For CRE, LA's Mayoral Race Is About Making The City 'Investable' Again

With Los Angeles’ mayoral primary coming in June, the crowded pool of candidates and narrow margins in early polls mean the position is very much up for grabs. 

Commercial real estate groups and leaders hope to see a candidate who will reverse the decline in confidence among investors and push for changes to the city’s quality of life.

“I don't think this election is about politics,” Concord CEO Reuben Robin said. “It's about whether LA becomes investable again, and that's really what it comes down to.”

Although LA metro real estate sales volumes across all property types grew year-over-year to $37.3B at the end of 2025, that figure remains $14.1B below the $51.4B in sales the area reached at the end of 2019. 

Robin said his company, which owns multifamily properties, began in Los Angeles and in 2014 started buying in about a dozen markets outside of California in search of better yields. By late 2022, Concord began buying in LA again. It has about 1,000 units under contract in the city now. 

Robin’s investors are skeptical. They're sticking with him as he brings capital back to LA, but they aren't as sure as he is that it's a safe bet.

Many industry experts who spoke with Bisnow mentioned in some way that regulations create unpredictability that makes some investors balk at putting money into the city, especially when there are more stable municipalities right next door.  

Things like Measure ULA and caps on rental increases come quickly and have major impacts on the value and desirability of property in LA, they said. Measure ULA places a 4% tax on real estate transactions starting at $5.3M and a 5.5% tax on deals of $10.6M or more. 

“LA doesn't have a demand problem,” Robin said. “It just has a policy execution problem.” 

While most of the policy is dictated by the city council rather than the mayor, the city’s top elected official does have power, through executive directives, to streamline approvals and generally galvanize the public for or against issues. CRE leaders said there was a lot of room for improvement on all these fronts. 

Regulations such as Measure ULA, which many in commercial real estate say negatively impacts the construction of new apartments, or those that affect multifamily owners, such as rent increase caps, were examples of issues that CRE leaders said a mayor can't fix alone but can certainly help to direct opinion on. 

And with a substantial homeless population in Los Angeles, the impacts of the shortage of housing that Angelenos can afford are on display every day and bleeding into multiple aspects of life and work in the city.

“There are obviously a lot of issues LA is facing, and how those get managed — from our budget crisis and beyond — are obviously important,” California Landmark Group principal Ari Kahan said. “But at the end of the day, I think that if we're able to actually start building, we could fix the housing affordability crisis in a way that allowed our city to properly grow in the way that it did 10 years ago.” 

Industry professionals see the creation of new housing units, affordable and market-rate, as a critical element to the city’s success and key to a politician’s success in the role. 

“Even [Mayor Karen Bass’] ED 1 — sorry, great intentions, but intentions don't equal outcomes,” Thomas Safran & Associates Director of Housing Parisa Roshan said at a Bisnow event in mid-March.

In her first move as mayor in December 2022, Bass sought to speed up approvals for 100% affordable housing projects through Executive Directive 1. As of December, 490 projects totaling more than 40,000 units had been proposed through ED 1, but only 44 projects accounting for about 2,500 units were under construction, the Los Angeles Times reported. 

“We need to stop rewarding politicians who say, ‘Well, we permitted this number of units’ or ‘We approved this number of units,’” Roshan said. “Ask them how many were actually built, and if the answer is closer to zero, vote them out and ask them why they failed.”

The latest University of California, Berkeley and LA Times poll projected Bass was supported by 25% of voters, with Councilmember Nithya Raman earning 17% of voters’ support and reality TV star and Pacific Palisades resident Spencer Pratt capturing 14% of the vote. 

Broadly, quality-of-life basics like public safety and trash cleanup were concerns for property owners, who are well aware of the reputational harm the city has faced since the pandemic. The Downtown core is still very much struggling with this, especially in the run-up to the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games. 

“We need some strong, business-minded person to run for mayor,” Apartment Association of Greater Los Angeles CEO and Executive Director Daniel Yukelson said. Yukelson hoped The Grove owner and businessman Rick Caruso would run, but he didn't, and the deadline passed to declare candidacy. Caruso ran for mayor against Bass in 2022.  

“Anybody who's business-minded is really going to focus on public safety and finding a real solution,” Yukelson said.

He said that AAGLA is looking to move out of its offices in Koreatown and into an office in a smaller adjacent city in the hopes of avoiding some of these quality-of-life issues, which included a break-in at the association’s offices while an employee was there alone.

“We have Los Angeles in our name, and we're looking to move outside of the city of Los Angeles,” Yukelson said.