Long Beach Housing Market Update: Q3 2026

Long Beach was two markets in the third quarter of 2026: a seller's market for single-family homes and a buyer's market for condos. The citywide median finally moved, and every dollar of that move came from houses.

Let me say the quiet part first. The same quarter that produced the highest monthly median I have tracked also produced the highest listing failure rate. Both are true, and which one applies to you depends almost entirely on what you own.

The quick read

• $902,500 median sale price in September, up 4.9 percent from September 2025 and the highest monthly median in the 33 months I track. Price per square foot was $656, up 0.5 percent, so the headline moved more than the house under it did.
• $1,042,500 for a single-family home against $521,000 for a condo. The house median rose 6.6 percent from a year ago, and 5.5 percent on a per-square-foot basis, so that gain is real and not just bigger houses selling. The condo median fell 0.3 percent. The whole gain is houses.
• 98.9 percent is the median Long Beach sale measured against the original asking price this quarter. Fewer than half of sellers got their original number or more, and one in four took more than 5 percent off it.
• 303 listings came off the market without selling against 593 that closed. One in three sellers who reached a decision point this quarter did not get it done, and in September it was closer to four in ten.
• 232 new listings in September, down 11.5 percent from a year ago. Supply thinned again after a July and August bump.

That is the gist. Everything below is the detail behind it, and you can stop reading wherever it stops being useful to you.

At a glance

Long Beach residential market, September 2026. Source: CRMLS, pulled October 7, 2026. Active listings here count every listing that was active at any point in the month. As of October 7 there were 597 active listings and 198 homes in escrow.

Start with the two price rows together. The median jumped 4.9 percent, but price per square foot moved 0.5 percent, because the typical September sale was a bigger home than a year ago. For a year I have been writing that Long Beach prices were flat. Per foot, in September, they still were. The quarter as a whole tells a different story, and the rest of this report is about who it is true for.

The quarter in three months

Source: CRMLS. Failed listings are expired, canceled, and withdrawn, by the date the status changed.

For the full quarter, the median price per square foot was $659, up 1.5 percent from $649 in the same quarter last year. Single-family homes went from $692 to $730 per foot, up 5.5 percent. Condos went from $563 to $559, down 0.7 percent.

Every month this quarter beat the same month last year on price. Every month also sold fewer homes than the year before, except July. August was the quietest August for closings in three years, and then September posted a record median on fewer sales. Prices rose on thinner volume, which is a weaker kind of strength than prices rising on more sales.

What this means for you

If you are buying a house. You are competing for a shrinking pool and paying more for it. The median single-family home closed at exactly its original asking price this quarter, and half of them went under contract within 18 days. Get fully underwritten before you shop, and decide in advance what you will walk away from, because the market will not give you time to decide in the moment.

If you are buying a condo. This is your market. The median condo closed at 97.5 percent of original asking, took 35 days to sell, and nearly three in ten condo sellers ended up taking more than 5 percent off their original price. Ask for the original list price on anything you tour, and if a unit has been sitting past 30 days, it has already told you what the seller will consider.

If you are selling a house. Price is finally on your side, but only if you price to the comparable sales rather than to the headline. Half of single-family sellers got their original asking price or better. The other half did not, and 21 percent took more than a 5 percent cut to get it closed. The difference between those two groups is almost always the first two weeks.

If you are selling a condo. I will give you the straight version. Condo prices in Long Beach have not moved in a year, the median unit is taking over a month to go under contract, and 37 percent of condos that closed this quarter had been on the market 60 days or more. If you can wait, there is no penalty for waiting. If you cannot, price it to be the obvious choice in its building on day one.

If you already own. If you own a house, the equity line moved this quarter for the first time in a while. If you own a condo, it did not, and the gap between what you have and what the next step costs just widened. That is the honest read, and it changes the math on whether a move up pencils this year.

The number nobody publishes: what sellers actually got against their original price

Most market reports stop at the median. I went through every one of the 593 Long Beach closings this quarter and compared the closing price to the price the home first listed at, not the price it was sitting at when it finally sold.

The median sale came in at 98.9 percent of the original asking price. Sellers in Long Beach are getting close to their number, but close is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

• 264 of 588 sales, or 45 percent, closed at or above original asking. That is a minority. Most sellers in Long Beach this quarter took something off.
• 139 sales, or 24 percent, closed more than 5 percent under the original asking price. On a $900,000 home that is at least $45,000 left behind, before closing costs and credits.
• 53 sales, or 9 percent, closed more than 10 percent under.
• The remaining 31 percent landed in between, taking up to 5 percent off the original price.

Split it by property type and the two markets separate completely. Single-family homes: median 100 percent of original asking, 51 percent at or above. Condos: median 97.5 percent, 34 percent at or above, and 30 percent took a cut of more than 5 percent.

Sellers had the price and lost the certainty

Put this quarter together and you get a pattern that does not match the usual story. The median rose in every month. Days to sell stayed under three weeks for houses. Inventory sat at four months. Every one of those points in the seller's direction.

And one in three sellers who reached a decision point did not sell at all.

303 Long Beach listings expired, were canceled, or were withdrawn between July and September, against 593 that closed. That is a failure rate of roughly 34 percent, up from roughly 30 percent in the same quarter last year. September alone was 117 failed against 198 closed, which is 37 percent. The sellers who got their price this quarter got it because they priced right from the start. The sellers who overshot did not get a second chance; they got a canceled listing.

209 Long Beach listings changed price during September. Against roughly 600 active listings at any given moment, that is a lot of repricing after the home hit the market instead of before.

The citywide median is still the least useful number in this report

I lead with $902,500 because it is the number people search for. It is also close to meaningless for any specific house.

Over the twelve months through September, the median Long Beach sale price by area ran from $505,000 in Downtown and Alamitos Beach to $1,995,000 in Park Estates. That is nearly a 4x spread inside one city. Park Estates is a small area where a handful of sales move the number, so treat the top of that range as directional. The bottom is not moving at all: Downtown was $503,500 in the last window and $505,000 in this one.

When a market report tells you Long Beach is up 4.9 percent without telling you which Long Beach and which property type, it is not telling you much. A condo owner in Downtown reading that headline is reading somebody else's market.

Median sale price by Long Beach area

Median sale price by CRMLS marketing area, October 2025 through September 2026, 2,210 closed sales. Source: CRMLS.

A note on the area names: these are CRMLS marketing areas, not city boundaries, and every sale in this table is a City of Long Beach address. Several areas carry names borrowed from neighboring communities because those lines were drawn decades ago and do not follow the city limit. If a name surprises you, that is why.

Neighborhood spotlight: Belmont Shore and Naples

Closings in the third quarter: 64. Median sale price: $1,470,000. Twelve-month median: $1,510,000.

This is the coastal end of the Long Beach price ladder, and it behaves differently from the rest of the city. The 64 sales this quarter ran from $504,000 for a condo to $8,250,000 on the water. Single-family homes here had a median of $1,800,000, and the 16 condos that closed had a median of $750,000, which is higher than the overall median in five Long Beach areas.

Two things stand out in the data. First, the twelve-month median slipped from $1,592,500 in the window I reported in June to $1,510,000 now, while most of the city moved up. Second, sellers here negotiated harder than the citywide average: the median sale closed at 98.4 percent of original asking, only 39 percent got their original price, and 31 percent took more than a 5 percent cut. Price discipline matters more at this end of the market, not less, because the dollar amounts attached to a miss are larger.

Despite the higher price tags, people still keep an eye on Belmont Shore and Naples. The community is a big draw, the local small businesses add to the charm, and then there is being on or close to the water. I expect homes closest to the water may see longer sale times as we head into the predicted El Niño season, with the news portraying the danger of elevated tides, but there will always be people who value living on the water and are willing to pay for it in Southern California.

The scoreboard

Every edition of this series ends the same way: what I said last time, and what actually happened. In June I wrote that the question for the summer was whether new listings would recover, that if sellers stayed on the sidelines the speed and inventory numbers would keep tightening, and that whether any of it would move price was an open question where the answer so far had been no.

That call was a miss, on both the mechanism and the result.

• Sellers did not stay on the sidelines. New listings came back to 282 in July and 286 in August, which was above August 2025. September thinned again at 232.
• Speed did not tighten. Median days to sell went from 16 in June to 20 in July, 24 in August, and 19 in September. Every month was slower than June.
• Price moved anyway. July and September both set new highs, and all three months beat the same month in 2025. The flat market I had been describing for a year ended this quarter, and I did not see it coming.

I would rather tell you that plainly than quietly rewrite the June post. Here is what I am watching for the fourth quarter.

This is my read of the market, not a sourced statistic, so weigh it accordingly. Hold me to it in the next edition either way.

Frequently asked questions

Is it a buyer's market or a seller's market in Long Beach right now?
Both, depending on what you are buying. As of September 2026, single-family homes in Long Beach are a seller's market: the median house closed at its full original asking price and went under contract in 18 days. Condos are a buyer's market: the median condo closed at 97.5 percent of original asking and took 35 days. Citywide, roughly four months of inventory and one in three listings failing to sell.

What is the average home price in Long Beach?
The median sale price for a Long Beach home was $902,500 in September 2026, the highest monthly median since at least January 2024. For the full third quarter, the median single-family home sold for $1,042,500 and the median condo for $521,000, and the median price per square foot across all closings was $659. I use median rather than average because a few very high sales pull an average upward and make it less useful to you.

Are Long Beach home prices going up or down?
Up, for houses. The September 2026 median was 4.9 percent above September 2025, and the single-family median for the quarter was 6.6 percent above the same quarter last year. Condo prices were flat, down 0.3 percent over the same period.

How long does it take to sell a house in Long Beach?
The median Long Beach home went under contract in 19 days in September 2026, down from 27 days a year earlier. Houses were faster than that at 18 days across the quarter, and condos were slower at 35 days. Roughly one in three listings that came off the market this quarter did so without selling at all.

How much below asking do homes sell for in Long Beach?
The median Long Beach sale in the third quarter of 2026 closed at 98.9 percent of its original asking price. About 45 percent of sellers got their original price or more, 24 percent sold for more than 5 percent under it, and 9 percent sold for more than 10 percent under. Condos sold further below asking than houses.

Which Long Beach neighborhoods are the most affordable?
Over the twelve months through September 2026, the Downtown and Alamitos Beach area had the lowest median sale price at $505,000, followed by the Eastside and Circle area at $560,000 and Poly High at $652,500.

How much below asking can I offer on a Long Beach home?
That depends far more on how long the home has been listed than on any citywide rule. With 209 listings changing price during September alone, a home that has been sitting has usually already told you how flexible the seller is. Ask what the original list price was, not just the current one, and ask how many days it has been on the market in total, including any earlier listings.

Sources and method

CRMLS data for the City of Long Beach, pulled October 7, 2026. Sale-to-asking and price-per-foot figures are computed from every individual closing in the quarter, not from a summary report. Active and pending counts in the table note are October 7 snapshots. Neighborhood medians cover October 2025 through September 2026. No citywide figure should be applied to a specific property without a closer look.

If you want an honest read on what any of this means for your actual situation, whether you are thinking about listing or trying to figure out what you can buy, join the Dream Home Club for straight takes and a first look at opportunities, or reach out and we will make a plan together. No pressure, just clear answers.

Dream Homes Do Come True.

Be well,
David

For informational purposes only and not legal, tax, or financial advice. Market data reflects July through September 2026 CRMLS figures and conditions change. Verify current numbers before relying on them. David Mercier, DRE #02096621.