Selling a house in Calabasas: no ULA, the oak ordinance, and insurance

What does it actually cost to sell a house in Calabasas?

On the tax side, less than you'd pay four miles east. You owe the Los Angeles County documentary transfer tax — $0.55 per $500 of value, which works out to $1.10 per $1,000 — and the city of Calabasas adds nothing on top of it. No city transfer tax. No Measure ULA.

That second part matters more than people realize. Measure ULA is a City of Los Angeles tax, and it only applies to property inside the City of Los Angeles. Where it applies, it's 4% of the entire sale price at the lower threshold and 5.5% of the entire sale price above the upper one — originally $5 million and $10 million, both adjusted annually for inflation. Not 4% of the amount over the line. The whole price, from dollar one. Calabasas is its own incorporated city, so none of that reaches you. If you want the mechanics of how ULA works on the other side of the line, I wrote it up in what Measure ULA actually is.

Here's the same sale, priced identically, in Calabasas versus in the City of Los Angeles:

That last row is not a typo. A $6 million house in the Woodland Hills hills and a $6 million house in Calabasas can be a quarter-million dollars apart on the settlement statement for no reason other than which side of a municipal boundary the parcel sits on. If your property is anywhere near that line, the first thing to confirm is which city you're actually in — and that's a parcel-level question, not a mailing-address question. Plenty of mail gets delivered to a "Calabasas, CA 91302" address on land that isn't in the city.

Why can Santa Monica charge 6% and Calabasas can't charge anything?

Because of how a city was formed. This is the piece nobody explains, and it's the reason the table above looks the way it does.

Revenue & Taxation Code §11911 lets a county levy a documentary transfer tax, and it lets a city levy one too — but a general law city is capped at half the county rate, and the city's portion gets credited against the county's, so the combined total stays at $0.55 per $500. A general law city can't tax its way past that ceiling.

Charter cities are different, and the statute isn't what makes them different. They aren't carved out of §11911. They tax under independent authority that Article XI, Section 5 of the California Constitution gives charter cities over their own municipal affairs, and the courts have consistently treated a local transfer tax as a municipal affair. That's why Santa Monica, Culver City, Los Angeles, Pomona and Redondo Beach can set rates the general law cap would never permit, and why four of those five are the names you see on the County's city-by-city rate schedule.

Calabasas is a general law city. It's capped, and it hasn't adopted a transfer tax at all. Your settlement statement shows the county line and a zero on the city line. Escrow will confirm it, but that's the structure underneath.

What do I have to do about the oak trees?

Find out what's protected before anyone touches a branch, and before you let a stager, a landscaper, or a buyer's contractor onto the property with a chainsaw.

Calabasas regulates oaks through the tree preservation chapter of its Land Use and Development Code, Title 17 of the Municipal Code. Protected status is triggered by trunk diameter measured at a set height above natural grade, the protected zone extends out past the trunk — in most cases beyond the dripline, not just to it — and work inside that zone, including pruning past a defined percentage of the canopy and any grading or trenching, requires a permit and usually an oak tree report from a certified arborist. The exact diameter trigger, the protected-zone measurement and the pruning percentage are all written into the chapter, and they get revised, so pull the current text or call the Planning Division rather than relying on what a neighbor did in 2014. For scale: unincorporated Los Angeles County protects native oaks at 8 inches in diameter measured 4.5 feet above grade. Calabasas built its own ordinance precisely because the city wanted tighter control than that.

Why a seller should care:

• Unpermitted removal is an enforcement matter, and it attaches to the property. A buyer's agent who notices a fresh stump in a yard full of mature oaks will ask. So will an appraiser.
• Deferred maintenance on a large oak over a roofline is a negotiation item. Get an arborist's assessment before you list, not after an inspection report calls the tree "a concern" with no detail.
• If your parcel is in unincorporated LA County — Monte Nido, parts of Old Topanga, pockets off Mulholland — the city ordinance doesn't apply to you. The County's does. Different permit, different counter, same principle.
• Planned work matters to buyers. If a buyer is imagining a pool or an ADU, the protected zone may decide where it can physically go. Knowing that in advance turns a deal-killer into a design conversation.

What about the fire zone and the insurance?

As of late 2025, most of Calabasas sits in a Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zone. The state redrew the Local Responsibility Area maps in early 2025 and cities were required to adopt the new versions, so parcels on the edges moved. The answer for your parcel comes from the current city-adopted map, not from a PDF someone downloaded years ago.

Two consequences for a seller.

First, disclosure. The Natural Hazard Disclosure under Civil Code §1103 will flag the zone, and for a home built before 2010 in a high or very high zone, Civil Code §1102.19 requires you to give the buyer the state's list of low-cost fire-hardening retrofits and disclose which of those features the house already has. You'll also be asked about defensible space compliance. None of that is hard. It's just one more thing that stalls an escrow if nobody started it until week two.

Second, insurance — and in the escrows I've worked this year, this is the item that has most often pushed a Calabasas closing past its original date. A buyer who can't bind coverage can't fund a loan. What helps, concretely:

1. Pull your own loss history and your current declarations page before you list. A buyer's broker quoting from scratch gets a worse answer than one who can see what you've been paying.
2. Document the hardening you've already done. Class A roof, ember-resistant vents, dual-pane tempered glass, five feet of noncombustible zone-zero clearance around the structure. Receipts and permit numbers, not adjectives.
3. Get the brush cleared and photographed before photos. It reads as maintained rather than hazardous, and it's the same work the fire district would ask for anyway.

What disclosures does a Calabasas seller owe?

There's no Report of Residential Property Records — the 9A — on your list, because that's a City of Los Angeles document and you're not in the City of Los Angeles. If you've sold in Woodland Hills or West Hills before, that's the one piece of the process you can cross off. What replaces it isn't a form. It's your permit file at Calabasas Building & Safety, and I'd pull it before listing every single time.

The rest:

• Transfer Disclosure Statement and Seller Property Questionnaire. Everything you know, in writing. Vague disclosures create more fear than specific bad news does.
• Natural Hazard Disclosure report, which for Calabasas commonly picks up the fire zone and, depending on location, flood or seismic hazard zones.
• Water-conserving plumbing fixtures, Civil Code §1101.4. Single-family homes built before 1994 are required to have noncompliant toilets, showerheads and faucets replaced. It isn't a point-of-sale inspection — it's a standing obligation on the owner — but it surfaces on the TDS, where you state whether the property complies.
• Smoke alarms, carbon monoxide alarms, and water heater bracing. Standard, cheap, and still the thing that holds up a signoff on a Friday.
• Septic, if you're on it. Much of the city is on Las Virgenes Municipal Water District sewer, but properties up Old Topanga and in the canyon pockets are on onsite wastewater systems regulated by LA County Environmental Health. Get it pumped, inspected and certified early. A failed leach field is a six-figure conversation you don't want to discover in week three.
• HOA documents, Civil Code §4525. If you're in The Oaks, Calabasas Hills, Mountain View Estates, Calabasas Park Estates, Clairidge, Vista Pointe or any of the other associations, the statutory disclosure package has to be ordered, and management companies are not fast. Order it the day you list.

Also pull your property tax bill and read the direct assessments below the line. Those are separate from your 1% ad valorem tax — lighting and landscape districts, water district charges, any community facilities district — and buyers ask about them. The County Auditor-Controller publishes the list of what each assessment is and who to call about it.

Do I keep my property tax base if I move?

If you're 55 or older, severely disabled, or the victim of a wildfire or declared disaster, yes — Proposition 19 lets you carry your assessed value to a replacement home anywhere in California. The three-transfer limit applies to the 55-and-older and severely-disabled categories; disaster and wildfire victims aren't capped at three.

The detail that costs Calabasas sellers money is the blend. If the replacement costs more than what you sold for, you don't lose the benefit — you add the difference to your transferred base. Sell at $2.1 million with a $340,000 assessed value, buy at $2.5 million, and your new base is roughly $340,000 plus the $400,000 difference. Buy for less and you carry the $340,000 clean.

The Assessor doesn't apply any of this on its own. Los Angeles County requires a claim form, and there are timing rules that determine whether relief is retroactive to the date of transfer or only applies going forward — which is why the two-year window between the sale and the purchase, in either order, is the thing to put on a calendar. Expect a supplemental tax bill on the new house in the meantime; it gets reconciled once the claim is processed. I walk through the whole sequence in the Prop 19 guide and in why the order matters if you're 55 or older. Your own CPA should look at the specifics before you sign anything.

What about capital gains?

This is the one that surprises long-time Calabasas owners, because the §121 exclusion hasn't moved since 1997: $250,000 single, $500,000 married filing jointly, if you've lived in the house two of the last five years.

Illustrative only — not a market estimate, just the shape of the arithmetic:

Notice what the improvements line does. Two hundred sixty thousand dollars of documented work — the addition, the re-roof, the pool, the retaining wall, the kitchen — moved $260,000 out of the taxable column. That's why I tell people to go find the receipts before they do anything else. Permits, contractor invoices, canceled checks, the folder in the garage. A box of old paperwork is worth real money here, and repairs don't count the way improvements do, which is a line your CPA should draw, not me.

What's the actual sequence?

1. Pull the permit history from Calabasas Building & Safety and compare it to what's physically on the property. Unpermitted square footage is survivable. Unpermitted square footage discovered by the buyer's appraiser is expensive.
2. Get the oak assessment if you have protected trees, especially if there's visible past pruning or any grading near a trunk.
3. Order the HOA package the day you decide to sell, if you're in an association.
4. Handle septic and insurance documentation in parallel with prep, not after. Both run on someone else's calendar.
5. Find the improvement receipts and hand them to your CPA with a draft net sheet.
6. Then stage, photograph and list. In the escrows I've worked this year, front-loading items one through five has consistently taken real time off the back end — the work still gets done either way, but it stops being a contingency fight.

If you want a starting number on what your house is worth before you commit to any of this, the home value tool is a reasonable first pass, and offer to keys lays out the escrow timeline in order. When you're ready to talk through your specific parcel — city or county, oaks or no oaks, sewer or septic — get in touch and I'll pull the records with you. If something in your situation is genuinely a legal question, you want a real estate attorney on it, and I'll say so rather than guess.