Like many, I’ve been worried about the families displaced, the homes lost, and the communities forever changed. But alongside that very human concern, I found myself returning to a different kind of question — one rooted in numbers, models, and the real cost of catastrophe.

There are plenty of articles that have damage numbers already:

But those figures represent a fraction of the total damage and economic loss in the L.A. region, which AccuWeather estimated to be somewhere between $250 billion and $275 billion.

AccuWeather's estimate accounted for not only the destruction and damage of homes and businesses, but also various other factors, including damage to utilities and infrastructure, the long-term cost of rebuilding, cleanup and recovery costs, emergency shelter expenses, long-term health care costs, lost wages, and housing displacement.

The spread in the estimates caught my attention. Why are the estimates so broad? What’s missing from the models? And how do we actually quantify the destruction when the data we rely on — especially property tax assessments — might be wildly inaccurate?

I decided to look into it myself. And discovered a complete mess.

Tax Assessed Values Dataset

I’ve always known that California’s property tax system was... tricky.

Between Proposition 13’s cap on annual assessment increases and the patchwork of reassessment triggers, it’s long been understood that assessed values often lag far behind market realities. But until I started digging into the data myself, I didn’t realize just how extreme the disconnect could be.

I pulled the official latest LA County Assessor Parcel dataset, which is openly available and contains LA County tax-assessed values for 2.4 million parcels.

Tax assessments were published for 2 roll years - 2021 and 2022. For this analysis I’ll be using just 2022 values, which are somewhat deprecated already in 2025, but more recent data is not published yet. I’ll also be using just single family residencies to simplify the analysis.

While looking through the LA County housing stock as a whole the numbers immediately did not make much sense to me:

As measured the median Improvement value is just $151.463, while the median land value is higher at $232.193. My immediate reaction was “that can’t be true”.

When looking at the total lot median, the median value, which is “land value combined with improvement value”, it is just $408.918.

Zillow Single Family index reports a value of $919.363, which is 2.2 times higher than the median assessed value of a typical house.

Ok, setting this observation aside, let’s look at the fire perimeters and properties that were affected by the recent fires.

Fire Perimeters and Tax Assessed Values

I pulled the fire perimeter dataset and spatially joined it with the assessed value dataset to see which properties stand within the fire perimeters.

Not all properties within the fire perimeter were destroyed, but aerial imagery suggests the vast majority were.

Land values tend to be higher along the coast and decrease further inland. So let’s take a look at the Pasifix Palisaes Assessed Land Values, with white text displaying the assessed dollar value of a Parcel in millions of dollars.

🏚️ One Lot is Worth $200K. The Identical One Next Door? $2.4 Million.

The reason lies deep in California’s tax code. Thanks to Proposition 13, passed in 1978, property tax assessments can increase by no more than 2% per year, unless the property is sold. That means:

A homeowner who bought in 1985 might be paying taxes on a $150,000 assessed value. Their neighbor, who bought the same house last year, might be assessed at $1.5 million

Same house. Same risk. But very different numbers.

The burnt-down Altadena area is, of course, cheaper than the Palisades, but inconsistencies are still there: $20,000 lots are right next to the $700,000 lots.

First-order Damage Assessment

If we simply sum the total assessed value of all single-family lots within the fire perimeter, we get a figure of $19.1 billion — including $12.9 billion in improvements, which are likely to be mostly destroyed.

But given that the median market value is approximately 2.2 times higher than the assessed value, we can scale this number up to arrive at a first-order estimate of $28.4 billion in actual fire damage — and that’s just for the single-family segment. This number has to be further scaled up above 30 billion because the summary is calculated on 2022 assessments.

Caveat: this is a rough and naïve approximation, but it highlights just how much current reporting may be underestimating the true scale of loss.

Where assessment values are closer to the market value

There are several property cohorts where the assessed value is close to the market value: recently built houses and recently sold.

Numbers for the newly built homes actually makes sense with $945.000 total assessed value:

The same applies to the properties with a more recent base assessment year. For properties with the base assessment year 2020 or later, the median is $745.000

The base year

In California, under Proposition 13 (1978), the base year is the year when a property was last reassessed at market value — typically:

• - The year of purchase, or

• The year of new construction or major improvement.

A histogram of base years reveals that a large share of properties in LA County are still anchored to legacy assessments — many dating back decades — meaning their assessed values remain significantly below market levels.

Conclusion

Because of how California's tax system works, assessed property values often reflect the past, not the present. As a result, when we tally up the cost of the fires using tax records, we’re massively undercounting the real financial damage.

This matters. It affects:

• Insurance planning — if official values are too low, coverage may fall short.

• Disaster funding — federal and state relief programs often rely on local damage estimates.

• Risk modeling and resilience investments — cities can’t protect what they can’t properly measure.

Home prices in the Sunshine State saw their biggest decline in more than a decade.

The median price for all home types in Florida fell 1.7% in March from the same time last year, according to Redfin, a national real estate brokerage. That’s a small number with big implications.

I think it is quite valuable to take a step back and look at the historical Miami housing situation.

Single Family Homes

Yes, the median price of a single-family home in Florida dipped slightly in March 2025, falling to $429,999 from $439,000 the year prior. However, context matters: this figure is still just shy of the national median of $449,000, a position Florida hasn’t always occupied.

To appreciate how far the market has come, consider this: in March 2020, the median price for a single-family home in Florida was just $277,000. That’s a 69.7% increase over five years—a staggering rise by any standard. Back then, Florida homes were priced about 11% below the national median of $307,400, a gap that had persisted for years.

What we’re seeing now isn’t a collapse—it's gravity taking effect after a period of extreme acceleration. Even with a modest year-over-year decline, today’s prices remain historically elevated. The correction may feel dramatic, but prices are still abnormally high compared to pre-pandemic levels. See chart below:

My point is that while single family home prices declined year-over-year in Florida as of March 2025, single family market right now price-wise, is still abnormally high given the historical context.

Condo Market

The condo market, meanwhile, is facing more acute challenges. Headlines often point to ballooning HOA fees, rising insurance premiums, and tougher building codes as key pressures—and they’re not wrong.

As of March 2025, Florida condo prices fell 6.7% year-over-year, from $329,800 to $307,600. But this decline, too, must be viewed in light of the meteoric rise that preceded it.

In March 2020, the median condo price in Florida was just $201,800, while the national median stood at $270,000. See chart below

That gave Florida condos a price ratio of just 0.71 relative to the national average. Fast forward to January 2023, and that ratio surged to nearly 0.98—the highest on record. In other words, Florida condos almost caught up with national pricing, a scenario that would have been hard to imagine just a few years earlier.

A Market Rebalancing, Not a Crash

So yes, prices are coming down. But the market is also coming off an extraordinary high. Both the single-family and condo segments in Florida are recalibrating after years of unsustainable growth.

This correction doesn't erase the gains of the past five years—it contextualizes them. For buyers, it might mean more opportunities. For sellers, it’s a reminder that rapid appreciation can’t continue forever. And for policymakers, it's a signal to watch closely—but not necessarily panic.

Sometimes a slowdown is just that: a pause, not a plunge.

A balanced market typically sits around 5 to 6 months of supply. Lower values signal a seller’s market with upward pressure on prices due to scarcity, while higher values suggest a buyer’s market with more negotiating power and potential for price declines.

As of March, 2025 the national housing market sits at 3.0 months of supply, but Sunbelt states are showing signs of divergence. Florida stands out with 5.7 months of supply, nearly double the national average. Seeing 5.7 months of supply is unusual, even compared to the pre-pandemic expansion phase. Months of supply peaked in Florida in January 2025 with a value of 7.9.

Where months of supply comes from?

The formula is pretty simple: Months of Supply = Total Active Listings / Monthly Sales Pace.

In Florida right in March 2025 33 thousand homes where sold, while 53 new listings were added to the market, which is vey non-typica given the historical trends (see image above).

From a market dynamics perspective, there is nothing unusual in sales dropping in Florida after the 2022 effective rate shock. What is unusual is the high amount of new listings (see chart above).

Another important attribute to track is median days on the market.

Low Median DOM (e.g. 10–20 days): Hot market, homes sell quickly, strong buyer demand.

High Median DOM (e.g. 60–90 days): Slower market, buyers are cautious, potential overpricing or too much inventory.

Nationally, the average days on market is 47, but Florida again leads the pack with homes sitting an average of 71 days before going under contract. This signals buyer hesitation and potentially overpriced listings in a cooling market.

Interestingly, Florida has been alsways sitting above the national days on the market trend, while California almost always lower.

Subscribe for more detailed statistics on sun belt states.

National home sales—both seasonally adjusted and non-adjusted—remain 23% below pre-pandemic levels. The trend line has yet to recover, with many would-be buyers either priced out or holding back due to elevated mortgage rates and economic uncertainty.

If we look at the seasonally-adjusted home sales volume by property type for Single Family and Condo/Co-ops categories separately, we will see that Condo/Co-op category experiences a greater drop in sales of 27%.

A drop in sales volume is expected, given the current rates and rising home insurance costs. What is unusual, and important to highlight, is that the dynamics of new listing (how many properties enter the market) does not follow the drop in sales.

If you look at the chart below, while Single Family listings experience a 20% drop, whileCondo/Co-op listings only dropped 10% with 64,300 new listings in February.

This imbalance fundametally pushes the months of supply metric higher.

Months of supply is a key indicator of market balance—it shows how long it would take to sell all current listings at the current pace of sales. A low number signals a seller’s market with limited inventory, while a higher number suggests a buyer’s market with more options and softer pricing power.

Single family category is at 3.1 months of supply nation-wide, while Condo/Co-op is at 4.1, setting it to a 2014-2015 level.

The percentage of houses sold above listing price is on the downward trajectory signaling a cooling in bidding wars.

• Single-family homes: 29% sold above list price (downtrend)

• Condos/co-ops: 23%, with an even steeper decline

Median sale prices continue to rise slowly. In February:

• Single-family homes posted a median of $453,000

• Condos and co-ops trailed at $371,000

Both categories show a steady, if modest, increase. But with buyer sentiment weakening, how long this trajectory holds is an open question.

Zooming in on counties with populations over 50k, some of the most buyer-friendly markets now sit in the Sunbelt.
Notably:

• Miami-Dade County has surged to 11.4 months of supply, one of the highest among large counties.

This signals a potential glut—particularly risky in vacation-oriented or investor-heavy markets.

Overall, the national housing market has entered a strained phase. The low volume of sales, weakening pricing power, and gradual rise in inventory all point toward a more buyer-favored landscape. Yet, not all segments are equal.

Condos and co-ops appear to be the weakest, with faster-rising supply and sharper declines in bidding wars. If the current trend holds, this category may see more pronounced price corrections in the coming quarters.

In contrast, single-family homes are holding on—but just barely. And in places like Miami-Dade and other Sunbelt hotspots, the inventory is rising too quickly for comfort.

This spring, buyers have more breathing room—and possibly, more leverage.