Long Beach spent the second quarter of 2026 doing something the rest of Los Angeles County did not. Rents grew 2.7% year over year while the metro average managed 0.8%. Vacancy sat at 3.9% against a metro figure of 4.5%. Construction ran at 3.0% of existing inventory, so supply is arriving, and the market absorbed it anyway.
None of which gets much attention, because Long Beach is treated as an appendix to Los Angeles rather than what it actually is: a city of 450,000 people with its own rulebook, its own economy anchored by the busiest port in the country, and roughly 7,500 individual apartment buildings.
For an owner or investor, three structural facts matter more than the market data. Long Beach has no local rent cap. It levies no city transfer tax, and Measure ULA does not reach it. And its seismic retrofit program is voluntary, with no deadline. Each of those is a cost or constraint that a comparable building inside City of Los Angeles limits carries and a Long Beach building does not.
What Long Beach Does and Does Not Regulate
This is where most analysis of this market goes wrong, usually by assuming Long Beach has rent control because so many of its neighbours do.
No local rent cap
Long Beach has no rent stabilization ordinance. The only cap that applies is California’s statewide AB 1482, at 8.7% for the Los Angeles metro, effective August 1 2026 through July 31 2027, calculated as 5% plus 3.7% regional CPI and capped at 10% overall.
Worth being precise about why that matters. A comparable building in the City of Los Angeles is capped at 3% this year under the rewritten RSO formula. An Inglewood building of five or more units sits at roughly 3.8% under that city’s own ordinance. Long Beach owners operate with roughly two and a half times the allowable annual income growth of their City of Los Angeles counterparts.
Two jurisdictional points, because they trip people up. Long Beach is in Los Angeles County but not in the City of Los Angeles, so the RSO does not apply. And the Los Angeles County rent ordinance, currently capped near 1.9%, applies only to unincorporated county areas, not to incorporated cities like Long Beach. Our breakdown of AB 1482 and its key provisions covers the state framework in detail.
One correction worth making, since it circulates widely: Long Beach’s Tenant Relocation Assistance Ordinance, LBMC Chapter 8.97, was adopted in June 2019 and repealed in December 2019, by an 8 to 0 urgency vote, ahead of the state Tenant Protection Act taking effect. It is not live. Any analysis treating it as current is reading six-year-old material.
What Long Beach does regulate: just cause
LBMC Chapter 8.99, Just Cause for Termination of Tenancies, was adopted March 10 2020 and amended in May 2024 to track state law changes. It is more demanding than AB 1482 in several specific ways, and these are the real operating constraints here.
Coverage attaches to tenants in continuous lawful occupancy for twelve months or more. Housing with a certificate of occupancy issued within the prior fifteen years is exempt, as are transient hotels, nonprofit hospitals, religious and care facilities, dormitories, various owner-occupied configurations, deed-restricted and Section 8 housing, and qualifying single-family homes and condos where the owner is not a REIT, corporation or certain LLCs and the required exemption notice has been given.
Notice is 90 days for any no-fault termination, longer than the state baseline.
Substantial remodel is tightly defined, and this is the provision that catches owners out. The work qualifies only if it requires the tenant to vacate for thirty or more consecutive days, and only if it involves permitted structural, electrical, plumbing or mechanical replacement, or abatement of hazardous materials such as lead, mould or asbestos. Cosmetic work does not qualify. Critically, all permits must be obtained before the termination notice is issued, and the notice must include copies of those permits, a description of scope and the approximate duration. The owner must also file the city’s displacement form, one per unit, with a complete tenant list.
The penalty for getting it wrong is real: up to $15,000 for an intentional violation through an invalid termination notice, plus attorney’s fees, and tenants may enforce by civil action.
Relocation assistance for demolition or substantial remodel is the greater of $4,500 or two months’ rent in effect at the notice, paid directly to the tenant within fifteen calendar days, with the notice void if not complied with.
One honest caveat here. The city’s own page indicates one month’s rent, the AB 1482 baseline, for other no-fault grounds such as owner move-in, while two reputable industry sources state the greater of $4,500 or two months’ rent applies to all no-fault grounds. I could not resolve that from the ordinance text. If you are contemplating an owner move-in or an Ellis Act withdrawal in Long Beach, confirm the relocation figure with Long Beach Community Development before serving notice.
Long Beach also runs a Proactive Rental Housing Inspection Program under LBMC 18.30.120, periodically inspecting residential rentals. The city does not publish coverage thresholds, inspection frequency or the fee schedule, so budget for it as an unknown and call Code Enforcement.
Two 2026 city programs owners should know about
Long Beach launched a Renter Aid Program on April 23 2026, $2.7 million targeting up to 1,000 households at or below 50% of area median income, covering overdue rent, short-term assistance, past-due utilities and relocation. The detail that matters to owners: payments are made directly to landlords or service providers, not to tenants. If you have a delinquent tenant who qualifies, this is a route to recovering rent rather than pursuing an eviction.
The city also funded Right to Counsel at $1.5 million for tenant eviction defence, rolled out earlier. Expect represented tenants more often than you used to.
The Transfer Tax Position
Long Beach levies no city documentary transfer tax. Only five cities in Los Angeles County do: Culver City, Los Angeles, Pomona, Redondo Beach and Santa Monica. Long Beach is not among them, so a seller pays only the county rate of $0.55 per $500, which is $1.10 per $1,000, or 0.11%.
And Measure ULA, which applies only within City of Los Angeles boundaries, does not reach Long Beach at all.
On a $6 million apartment building:
| Location | Transfer tax | Approximate cost |
|---|---|---|
| Long Beach | 0.11% | $6,600 |
| Inside City of LA | 4.45% combined under ULA | $267,000 |
A difference of roughly $260,400 on an identical price. ULA is assessed on the entire sale price from dollar one once the threshold is crossed, not just on the excess, and there is no 1031 exemption from it. The current thresholds are $5,400,000 and $10,900,000 for closings after June 30 2026, adjusted annually on Chained CPI. Our full treatment of Measure ULA and multifamily sales covers the mechanics.
This belongs in your offering materials if you are selling, and it is a structural reason for 1031 exchange buyers trading out of City of Los Angeles stock to look here.
The Seismic Program Is Voluntary
Long Beach runs a Building Seismic Resiliency Program targeting soft, weak or open-front wall lines in multistory wood-framed residential buildings built before 1978 with three or more units. Roughly 3,100 buildings citywide have been identified.
The program is voluntary. The city states plainly that there is currently no timeline for required compliance and no immediate consequence for not strengthening. Owners who are misidentified can request reassessment, and those who have completed permitted retrofit work or can document compliance through a licensed engineer can request removal from the list.
Set that against the City of Los Angeles, where covered owners received a mandatory order to comply and then had two years to submit plans, three and a half years to permit and seven years to finish, with Priority I and II orders mailed in 2016. A Long Beach owner of comparable stock has an identified condition and no mandate. Our guide to soft-story retrofit covers what the mandatory version costs.
Two caveats. The city explicitly reserves the right to reconsider and impose mandates depending on resources and earthquake concerns, so this is an advantage with an expiry date nobody has set. And a building on that list of 3,100 still has a structural condition a buyer’s engineer will find, whether or not the city requires anything. Price it, even if the city does not make you fix it.
What Long Beach Buildings Are Trading At
Long Beach is reported as its own submarket by the institutional data providers, but only for rent growth, vacancy and construction share. City-level price per unit and dollar transaction volume are not published, so the pricing figures below come from local brokerage analyses and I will label them as such.
Submarket fundamentals, second quarter 2026:
| Metric | Long Beach | LA metro |
|---|---|---|
| Rent growth YoY | +2.7% | +0.8% |
| Vacancy | 3.9% | 4.5% |
| Construction as share of inventory | 3.0% | n/a |
Rents, as of the end of September 2026, averaged $2,718 across all Long Beach rentals, up 0.65% year over year, on an average unit of 817 square feet:
| Unit type | Average rent | Average size |
|---|---|---|
| Studio | $2,043 | 476 sq ft |
| 1 bedroom | $2,461 | 701 sq ft |
| 2 bedroom | $3,130 | 1,022 sq ft |
| 3 bedroom | $4,128 | 1,348 sq ft |
Cap rates, from local broker analyses in 2026, show a clear split by building size:
| Segment | Cap rate |
|---|---|
| 2 to 4 units | 4.4% |
| 5 or more units | 6.1% |
| Citywide average | 6.0% |
That gap is the most useful thing on this page for a buyer. Small properties trade far tighter because they finance as residential, which brings in owner-users and small investors competing on something other than yield. Cross the five-unit line and you are in commercial underwriting, bidding against investors who price on income, and the yield widens by roughly 170 basis points. Fourplex sales volume rose about 70% year over year, which tells you where the competition is.
Against a metro average cap rate of 5.37% in the second quarter, Long Beach trades wider. Brokers also report sellers pricing roughly 10% to 20% below the 2021 peak. For context on metro pricing, Matthews put average price per unit at $308,551 in the second quarter, roughly 13.9% below the 2022 peak, and Northmarq put the 2025 median at $311,600.
I would not quote you a Long Beach price per unit. No institutional source publishes one, and the figures circulating in older broker content, around $300,000 per unit against a $340,000 peak, are from December 2023 and have been superseded.
Who Owns Here, and What That Means
Long Beach is a genuine small-to-mid apartment market, not an institutional one.
Roughly 59% of households rent, against 170,927 households and about 181,000 housing units. Around 56% of the stock was built before 1970 and about 70% before 1980, so the building vintage is old even though the regulation is light. Structure composition, from older but slow-moving census data, put roughly 48% of units in buildings of two to nineteen units and about 15% in properties of twenty or more.
Translated: most of the inventory here sits in buildings small enough that the buyer pool is private capital, not funds. That has two consequences. Competition on the 2 to 4 unit tier is intense and yield-insensitive. And on the 5 to 50 unit tier you are generally negotiating with individuals and small partnerships rather than acquisition committees, which makes relationships and off-market access matter more than it would in a institutional market. Off-market versus listed sales covers how that works in practice.
Long Beach’s sixth cycle housing allocation is 26,502 units through October 2029, up from 7,048 in the prior cycle, which is why the city has been permitting at pace.
The Demand Case
The Port of Long Beach is the foundation and it is performing. The port moved 9.9 million TEUs in 2025, up 3.1% over 2024 and its busiest year on record. August 2026 set an August record at 919,992 TEUs, up 2% year over year, with January through August running 1.3% ahead of 2025. The port’s chief executive has stated a goal of doubling cargo volume by 2050. That is a deep, wage-paying employment base that does not relocate.
Cal State Long Beach enrolled 42,355 students at the start of Fall 2025, the largest in the university’s history. Fall 2026 figures have not been published, so treat that as the most recent confirmed number rather than current.
The 2028 Olympics put eleven events in Long Beach, more than any city other than Los Angeles itself: beach volleyball at Alamitos Beach, coastal rowing on the waterfront, sport climbing and target shooting on temporary builds at the Convention Center lot, handball at Long Beach Arena, canoe sprint and rowing at Marine Stadium, sailing at Belmont Shore, marathon swimming on the waterfront, and artistic swimming and water polo at a temporary aquatics centre.
That is a genuine profile event for the city, and unlike a single stadium it spreads across the waterfront and downtown, which is where the apartment stock is.
Employment across the wider Los Angeles and Long Beach metropolitan division ran at 4.6 million nonfarm jobs in August 2026, up 0.7% year over year, with unemployment at 4.9%, improved from 5.2% in July.
On the medical and aerospace clusters that get mentioned in connection with Long Beach, I will be straight with you: the employer-level figures in circulation are from 2018 and around 2021, and at least one widely repeated source still lists a space company that ceased operations in 2023. The clusters are real, Relativity Space and Rocket Lab both moved headquarters here in 2020, but I would not underwrite to a specific headcount without a fresh state employment pull.
The 2026 Pipeline
Construction is running at 3.0% of existing inventory, concentrated downtown.
Portico, at 450 Promenade North where Long Beach Boulevard meets 4th Street on the former City Place site, broke ground as a $150 million first phase of 272 apartments across eight storeys with 18,800 square feet of ground-floor retail. The developer is JPI, and completion is expected in June 2028. The full three-phase plan runs to 900 apartments, of which 16 are affordable, plus 50 storefronts.
Alexan West End, at 600 West Broadway on a former surface parking lot, is in vertical construction for roughly 600 apartments across four mid-rise buildings, with a master plan allowing around 750. The developer is Trammell Crow Residential with R&V Management. Delivery timing is genuinely unclear, with three different dates circulating between late 2026 and 2027, so I would not plan around any of them.
For an existing owner, roughly 900 new downtown units arriving over the next two to three years is meaningful but manageable, and it competes at the top of the rent band. A renovated 1958 building in Bixby Knolls or North Long Beach is not bidding for the same tenant as a new eight-storey downtown building asking top-of-market rents. Why new construction is slowing covers the wider pipeline context.
A Note on Carson
Carson is a different market and deserves a short, honest treatment rather than being bolted on.
Structurally it is barely an apartment city. Roughly 74% of Carson households own, so only about a quarter rent, and about 79% of the housing stock is single-family with only around 6% in buildings of twenty or more units. A further 8.8% is mobile homes, which is why the city’s only rent regulation is a Mobilehome Space Rent Control Ordinance covering mobilehome spaces and nothing else. No data provider reports Carson as a standalone multifamily submarket; its figures appear only inside a South Bay grouping that also contains Torrance, Gardena, Hawthorne and Lawndale.
Two things make it worth watching anyway.
On October 6 2026, the Carson City Council rejected the entire tenant protection package that had been brought forward: rent control and rent stabilization, substantial remodel rules, anti-harassment and anti-retaliation provisions, security deposit and owner-entry rules, eviction limits including just cause, relocation fees for seniors and disabled tenants, and a health and safety inspection regime. The mayor pulled the item before discussion and stated it would not be heard under her administration. Carson apartment owners now operate under AB 1482 alone, with no local layer at all. That is the clearest regulatory position of any city in this corridor.
The Phillips 66 refinery ceased operations in the fourth quarter of 2025, removing roughly 600 employees and 300 contractors from the Carson and Wilmington area, with 650 combined acres entering redevelopment planning. That cuts both ways for an owner here: near-term loss of a well-paid renter base, longer-term redevelopment upside. Note that the published redevelopment plan covers the 444-acre Wilmington portion, which is in the City of Los Angeles, not Carson. No Carson-specific plan has been published.
Carson also hosts four 2028 Olympic events: track cycling at the velodrome, hockey, rugby sevens and tennis, at the complex home to the LA Galaxy, which is partway through a four-year renovation.
Two residential projects are moving: Evolve South Bay, 300 rental apartments across four-storey buildings on 11.8 acres at Main Street and Del Amo Boulevard, and Manhattan Square, 351 for-sale condos and townhomes from the mid-$700,000s, which is a for-sale comp signal rather than rental supply.
For the full Carson picture alongside its neighbours, the South Bay guide covers it city by city.
Strategy for Owners
Your allowable increase is the regional advantage. Use it. At 8.7% you have room a City of Los Angeles owner does not. If your rents have drifted below market, you can close that gap through increases rather than waiting on turnover, which is the opposite of the South LA situation.
Document the regulatory position when you sell. No local rent cap, no city transfer tax, no ULA, voluntary seismic program. A buyer comparing your building against City of Los Angeles product is looking at a materially better operating and exit profile, and most will not know it unless you tell them.
Get the just cause mechanics right. The 90-day notice, the permits-before-notice rule on substantial remodel, the city filing forms and the $15,000 exposure are the real compliance risk in this market. An invalid notice is void and the tenant can sue.
If you are sitting on a 2 to 4 unit property, know what tier you are in. Those trade around 4.4% against 6.1% for five or more units. That is a genuine pricing premium driven by residential financing and owner-user demand, and it may be the best exit you will see.
How to value your apartment building before selling covers the methodology, and sell or refinance covers the hold-versus-exit math.
Strategy for Buyers
Decide which side of the five-unit line you want. It is the single biggest pricing decision in this market. Below it, residential financing, longer fixed terms, lower down payments, tighter cap rates. At or above it, commercial underwriting, debt service coverage of 1.20 to 1.25 sizing your loan, and roughly 170 basis points more yield.
Take the wider cap rate for what it is. Six percent here against 5.37% metro is not mispricing, it is compensation for older stock and a smaller buyer pool on exit. That is a reasonable trade if you are holding, less so if you need a quick resale.
Check the seismic list. A building among the 3,100 identified has a structural condition even though the city does not currently require a fix. Get an engineer, price the work, and know that a future mandate is explicitly on the table.
Confirm the relocation figure before you plan any no-fault strategy. The city and the industry sources disagree on owner move-in, and the difference is between one month’s rent and the greater of $4,500 or two months’.
Budget for the inspection program. Coverage and fees are not published.
How to analyze a multifamily deal covers the underwriting with a worked example, how to buy multifamily property in Los Angeles covers the process, and the Los Angeles multifamily market overview puts Long Beach alongside the other submarkets.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Long Beach have rent control? No. Long Beach has no local rent cap. The only limit is California’s statewide AB 1482, at 8.7% for the Los Angeles metro from August 1 2026 through July 31 2027. The city’s former Tenant Relocation Assistance Ordinance was repealed in December 2019 and is sometimes wrongly described as current.
How much can I raise rent in Long Beach? Up to 8.7% for the year beginning August 1 2026, under AB 1482, for covered buildings. That is roughly two and a half times what a City of Los Angeles RSO building allows this year, which is 3%.
Does Long Beach have just cause eviction? Yes. LBMC Chapter 8.99, adopted in March 2020 and amended in May 2024. It requires 90-day notice for no-fault terminations, defines substantial remodel narrowly as work requiring the tenant to vacate thirty or more consecutive days with all permits obtained before notice, and carries exposure of up to $15,000 for an intentional violation.
What relocation assistance do Long Beach landlords owe? For demolition or substantial remodel, the greater of $4,500 or two months’ rent, paid directly to the tenant within fifteen calendar days. For other no-fault grounds the picture is less clear: the city indicates one month’s rent while industry sources state the higher figure applies to all no-fault reasons. Confirm with Long Beach Community Development before serving notice.
Does Measure ULA apply in Long Beach? No. ULA applies only within City of Los Angeles boundaries. Long Beach also levies no city transfer tax of its own, so a seller pays only the county rate of 0.11%. On a $6 million building that is about $6,600, against roughly $267,000 for the same price inside City of Los Angeles limits.
What are cap rates in Long Beach? Local broker analyses in 2026 put the citywide average near 6.0%, splitting to roughly 6.1% for buildings of five or more units and about 4.4% for 2 to 4 unit properties. The metro average was 5.37% in the second quarter of 2026, so Long Beach trades wider, particularly on the commercial-financed tier.
Why do small Long Beach properties trade at lower cap rates? Because 2 to 4 unit buildings finance as residential property, which brings owner-occupants and small investors into the bidding on terms other than yield. Five or more units shifts to commercial underwriting where the loan is sized by the building’s income, so buyers price on return. Fourplex sales volume rose roughly 70% year over year.
Is Long Beach a good multifamily market right now? On fundamentals it has been outperforming: rent growth of 2.7% against a metro 0.8%, vacancy of 3.9% against 4.5%, and that with construction running at 3.0% of inventory. Combine it with no local rent cap, no ULA exposure and a voluntary seismic program, and the operating profile is better than most of the county.
Does Long Beach require soft-story retrofits? No. The Building Seismic Resiliency Program is voluntary, with no compliance timeline and no immediate consequence for not strengthening. About 3,100 buildings have been identified, generally pre-1978 wood-framed with three or more units. The city reserves the right to impose mandates later, and a building on the list still carries a condition a buyer’s engineer will find.
How old is Long Beach apartment stock? Old. Roughly 56% of housing units were built before 1970 and about 70% before 1980. That means real capital expenditure budgets and seismic conditions, but without the mandatory retrofit obligation a City of Los Angeles owner of the same vintage carries.
What is driving Long Beach rental demand? The Port of Long Beach, which moved a record 9.9 million TEUs in 2025 and set an August record in 2026; Cal State Long Beach with 42,355 students as of Fall 2025; a downtown and waterfront employment base; and eleven 2028 Olympic events spread across the waterfront, Marine Stadium, Long Beach Arena and the Convention Center.
Should I buy in Long Beach or Carson? They are not really comparable. Long Beach is a deep apartment market of 450,000 people where about 59% of households rent. Carson is roughly 74% owner-occupied with only around 6% of its stock in buildings of twenty or more units, and no data provider reports it as a standalone submarket. Carson’s advantage is regulatory: on October 6 2026 its council rejected the entire tenant protection package, so it operates under AB 1482 with no local layer at all.
Talking About a Specific Building
Long Beach is the market where the gap between what the regulation allows and what owners think it allows is widest, and it runs in owners’ favour for once. No local cap, no city transfer tax, no ULA, no retrofit mandate. The constraints that do exist, mainly the just cause mechanics, are procedural rather than economic.
I work with owners and investors across Long Beach, the South Bay and greater Los Angeles from Lyon Stahl’s El Segundo office, in English and Spanish. If you own here and have not tested what the building is worth against a buyer pool that increasingly understands the regulatory advantage, a free valuation will tell you. If you are buying, I can tell you which tier your capital competes best in and what is quietly available.
See current active listings, or reach out to talk through a specific property.
