, quieter and more residential, averages closer to $2,495, and it’s tracking the same downward direction, also down roughly 6% year over year.
Both markets appear to be cooling together rather than diverging, which suggests the softness is regional rather than something specific to either submarket, a distinction worth watching over the next few quarters rather than reading as a permanent shift.
If your building is in Palms, City of LA rules apply. Pre-October 1978 buildings fall under the RSO, currently capped at 3% annually through June 30, 2027. Vacancy decontrol lets you reset a unit to market on lawful turnover, and that mechanism is often where real value sits in an older Palms building with a stale rent roll.
If your building is in Culver City, none of that applies. Culver City’s own Rent Control Ordinance, in effect since October 2020, covers multifamily units with a certificate of occupancy on or before February 1, 1995, and caps annual increases at a CPI-tied figure that has run close to 3.25%. Owners register every unit annually with the city, pay a per-unit registration fee, and follow Culver City’s own just-cause eviction and relocation assistance rules, which run through the Culver City Rent Control Board, not anything connected to Los Angeles. Costa-Hawkins vacancy decontrol still applies here too, and the Ellis Act is available for owners looking to exit the rental business entirely, though Culver City layers its own filing and notice requirements on top of the state process.
Two buildings a few blocks apart, same cluster pricing, same GRM range, and completely different rulebooks governing what you can charge and how you exit a tenancy. We confirm which jurisdiction actually governs your building before we ever discuss price, because a buyer’s underwriting team will do exactly the same thing.
Hi, I am Max Berger, a multifamily broker at Compass. Two buildings on either side of the same street here can answer to two completely different governments, and getting that wrong costs sellers and buyers real money in escrow. Contact me or call (818) 321-4972 for your free written valuation.
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