If Sherman Oaks home prices fell by double digits this year, why are homes selling faster than they did a year ago, not slower?
That's the contradiction sitting inside the numbers right now. Redfin's tracker for the neighborhood, covering the three months ending in August 2026, shows a median sale price of $1.5 million, down 12.8 percent from the same stretch a year earlier. In the same window, homes went from averaging 65 days on market to 48. More homes sold in August 2026 than in August 2025, not fewer. A neighborhood where prices are supposedly collapsing does not usually sell faster and sell more. Something else is moving underneath that headline number, and it has more to do with what closed escrow than what any specific house is worth.
Look at three sales that closed within a day of each other in mid-September 2026. A three-bedroom, 1,664-square-foot house on Huston Street sold for $1,310,500. A property on Knobhill Drive, listed at $1,399,000, closed at $1,620,000. A house on Ventura Canyon Avenue sat on the market for 140 days before selling for $1,000,000, nine percent under its asking price. Three homes, three outcomes, all technically part of the same "Sherman Oaks median" that gets quoted as a single figure. That single figure was never built to describe any one of them.
Two Different Measurements Wearing the Same Name
Part of the confusion is that "median price" doesn't mean the same thing from one source to the next. Redfin's -12.8 percent figure is calculated from actual closed sales. Movoto's September 2026 update tells a different story from the same neighborhood: a median list price of $1.52 million, down only 4 percent year over year, with price per square foot down 2 percent and days on market flat at 62.
A 4 percent shift and a 12.8 percent shift are not close. One measures what sellers eventually got paid. The other measures what sellers are currently asking. Neither is wrong. They're answering different questions, and a reader skimming past both without noticing the difference walks away with a number that describes neither.
What's Actually in the Blender
Here's the part that explains most of the gap. "Sherman Oaks" as a single geography contains three very different kinds of property, and the mix of what happens to sell in any given month swings the blended median around even when nothing about individual home values has changed.
Redfin's own current listings tell the story plainly. In the most recent month tracked, 76 single-family houses sold in the neighborhood. At the same time, the active market carried 118 condos, 20 townhouses, and 13 multi-family units under the same Sherman Oaks label. Condos and townhouses aren't a side note here. They outnumber the detached houses that most people picture when they hear the neighborhood's name.
| Property Type | Recent Median Listing Price | What It Reflects |
|---|---|---|
| Condos | Around $670,000 | 65 units on the market, concentrated near Ventura and Sepulveda where multi-family housing is more common |
| Townhomes | Roughly $765,000 to $799,000 | Communities like Coldwater Garden Terrace on Coldwater Canyon Avenue, offering more square footage than a condo without a detached lot |
| Single-family houses | Historically $1.1 million to $1.3 million in a spring 2026 breakdown of neighborhood listings | The largest gap in the mix, driving most of the swing when the ratio shifts |
A gap of $400,000 to $700,000 between property types means that if condo and townhome sales make up a slightly larger share of what closes in one month versus the next, the blended median moves substantially, with zero change in what any individual house, condo, or townhome is actually worth. That's the mechanism behind the scary year-over-year number. It isn't that Sherman Oaks houses got cheaper. It's that a market where non-single-family sales are a real and growing share of transaction volume will always produce a blended figure that looks unstable, because it's averaging two markets with a six-figure gap between them.
The Zip Code Where the Math Runs Backward
The clearest evidence that this is a mix problem, not a value problem, shows up at the zip code level. Sherman Oaks spans at least three: 91403 to the south, closer to the hillside streets below Mulholland; 91423 covering more of the flats; and a sliver of 91401 near the Valley Glen and North Hollywood border.
In 91403, Redfin's tracker for the twelve months ending in March 2026 showed the median sale price up 2.5 percent year over year, landing at $1.5 million. In that same period, price per square foot in that zip code fell 11.7 percent. A rising median alongside a falling price per square foot means one thing: bigger homes were the ones selling. Buyers in 91403 weren't getting a discount on the same house. They were closing on larger homes at a lower cost per square foot than the year before, likely reflecting increased activity in the hillside streets around Longridge Estates and the Mulholland corridor, where larger lots and bigger footprints are more common. Days on market in that zip ran 89 days, essentially unchanged from 88 the year prior, slower than the neighborhood-wide 48-day figure and a reminder that the luxury hillside segment moves on its own clock.
What Doesn't Move With the Monthly Number
A few things about Sherman Oaks stay constant whether the blended median is up or down in any given month, and they matter more to an actual buying or selling decision than the headline swing.
Lot size is one. A spring 2026 breakdown of neighborhood listings noted that Sherman Oaks delivers larger lots than Studio City or Valley Village at a relative discount, with properties over 7,500 square feet and ADU potential generating consistent buyer competition. That's a structural feature of the neighborhood's original 1920s-era lot layout, not something that shifts because more condos closed last month.
Walkability along the Ventura Boulevard corridor, particularly around Sherman Oaks Village near the Van Nuys Boulevard intersection, is another. Ongoing changes to that stretch, including new restaurants and boutique fitness spaces, keep drawing buyers who want to be able to walk to dinner, independent of whatever the blended median happened to do that quarter.
Questions Worth Asking Before You Trust a Median
- Is the number I'm looking at built from closed sales or from current listings? Those track different things and rarely move together.
- Does it cover single-family houses only, or is it blended with condos and townhomes? A six-figure gap between those categories can swing a combined median without any single property losing value.
- Which zip code is behind the number? 91403's hillside streets and 91423's flats do not behave the same way, and a citywide Sherman Oaks figure can obscure both.
- Is price per square foot moving in the same direction as the overall price? If they diverge, the story is usually about what size of home sold, not what it's worth.
None of this means Sherman Oaks is immune to real shifts in buyer demand. It means a single quoted figure, however confidently reported, is describing a mix of very different transactions that happened to close in the same thirty-day window. Knowing which slice of that mix your own situation falls into, by property type, by zip code, and by square footage, tells you far more than the headline percentage ever will.
If you're trying to make sense of what a specific Sherman Oaks property, on a specific street, in a specific zip code, is actually worth right now, that's a conversation worth having directly. Ingrid Sacerio works this corridor block by block and can walk you through what the numbers mean for your situation specifically.
