Sellers Keep Hearing They Have to Discount. Woodland Hills Says Otherwise.

Ask around and you'll hear the same assumption: buyers have the upper hand, sellers should expect to come down, and asking price is more of a suggestion than a target. Here's what the data actually says.

Across the territory covered by MLS sold data for the twelve weeks ending August 30, 2026, homes sold at a median sale-to-list ratio that rose to 98.7%, compared with 97.8% for the same window a year earlier. That is not a market where sellers are getting picked apart. That is a market holding its ground.

Nowhere is that clearer than in Woodland Hills. Homes there sold at an average sale-to-list ratio that rose to 99.1% this period. A year ago, that same measure sat at 96.8%. That is a real, statistically validated move, not noise, and it runs directly against the idea that this is a discount market.

It would be easy to assume that means everything is accelerating. It isn't. In Woodland Hills, homes sold fell 11.24% year over year, even as the price sellers are actually collecting relative to their ask improved. Fewer transactions, stronger footing at the table. That combination is the tension worth sitting with: this isn't a market getting hotter across the board, it's a market where the deals that do happen are closing closer to what sellers asked for.

Contrast that with Sherman Oaks, where the median sale price fell 20.37% year over year. Even there, the average sale-to-list ratio rose 0.6 percentage points. Homes are fetching less in absolute dollar terms, but sellers are conceding less to get a deal done. Price and leverage are not always moving in the same direction, and this period they clearly did not.

What does this mean if you're on either side of a transaction? If you're selling, the "just expect a big haircut" advice doesn't match what actually closed this period. The measured ratio between what sellers asked and what buyers paid held up, and in some pockets it improved. If you're buying, don't assume a lowball offer is a formality. Sellers who are transacting are, on average, giving up less ground than they were a year ago.

None of this means every neighborhood is behaving the same way. Median days to pending ran 64.5 days in Encino over this same window.

Santa Monica told a different story on the same measure: median days to pending there ran 30 days. One buy box, two very different paces. That's a reminder that a territory-wide read never tells the whole story block by block.

What's worth watching from here: whether the Woodland Hills sale-to-list strength holds as fewer homes trade, or whether a thinner pool of sales this period is doing some of the work. The next read on that same measure will tell us whether this is a shift in leverage or a shift in which homes happened to sell.

Data sourced from MLS sold data via Listing Leads.

Daniel