In early October, high tides smashed into oceanfront homes along a Long Beach peninsula. Fueled by Hurricane Rachel and El Niño conditions, waves battered this stretch of coastline, flooding living rooms and gnawing away at walls and foundations. For at least eight homes along the sand, it meant devastation. But the future of one of them isn’t what you might expect.
6519 E. Seaside Walk #21, a four-story luxury home, was for sale when the storms hit, having been on the market for about $5 million since August. The four-bedroom, six-bathroom house sustained substantial damage, with about 70% of the property salvageable, according to a structural engineer who assessed it in the wake of the storms. The home was built on two foundations, listing agent Andy Dane Carter explained, and the front portion took the brunt of the fracture. Local officials quickly red-tagged it as no longer safe to inhabit.
Its owners didn’t take the home off the market, though. Instead, they slashed the price to $2.9 million.
That’s still far above the median home sale price in California, and to many people, it would be an unfathomable price for an unlivable home. But Carter said he’s been fielding about six calls a day from developers and investors interested in the property. “They’re trying to snatch up all those houses,” he said.
That’s more calls about the property than he received before the damage, he said, and marketing the house has totally changed, since it’s now more of a “land sale.” Carter said that while there’s “a lot of fear in the market” in the area right now, there’s also a lot of opportunity. He likens it to the corporate developers and investors who bought up lots in Altadena and Pacific Palisades after the 2025 fires, a practice that’s been dubbed “disaster capitalism.” While that wave of purchases was often seen as predatory, Carter said this is just an example of how valuable California land is. “These builders can’t buy these lots fast enough,” he said…