The City of Los Angeles has avoided the effects of the subprime rampage many parts of the country have seen. While major media sources including The Los Angeles Times have been quick to correctly point to Southern California as an epicenter of the subprime debacle, those same news sources have been slow to point out that Los Angeles and its Westside neighbors have been spared from the foreclosures seen in other parts of the Southland.

Yes, areas of the San Fernando Valley, Los Angeles County, and many areas of the Inland Empire—San Bernardino County and Riverside County—have been hit hard by the subprime situation, but the real estate market in the City of Los Angeles and other parts of the Westside area has remained strong.

The local media has been criticized in recent weeks by many real estate professionals for failing to report on the distinction between the Southland as a whole and Los Angeles in particular. The difference is stark and deserves to be identified.

They could just as easily have included facts—even just a sentence or two—about the strength of the real estate market in the Westside instead of their uniformly ‘doom-and-gloom’ outlook.

"I understand that the [Los Angeles] Times needs to make a buck, just like everybody else, and sensationalistic headlines certainly sell papers," says one colleague who’s definitely taken umbrage with the one-sided reporting on the subprime situation.

"But they could just as easily have included facts—even just a sentence or two—about the strength of the real estate market in the Westside instead of their uniformly ‘doom-and-gloom’ outlook. That would have given their readers a more complete picture of local conditions."

This juxtaposition of fortunes may be due to the fact that as home prices increased in the popular Westside area, many homebuyers were forced out of the market and bought homes in the Inland Empire instead. Many of these same buyers used subprime loans to finance their purchase and are now seeing their mortgage payments grow beyond their ability to pay.

According to RETRAN data, there were only 8 total foreclosures for the third quarter of 2007 for the following areas of the Westside:

• Brentwood
• Bel Air
• Beverly Hills
• Malibu
• Marina Del Rey
• Pacific Palisades
• Santa Monica
• West Hollywood
• Westwood (90024)
• West Los Angeles (90025).

In fact, according to DataQuick, of the 13,583 total Notices of Default issued (this is before foreclosure actually begins) for either single-family residences or condominiums in the Los Angeles area for Q3 of 2007, less than one-half of one percent were from the Westside.

Given that affluent and not-so-affluent areas of the San Fernando Valley, San Gabriel Valley and the Westside are still experiencing brisk sales activity, especially on well-priced homes, the broad strokes painted by The Los Angeles Times and other media outlets have given many potential homebuyers a false impression of current market conditions.

2007 has been kind to the Los Angeles real estate market. Buyers who are waiting for a potential glut of foreclosures to flood the market may be better-advised to set their sights on areas other than the resilient Westside of Los Angeles.

Will this resilience continue in 2008? We’re about to find out.