On this page
This site answers one question for owners of Los Angeles County apartment buildings: what the building is worth, and how a buyer will arrive at that number. The answer is arithmetic on the building's income, and the arithmetic is only as good as the rent roll and the expenses that go into it, so most of what follows is about those two documents and the rules that bend them.
Who it is for
It is written for owners of buildings with two or more units in Los Angeles County, and for the people who end up holding one, such as heirs, executors, successor trustees, partners and spouses dividing property. Most of it concerns buildings of five units and up, which buyers price from their income. On a duplex or a fourplex, comparable sales and the gross rent multiplier carry more of the weight, and the pages say where.
What it covers, page by page:
- How a buyer builds net operating income and a cap rate, and where the gross rent multiplier and price per unit fit.
- What raises or lowers value, and what rent control does to the income a buyer can count on.
- Why the assessed value on your tax bill is not a price, and how the rent roll sets one.
- When you need a broker's opinion of value or an appraisal, and how an inherited building is valued as of the date of death.
How the pages are researched and kept current
Every rule on the site links to the statute, court or agency page it comes from. Property tax points to the Revenue and Taxation Code and the County Assessor, rent control to LAHD, the income approach to the Board of Equalization's Property Tax Rule 8, and date-of-death value to the Internal Revenue Code and the Treasury regulations. For each claim there is a line in the research notes naming the source it rests on. A number that changes over time, like the RSO's allowable increase or the Measure ULA thresholds, appears with the period it applies to, or not at all.
When a statute or ordinance a page relies on is amended, that page is reviewed against the new text. The date printed on every page is the last time its content changed, so a typo fix leaves the date alone and a new rule moves it.
Every dollar figure in a worked example is invented, labelled as invented, and computed twice. What you will not find is market data. The site states no cap rate, price per unit or expense ratio as a fact about the market, because no dataset it can cite publishes them for your building, and a figure with nothing behind it is the thing to be skeptical of in anyone's estimate, this site's included.
Why the calculator has no default cap rate
The calculator on the homepage is arithmetic on your numbers. You enter the number of units, the monthly rent, vacancy, a year of operating expenses, and a low and a high cap rate taken from comparable sales, plus a gross rent multiplier and a price per unit if you have them. It returns net operating income and a value from each method. It starts blank and carries no default cap rate, because a cap rate is a measurement of particular sales, and a default would be a number with no sales under it. Bring rates from sales like yours and it will do the division.
Who writes it
Shaya Lowenstein writes the guide as a Multifamily Real Estate Advisor, and his responsible broker is Lyon Stahl Investment Real Estate. His California DRE license, number 01942326, can be checked on the DRE's public license lookup. He has worked in the industry since 2011, in brokerage, operations and development. His focus is apartment buildings and land in Southern California, and the work he does there is land use and zoning analysis, value-add and repositioning, and planning portfolios over the long term for owners, investors and developers. He works out of an office in El Segundo.
What he does and does not do
Shaya is a real estate agent. His work is preparing opinions of value and listing buildings, sold either openly on the market or quietly to a buyer he brings. He is not an attorney, a CPA, a tax advisor or an appraiser, and he does not buy buildings. Under Business and Professions Code section 11302, an opinion of value from him is not an appraisal. Where a question belongs to a lawyer, a CPA or an appraiser, the page that raises it says so.
If you want a number for your own building, send the rent roll and a year of expenses, and Shaya will tell you what else a buyer would ask for before he gives you a range.