Developers Snap Up Burned Lots in Altadena—as One Agent Insists More Builders Are Needed To Revive the Area

Five months after wildfires devastated Altadena, CA, developers have started buying up burned lots in the city, raising fears of gentrification among locals. But one real estate agent argues that more professional builders are desperately needed to speed up recovery.

More than 6,000 homes were either destroyed or heavily damaged by the deadly Eaton fire that raced through Altadena in early January. Since then, the pace of recovery has been sluggish, with just 22 rebuilding permits issued by Los Angeles County to date, according to its online permitting progress dashboard.

Lured by the rare opportunity to purchase flat parcels of land just a short driving distance from downtown Los Angeles, quick-thinking developers have been flocking to Altadena, cash in hand.

Roughly 165 properties were sold in Altadena in the first five months of 2025, with more than half of the buyers being investors. For comparison, only about 15% of buyers in Altadena were investors at the start of 2024, according to the latest available data from Realtor.com®.  

The median sale price in Altadena so far this year is $675,000, roughly half of the previous year’s median of $1.25 million.

Last week, there were close to 140 lots listed for sale on Realtor.com with a median price of $649,000.

Lot listings and sales have been ramping up since the fire: At least two dozen properties have gone on sale just over the past seven days.

Altadena residents have voiced concerns that the influx of developers would fundamentally change the character of the city, prompting activist Freddy Sayegh to launch the “Altadena Not for Sale” movement directed against real estate speculators.

“What we don’t want to see is a displacement of large-scale swaths of Altadena residents,” Sayegh told NBC Los Angeles in February. “What we don’t want are people to come buy, build, and then sell it for a profit.”

Altadena is facing a slow recovery

But local real estate agent Brock Harris, with the firm Brock & Lori, argues that the animosity toward developers is misguided, and that Altadena should instead welcome them with open arms if it is to have any hope of rising from the ashes.

“The ire toward developers is a total mystery to me,” Harris tells Realtor.com. “If we’re going to make any sizable dent in rebuilding Altadena, we’re going to need, frankly, way more developers.”

Harris has overseen the sale of seven burned lots to date, all of them to mom-and-pop developers who typically build no more than 10 to 20 homes a year, with the priciest parcel fetching somewhere between $600,000 to $700,000.

“The number of developers working in the area now is barely a pebble in a pond,” says the agent.

A month after the fire, Harris handled the sale of the first empty lot to hit the market in Altadena. The 9,109-square-foot plot, which until January had been a rental home, was sold for $550,000, more than $100,000 over asking, in an all-cash deal.

But Harris says with more land parcels going up for sale, the prices have stabilized, with the local market becoming more buyer-friendly. Now, the typical vacant lot in town goes for around $400,000 to $500,000.

About half of the lots purchased in Altadena so far have ended up in the hands of buyers who scooped up just one property, while the rest have gone to buyers that have snapped up multiple parcels, including the luxury commercial real estate company Black Lion Properties and the midsized L.A.-based Ocean Development Inc., according to the Los Angeles Times.

However, Harris points out that he has dealt only with small builders, many of them family-owned, who buy one lot at a time, as opposed to large-scale developers muscling in on Altadena.

“So, for all the talk about this institutional money and people coming in to buy a hundred lots, I’ve not seen it. I’ve not spoken to any of these people,” he adds.

Red tape keeps homeowners from rebuilding

Harris says what he has been seeing in Altadena is homeowners who were hoping to rebuild but are “now realizing it’s not in the cards for them,” having run up against what he calls a “brick wall” of soaring costs and red tape.

“Everyone’s Plan A was to rebuild the home they lost, but it didn’t take long for a lot of people to realize that it certainly wasn’t in the cards for them.”

Homeowners have expressed anger at the slow permitting process, with former “This Is Us” star Mandy Moore recently taking to Instagram to rail against the county, accusing officials of not doing enough to facilitate the rebuilding process.

“Thanks, LA County for making it as frustrating and impossible to rebuild after the fires as possible,” the actress wrote in a post last month. “Shouldn’t be surprised but it’s mind boggling the red tape and hoops they’re putting us all through.”

Moore, whose family had several homes either burned to the ground or damaged by the Eaton fire, summed up the building process as “maddening and heartless.”

Harris sounded a similar note, saying that many locals now found that those in charge of approving their rebuilding plans are “adversarial” rather than helpful.

“Building a home is not fun. It’s a full-time job, and it takes a massive amount of money and time,” Harris explains. “This is you versus the county inspectors, and they’re not on your side.”

Many homeowners, including seniors and parents with young children, are not in the position to spend precious time jumping through legal hoops and dealing with various building professionals.

Harris says that even seasoned developers frequently find it extremely difficult to get a building project off the ground.

“They have in-house professional permit expediters and architects, and they’re still pulling their hair out,” he says. “So for someone who has zero experience building a house to take this on, it’s a herculean task.”

Realtor.com senior economic research analyst Hannah Jones agrees.

“Many locals may opt to sell their property as the work to rebuild proves too difficult and expensive,” she says. “Developers and investors may have more capacity to take on this scale of rebuilding, which is helpful to replace lost housing in the area.”

But Jones warns that the influx of investors will “undoubtedly” change the Altadena housing market. As for why developers are flocking to Altadena, Jones says it’s about investing in the future.

“The larger Los Angeles market is expensive and housing can feel scarce and competitive to secure,” she says. “With this in mind, investors may feel confident buying property to develop in Altadena, betting on future demand.”

Harris stresses that no homeowner should be pressured to sell to a developer or be taken advantage of, but he points out that the process of rebuilding is so complicated, costly, and time-consuming that not everyone is willing to shoulder this burden.

“My guess is 90% of the people who lost their homes are financially or psychologically incapable of rebuilding a house,” he says. Homeowners should not be vilified for opting to put their lot on the open market and getting the most money they can for it so they could purchase another home and “get on with their lives.”

“As far as building changing the character of the area … it’s too late,” notes Harris. “This community was destroyed. So what we all hope is that the buildings that replace it will have the same charm.”

But the agent contends that at the end of the day, what made Altadena interesting were not its homes, but its people.

“And the sooner we can get people back in there, the better,” he says. “Because the danger isn’t that a bunch of people sell to the developers and homes get rebuilt. The danger is that Altadena doesn’t get rebuilt at all.”