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 They went on the market, sat, and came back off — expired, cancelled, or withdrawn.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- Of the 269 that failed, 97 formally expired, 162 were cancelled and 10 withdrawn — so the true "never sold" rate is a range, 26% to 49% citywide.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:
- The actual days-on-market number for your price band, so you know what normal looks like.
- An honest read on which of the four causes applied to your listing — and it is usually more than one.
- 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.