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On Sunday, August 2, Marmalade Cafe served its last meal at The Commons at Calabasas. It had been there since 1998 — one of the center's original tenants, twenty-eight years.

The company's explanation was blunt. "The ongoing construction throughout the shopping center has resulted in a devastating decline in business," it said, adding that "despite our best efforts to weather these changes… the landlord declined to help." The Acorn reported that Marmalade asked for construction-period rent relief and was refused.

Fresh Brothers Pizza is gone too.

Almost everything written about the Commons redevelopment describes what's coming. This is the part that's already happened — and most of the coverage still in circulation describes a version of the project the city replaced two years ago.

Executive Summary

• The Calabasas City Council approved the project twice: Resolution 2023-1880 on December 6, 2023, then a scaled-down Resolution 2024-1927 on October 9, 2024.
• The approved project shrank by 16%: from 119 apartments and 210,921 square feet of new floor area to 80 apartments and 176,261 square feet.
• Affordable housing dropped from 12 units at low-income to 4 units at very-low-income, under a 55-year affordability covenant.
• New commercial space grew slightly, to 27,411 square feet, for 12 to 14 shops and restaurants. No tenants have been publicly announced.
• The traffic study projects 437 net new daily trips, 69 in the AM peak and 65 in the PM peak — after crediting roughly 998 daily trips removed with the 567-seat movie theater.
• Commercial parking drops from 1,059 spaces to 931 — a loss of 128, or 10.7%. Projected peak demand is 896 spaces.
• The 2024 downsizing was approved as a consent calendar item. The Planning Commission never reviewed it.
• Site prep began January 2026 and construction broke ground February 3, 2026. Some shops are targeted for end of 2026; all construction including the apartments completes Fall 2027.
• Marmalade Cafe, an original 1998 tenant, closed August 2, 2026, citing construction. Fresh Brothers also closed during construction.
• The plaza green space grew in the revision, from 2,840 to 4,720 square feet, planned for community events, children's programming and outdoor movies.

The numbers most coverage still gets wrong

If you have read about this project, you have probably seen 119 apartments and 210,921 square feet. Those figures are real, but they describe the plan the council approved in December 2023 — not the one being built.

In October 2024 the council approved a materially smaller project. Here is what changed:

	Approved Dec 2023	Approved Oct 2024
Total new floor area	210,921 sq ft	176,261 sq ft
Apartments	119	80
Affordable units	12, low-income	4, very-low-income
New commercial	24,163 sq ft	27,411 sq ft
Building B height	46 ft, 3 stories	33 ft, 2 stories
Subterranean parking	Included	Eliminated
Plaza green space	2,840 sq ft	4,720 sq ft
Earthwork export	10,600 cubic yards	400 cubic yards

Building A stayed at 85 feet and eight stories.

Two things in that table matter more than the rest. The project got physically smaller and generated far less truck traffic during construction — 400 cubic yards of exported dirt instead of 10,600. And the affordable housing was cut by two-thirds.

One note on a figure you may also encounter: coverage of the February groundbreaking described roughly 190,000 square feet of new construction. The number entitled by the city is 176,261. Where the two came from is not documented; the city's figure is the one in the resolution.

How an 85-foot building happened in a 35-foot zone

The Commercial Mixed-Use zoning at this site limits buildings to 35 feet. Building A is 85 feet.

That gap was bridged by California's State Density Bonus Law, which lets a developer who includes affordable housing request waivers from local development standards. The detail worth knowing: Caruso asked for a density bonus of zero percent. No additional units. The law was used entirely to obtain the height waiver, smaller parking stall dimensions, and the state's reduced residential parking ratios.

At the December 2023 hearing, Councilmember James Bozajian called the 85-foot height "extraordinary" and asked that the project return to council if it grew in final design.

The city's own staff report noted that denying the requested concessions would require further analysis under the Housing Accountability Act — the state law that limits a city's ability to reject qualifying housing. A pro-housing organization, the California Housing Defense Fund, submitted a letter pressing that point.

This is worth understanding if you were surprised by the outcome. Calabasas voters rejected a 161-unit apartment proposal in 2020 by 77.5% to 22.5%. Six years later a project with a taller building was approved with broad public support and no organized opposition. State housing law is a large part of why the second one was harder to stop.

The traffic question, answered

Traffic was the most common concern raised at the hearings. The study is public, and it is more specific than the conversation around it.

Linscott, Law & Greenspan analyzed the project in July 2023. Their conclusion:

• 437 net new daily trips, roughly 218 in and 217 out
• 69 net new trips in the AM peak hour
• 65 net new trips in the PM peak hour

Those are net figures. The demolished movie theater — 567 seats — was generating about 998 daily trips and 45 PM peak trips, and that reduction is already subtracted. So the honest summary is that trips go up, but by less than the new construction alone would suggest.

The study also screened the project out of vehicle-miles-traveled analysis under SB 743, on two grounds: the commercial component is below the 50,000-square-foot threshold for local-serving retail, and the site sits in an area the county already classifies as low-VMT for residential. Freeway ramp queuing was screened out as well, with fewer than 25 added trips at any nearby ramp.

Whether 437 more daily trips on Calabasas Road feels like a lot is a judgment call. But it is the number, and it comes from the study the city relied on.

The parking math behind the empty tables

The parking numbers explain more about the merchant situation than the traffic numbers do.

KOA Corporation's shared parking analysis found:

• The center had 1,059 commercial spaces
• The completed project provides 931 — a reduction of 128 spaces, or 10.7%
• Projected peak demand, on a December weekend afternoon, is 896 spaces

That leaves a projected margin of 35 spaces at the busiest hour of the year. The study concluded the project "is not anticipated to generate adverse off-site parking effects."

That is the projection for the finished center. It is not a description of what parking looks like during two years of construction, when portions of the lot are fenced. Valet now runs Friday through Sunday, 11am to 7:30pm.

The October 2024 report on the downsized project gives no revised parking counts, so the post-reduction numbers are not on the public record.

How the smaller version was approved

The December 2023 approval went through the full process: a Development Review Committee meeting, two Architectural Review Panel sessions, two Planning Commission hearings, and a council public hearing with 38 speakers. The Planning Commission recommended approval 5–0 after the applicant added 26 voluntary conditions.

The October 2024 revision took a different route. It was placed on the consent calendar — the portion of a council agenda reserved for routine items approved in a single vote without individual discussion. It was pulled for separate consideration after public comment and passed unanimously. The Planning Commission did not review it.

Reducing a Housing Element site from 119 units to 80 required the council to make written "no net loss" findings under state law, confirming the city could still meet its housing obligations elsewhere. It found that 329 units are still required and 1,157 units remain available across other opportunity sites.

Speaking as a private citizen at that meeting, Planning Commissioner Michael Harrison objected to the placement of the four affordable units, describing them as "located next to the trash area at the bottom, in the back facing the driveway and the cement wall."

What opens when

• January 2026 — site preparation began
• February 3, 2026 — groundbreaking
• Now — construction underway on both the new shops and restaurants and the apartment parking structure. The center remains open, with normal hours.
• End of 2026 — some new shops and restaurants targeted to open
• Fall 2027 — completion of all construction, including the residential building

The finished center adds 12 to 14 shops and restaurants, a landscaped paseo, and a green space roughly two-thirds larger than the December 2023 plan called for, intended for community events and outdoor movies.

No tenants for the new space have been publicly announced.

The theater

The Edwards Grand Palace opened at The Commons on December 18, 1998, with six screens and 649 seats. It closed in September 2022 when Regal's parent company went through bankruptcy, reopened that Christmas under Regency Theatres with recliner seating, and closed for good at the end of 2025.

Caruso's stated reason is that a movie theater "made a lot of sense when The Commons opened in 1998, before the advent of streaming services." Worth noting the sequence: the entitlement approving the theater's demolition passed in December 2023, two years before it closed.

Its closure leaves no movie theater between Thousand Oaks and Woodland Hills.

What this means if you live or own nearby

I am not going to tell you what this does to your property value, because the data doesn't support a claim either way yet. There were 18 sales on the streets closest to the site in the past twelve months. That is not enough to separate a construction effect from which houses happened to sell.

What I can tell you is what's practical.

If you're selling nearby before Fall 2027, buyers will see the construction and ask about it. Knowing the completion date, the traffic figures and the parking plan turns an objection into an answer. Being vague about it is what costs you.

If you're a Commons merchant or looking at commercial space there, the parking arithmetic above is the number to plan around, and Marmalade's experience is the case study on what construction-period revenue can look like.

If you're considering downsizing into one of the 80 apartments, Caruso names "seniors looking to downsize" as a target resident. Those units come online in Fall 2027. If selling a Calabasas house is part of that plan, the sequencing question — when to list, whether to bridge, what to do if the timelines don't line up — is worth working out well before then, not in 2027.

The next twenty-eight years

It is worth remembering what was here before The Commons. A roughly 70-acre dirt field. Caruso didn't buy this center — he built it, from the ground up, and it opened in November 1998. For twenty-eight years it has been where Calabasas actually gathers. Not a mall. The place you run into people.

What's being built is a bet that it stays that way for the next twenty-eight.

The green space at the center of the plan grew rather than shrank in the revision — from 2,840 square feet to 4,720, laid out for community events, children's programming, local music, and outdoor movies. There's a landscaped paseo with wide sidewalks at pedestrian scale. Twelve to fourteen new shops and restaurants. Eighty homes for people who want to live somewhere they can walk to dinner, which in this part of Los Angeles County is close to unheard of.

There's a small irony in it that I like: the replacement for a demolished movie theater includes screening movies outdoors, in a park, for free.

At the groundbreaking, Rick Caruso said something about Calabasas that is easy to skip past: "Capital flows where it's safe, and where it's allowed to grow. In an era where so many cities are struggling, the City of Calabasas is just the opposite."

None of that erases the cost of getting there. Marmalade was open for the entire first twenty-eight years and did not make it to the twenty-ninth. Both of those things are true at the same time, and I'd rather tell you both than pick the half that's easier to read.

What I could not confirm

A few things are unresolved, and I would rather say so than fill the gap.

Sources disagree on the theater's exact final day — reporting variously gives late December 2025, early January 2026, and February 2026. No record of the actual demolition date is public. Post-downsizing parking counts were never published. A $120,000 traffic mitigation fee was reported by The Acorn but does not appear in the traffic study or the resolution. And Caruso has not publicly responded to the merchant concerns; The Acorn noted it was unable to reach the company.

Common questions

Is The Commons open during construction? Yes. All stores and restaurants remain open with normal hours — Monday through Thursday 10 to 7, Friday and Saturday 10 to 8, Sunday 11 to 7. Surface parking remains available, and valet operates Friday through Sunday from 11am to 7:30pm.

When will the new shops open? Some are targeted for the end of 2026. All construction, including the apartment building, is scheduled to complete in Fall 2027.

How many apartments, and are any affordable? Eighty apartments. Four are deed-restricted as very-low-income under a 55-year covenant. The December 2023 approval called for 119 units with 12 affordable at the low-income level; the October 2024 revision reduced both.

Will traffic get worse? The traffic study projects 437 more daily trips and about 69 more in the morning peak hour, after accounting for the roughly 998 daily trips the closed movie theater no longer generates. The project was screened out of further vehicle-miles-traveled analysis under state law.

Is parking being reduced? Yes. Commercial parking goes from 1,059 spaces to 931, a 10.7% reduction. The shared-parking study projects peak demand of 896 spaces at the busiest time of year.

Why is Building A 85 feet when the zoning limit is 35? State Density Bonus Law allows waivers from local standards for projects including affordable housing. The developer requested no additional units — a 0% density bonus — and used the law for the height waiver and reduced parking standards.

Is the movie theater coming back? No. The theater site is where the apartment building is going. The plan does include outdoor movie screenings in the new green space.

A note on sources

Entitlement figures come from City of Calabasas Resolutions 2023-1880 and 2024-1927 and the associated staff reports. Traffic figures are from the Linscott, Law & Greenspan analysis dated July 21, 2023; parking figures from the KOA Corporation shared parking analysis dated July 12, 2023. Construction status and hours come from the City's Commons Lane project page and shopcommons.com. Merchant closures are from The Acorn's reporting of August 7, 2026.

Where published figures conflict, I have used the city's entitlement documents and said so.

I have spent thirteen years and about $152 million in sales volume in this market, and my office is on Calabasas Road, a few minutes from the site. I've watched this center be the middle of town for most of my career, and I'm looking forward to what it becomes.

If you own nearby and want to talk through what the next two years look like for your timing, call me — whether or not you're selling.

 

Over the past twelve months in Calabasas, 280 homes sold.

269 didn't.

Not "sold slowly." Didn't sell. They went on the market, sat, and came back off — expired, cancelled, or withdrawn. That is roughly half of everything listed in this city.

Here's the part that surprises people: it isn't because Calabasas is a bad market. The homes that did sell closed in a median of 43 days, and prices are up about 3% over the year before. Calabasas is a fine place to sell a house. It is a very hard place to sell an overpriced house, and the gap between those two sentences is where 269 sellers lost the better part of a year.

Executive Summary

• Between August 27, 2025 and August 26, 2026, 280 Calabasas homes closed and 269 came off the market without selling — roughly half of everything listed.
• Homes that sold closed in a median of 43 days. Homes that failed sat a median of 84.
• Above $4 million, more Calabasas listings failed than sold — 76 versus 32.
• Of the 269 listings that failed, 112 cut their price first — about 42%. The median cut was roughly $125,000. It didn't save them.
• Homes priced right at launch sold in a median of 23 days and closed 1.8% below their original ask. Homes that needed a cut took 84 days and closed 10% below — a gap worth roughly $150,000 on a median-priced Calabasas home.
• About a third of homes that sold had cut their price at some point, so cutting is not itself a failure — but the cut costs about eight percentage points of final price.
• Among failed listings, the share that had cut their price climbed from 3% in the first 30 days to 63% past 120 days, and the average cut deepened from 4.3% to 7.2%.
• Luxury staging in this market starts around $15,000 and typically runs as a three-month contract, then a monthly fee — landing on the same 90-day mark the listing data points to.
• The $1.5M–$2.5M band is the healthiest in the city: homes there sold in a median of 34 days, the fastest of any price range.
• Of the 269 that failed, 97 formally expired, 162 were cancelled and 10 withdrawn — so the true "never sold" rate is a range, 26% to 49% citywide.

The market is not the problem

I want to get this out of the way, because most sellers whose listing just expired assume the market turned on them.

It didn't. In June 2026 the median Calabasas sale price was $1,829,005, up 3.0% year over year, and the typical home sold in 42 days according to Redfin. My own MLS pull of every Calabasas closing over the last twelve months puts the median at 43 days. Two separate sources, one day apart.

So buyers are here. They are buying. They are just not buying everything.

Three reasons a listing fails

In thirteen years I have watched a lot of listings expire, and almost all of them come down to one of three things.

A pricing gap. The list price and what a buyer will actually pay are too far apart. This is the most common cause by a wide margin, and it is the hardest one for a seller to see from inside their own house.

A marketing gap. The home was priced reasonably, but buyers never really saw it. Weak photography, no video, a listing that went live on a Friday afternoon with eight dark pictures, no reach beyond the MLS. The buyer pool for a Calabasas home is not big enough to survive being invisible for the first two weeks.

Staging belongs in this category, and it is the line sellers cut first. NAR's 2025 Profile of Home Staging found that 83% of buyers' agents said staging made it easier for a buyer to picture the home as their own, 29% of listing agents reported staged homes drew offers 1% to 10% higher, and about half reported staged homes spent less time on the market.

That same report puts the median cost of a staging service at $1,500. Ignore that number here. It is a national median across every price point in the country, and it includes listings the agent staged themselves out of a storage unit. Out here, luxury staging starts around $15,000 and climbs from there — and what I typically see out here is a three-month contract, then a fee for every month after that.

Sit with that structure, because it is telling you something. You are buying ninety days whether you use them or not, and on day 91 the meter starts running again. That lines up with what the MLS shows: by day 91, six in ten Calabasas sellers who ultimately failed had already cut their price. The contracts I see and the numbers I pulled point at the same wall.

The math still favors staging. At the Calabasas median of $1.83 million, $15,000 is about eight-tenths of one percent of the sale price. If staging moves the number by even a single percent, it has paid for itself. And the band where sellers balk hardest at a five-figure staging bill is the $4M+ band — the one where seven in ten listings already fail.

Both ends of this go wrong. A vacant house gives a buyer nothing to scale a room against. A house staged around the current owner's furniture asks a buyer to picture their life inside somebody else's. Living room, primary bedroom and kitchen are the three rooms buyers' agents rank as mattering most, in that order — and those are the rooms most often left as they are.

A communication breakdown. Nobody told the seller what was happening. Showings dropped off, feedback stopped, and no one sat down and said "here is what the last thirty days told us, and here is what I recommend." This is the one that doesn't show up anywhere in the data, and it is the one sellers describe most often when they explain why they didn't renew.

The fourth reason, which almost nobody says out loud

Those three are real. They are also what every agent who prospects expired listings will tell you, because all three imply the same conclusion — hire a better agent.

The data says there is a fourth cause, and it is structural.

Above $4 million, 32 Calabasas homes sold in an entire year. Fewer than three a month, in the whole city. In that same year, 76 listings above $4 million came off the market without selling.

That is not three agents making three mistakes. That is a buyer pool with a floor under it. When only 32 buyers exist for a price point in twelve months, better photography does not manufacture a 33rd. At that level, price and timing carry almost all the weight, and any agent who tells you their marketing plan alone will fix it is selling you something.

Here is how the odds stack up by price:

If your home is worth	Chance it sold in the past twelve months
Under $1.5M	About 6 in 10
$1.5M – $2.5M	About 6 in 10
$2.5M – $4M	Slightly worse than a coin flip
Above $4M	About 3 in 10

(Range depends on how you count. See the note at the end.)

The healthiest part of the Calabasas market right now is between $1.5 and $2.5 million. Those homes sold in a median of 34 days — the fastest in the city.

What a price cut actually tells you

I could not answer this properly until I pulled the sold data too. The answer is not what I expected.

Cutting the price is not the mistake. Eighty-seven Calabasas sellers reduced their asking price and sold anyway — about a third of every successful sale in the city involved a reduction. Anyone telling you a price cut is an admission of failure is wrong.

But look at what needing to cut costs you.

	Median days on market	Closed vs. original ask
Sold, never cut	23 days	1.8% below
Sold, cut the price	84 days	10.0% below
Never sold, never cut	59 days	—
Never sold, cut the price	120 days	—

The homes priced right on day one sold in 23 days — three weeks — and closed within 2% of what they asked. The homes that had to be repriced took 84 days and closed 10% below their original number.

On a home listed at the Calabasas median of $1.83 million, that gap is about $150,000.

And the size of the cut is not what separates the two groups. Sellers who sold cut a median of 6.2%. Sellers who failed cut a median of 5.8%. Nearly identical. What separated them was whether they needed to cut at all — and how long they took to find out.

The cut is not the disease. The cut is the bill.

One Calabasas home listed at $15,000,000, cut to $11,500,000, sat for 328 days, and expired anyway. A three-and-a-half-million-dollar reduction does not fix a launch price problem. It only pays for it.

The cut curve: how price reductions pile up over time

There is a well-known chart in this business showing that the longer a home sits, the deeper the eventual discount. It's usually national data, and it's usually presented at conferences without a market attached.

So I ran it for Calabasas.

Days on market	Share that had cut the price	Average cut, among those who cut
0–30	3%	6.0%
31–60	20%	4.3%
61–90	46%	5.6%
91–120	60%	6.1%
Over 120	63%	7.2%

Two things happen at once, and both start around day 60.

More sellers cut. Between day 30 and day 90, the share of Calabasas sellers who had reduced their price goes from 1 in 5 to nearly 1 in 2. By day 91 it's 6 in 10.

And the cuts get deeper. A seller cutting in the 31–60 day window took about 4.3% off. A seller still on the market past 120 days took 7.2% — close to double.

Every listing in that table came off the market without selling. So this is not a chart about how discounting eventually works. It's a chart about how a pricing problem compounds: you wait, you cut, it doesn't move, you wait longer, you cut deeper, and you end up further from your original number than if you had been honest in week one.

The 0–30 day row is the one to sit with. Only 3% of sellers cut in the first month. Almost nobody adjusts inside the window when adjusting would still matter.

Know your number before you list

Here is what I think most sellers never get, and what I would want if I were the one making the decision.

Before your home goes on the market, you should know the specific median days on market for your price band in Calabasas — not the national number, not the county number, not "homes are selling fast right now." Yours.

Right now those numbers are:

Price band	Median days on market, homes that sold
Under $1.5M	50 days
$1.5M – $2.5M	34 days
$2.5M – $4M	49 days
Above $4M	61 days

Now you have a threshold. If your home is listed at $2 million and you are at day 45 with no offer, that is not a feeling — that is a measurable signal that something in the pricing, the marketing, or both is off, and you are past the point where waiting is a strategy.

That number should be agreed on before the sign goes in the yard, not discovered in month four.

And have the second plan ready

The threshold is only useful if something happens when you cross it.

Before you list, you and your agent should have already written down what you do at day 30, at day 45, and at day 60. Not vaguely. Specifically: what gets re-shot, what price gets tested, what changes about how the home is shown, and what you do if none of it moves the needle.

Almost nobody does this. It is why so many sellers spend four months waiting for a market that already answered them in week three.

Sometimes the agent did everything right

I am not going to pretend every expired listing is an agent's fault, because that isn't true and you would know it.

Plenty of these listings had good photography, a real marketing budget, honest weekly communication, and an agent who recommended a price the seller declined to take. The seller had a number in their head — from a neighbor's sale, from what they paid, from what they need to buy the next house — and they held it. The agent went along rather than lose the listing.

That listing was going to expire the day it went live, and no one could have saved it.

If that is what happened to you, the problem was never the marketing plan. It was the number. Whoever you list with next, make them show you the data behind the price before you agree to it — and be willing to hear an answer you did not want.

If your listing just came off

You have about a month before the decision gets made for you. Nationally, roughly 45% of sellers whose listing expires relist within about 30 to 35 days, usually with someone new.

Before you do that, get three things:

1. The actual days-on-market number for your price band, so you know what normal looks like.
2. An honest read on which of the four causes applied to your listing — and it is usually more than one.
3. A written plan for what happens at day 30 and day 45 next time.

If you want me to run those numbers for your specific home, I'll do it whether or not you list with me. I've spent thirteen years and about $152 million in sales volume in this market, my office is on Calabasas Road, and I would rather tell you the truth about your price now than sell you a listing agreement and hope.

Common questions

How long should I wait before relisting? Long enough to change something. Relisting the same house at the same price with the same photos produces the same result. Most sellers who relist do it within about a month, but the calendar matters less than whether anything is actually different.

Does my listing history follow me? Not as much as people assume, and this is where sellers get bad information. In CRMLS, relisting resets Days Active in MLS to zero — on the primary field, it looks like a brand-new listing. The cumulative counter only resets after 90 straight days off market or a change in ownership, and agents can see both. So another agent can pull your history, and Zillow and the other portals keep their own price and status timelines regardless. In my Calabasas data, about 13% of failed listings showed a prior attempt inside that 90-day window. The practical read: a relist genuinely looks fresh to most people scrolling, and anyone who digs will still find the history.

Can I relist with the same agent? Often, yes — if the reason it failed was something you both now understand and have a plan for. If the reason was a price you insisted on, a new agent may just be a new person to have the same argument with.

Does taking it off and waiting for spring help? Sometimes. Calabasas listings come off the market most often in September and December, which is what happens when six-month agreements signed in spring quietly run out. But if the price was wrong in October, it will still be wrong in April unless something changes.

How do I tell whether it was price or marketing? Count showings. Lots of showings and no offers usually means price and condition are fighting each other — buyers are seeing it and passing on it. Very few showings is almost always pricing that is off, mixed with marketing that could be doing more; in my experience it is rarely only one of the two. And no showings and no calls at all means the price band is wrong — the home is sitting in a range where its actual buyer is not even looking.

Is it different above $4 million? Yes, materially. Only 32 homes above $4 million sold in Calabasas in the past twelve months. At that level the buyer pool is small enough that timing and price dominate, and patience has to be part of the plan from the beginning rather than a reaction to failure.

A note on these numbers

Everything here comes from CRMLS records for residential sale listings in the City of Calabasas with a status change between August 27, 2025 and August 26, 2026.

One honest caveat. Of the 269 listings that came off the market, 97 formally expired, 162 were cancelled, and 10 were withdrawn. A cancellation isn't automatically a failure — sellers cancel to change agents, to relist, or because their plans changed. So the true "never sold" rate sits between 26% and 49% citywide, and between 48% and 70% above $4 million, depending on how you count.

I'd rather show you the range than pick the scarier number.

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