Browse all Los Angeles real estate — or explore the full Los Angeles luxury real estate market.
Browse all Los Angeles real estate — or explore the full Los Angeles luxury real estate market.
Gated homes in Los Angeles are properties inside a controlled-access community, ranging from 24-hour guard-gated estate enclaves like Beverly Park and Mulholland Estates to private streets behind an unmanned card gate. The category spans most of the county’s prime markets: Bel Air, Beverly Hills, Brentwood, Calabasas, Malibu, Pacific Palisades, and a dense cluster across the San Fernando Valley.
The premium here is not square footage. It is control: who reaches your front door, who sees the house, and who maintains the street. That is what buyers are paying for, and it is why this segment held value through cycles that softened other luxury inventory.
Browse current gated listings below, or contact The Knight Group for on- and off-market access inside the gates. Many of these communities trade quietly.
Not all gates are equal, and the difference is the single most important thing to establish before you tour. Los Angeles inventory falls into five distinct models, and listings blur them constantly.
Guard-gated, staffed 24 hours. A manned gatehouse screens every entry and visitors must be pre-registered. Beverly Park operates two fortified entrances with armed security. Brentwood Circle has a single entry gate staffed by an officer around the clock. Serra Retreat in Malibu runs two guard-gated drives.
Gates within gates. An outer manned gate plus a second inner gate for a premium enclave. Beverly Park layers long private drives and individual property gates behind its main entrances. The Estates at The Oaks in Calabasas is a double-gated inner enclave with 24-hour security.
Guard plus roving patrol. Mulholland Estates and The Summit both add a security vehicle patrol on top of the gate. Mountaingate in Brentwood patrols all of its neighborhoods on a regular schedule.
Unmanned card or code gate. An automated gate on a private street with no staff. This is most of what gets marketed as “gated” in Santa Monica, where the gating is usually at the individual property rather than the subdivision.
Gated feel, no gate. Some of the most private addresses in Los Angeles have no gate at all. Outpost Estates in the Hollywood Hills reads as an enclave without literal gates. Amestoy Estates in Encino is guard-patrolled, which is not the same thing as gated.
Next move: before you write an offer, confirm in writing whether the gate is staffed, what hours, and whether the HOA or a contracted firm employs the guards. Marketing copy will not answer this reliably.
Gated inventory concentrates in three bands: the Beverly Hills Post Office ridgeline, the Westside canyons, and the southern rim of the San Fernando Valley. Each has a different character and a different buyer.
The ridgeline (Mulholland corridor). This is where the county’s marquee enclaves sit. Beverly Hills gated homes include Beverly Park, Mulholland Estates, The Summit, Beverly Ridge Estates (12 homes) and Wallingford Estates (15 homes). Bel Air gated homes center on three guard-gated neighborhoods: Bel Air Crest, Moraga Estates (33 homes on a single private street) and Bel Air Park at Casiano Estates.
The Westside. Brentwood gated communities are the most structured: Brentwood Circle (67 residences), Mountaingate (307 residences across four sub-communities) and Brentwood Country Estates (13 properties). Pacific Palisades gated homes are anchored by The Enclave in the Highlands, which carries Summit Club membership. Malibu gated communities split cleanly: Serra Retreat, Malibu Colony and Malibu Cove Colony are guard-gated, while Paradise View Estates, Sea Star Estates and Cavalleri use a manual gated entrance. Santa Monica gated homes are the exception to the pattern: the gating is property-level rather than community-level, plus guard-gated condominium complexes.
The Valley rim and west county. Calabasas gated communities are the densest concentration in the county, with more than twenty gated communities and over ten that are 24-hour guard-gated, including The Oaks, The Estates at The Oaks, Mountain View Estates and The Ridge. Porter Ranch gated homes are the county’s newest gated product: Renaissance (434 residences across Milano, Portofino, Verona and Renaissance Summit) and Porter Ranch Estates (roughly 1,100 homes). Tarzana gated communities center on Mulholland Park, roughly 176 guard-gated homes. Woodland Hills gated homes lead with Westchester Estates, a 24-hour guard-gated community of 104 homes. Encino gated homes include Royal Oaks Colony, 51 residences where the monthly HOA fee covers the 24-hour guarded gate.
Also in the network: Studio City, Sherman Oaks (much of Mulholland Estates sits inside the Sherman Oaks district despite its 90210 address), Toluca Lake, Hollywood Hills, West Hills, Westlake Village and Agoura Hills.
Four names define the top of this market, and each is exclusive for a different structural reason.
Beverly Park is the benchmark. Conceived in 1979 and completed in 1990 across 250 acres, it holds 64 lots in the North section and 16 in the South, on parcels of two to five acres. The HOA mandates a minimum house size of 5,000 square feet. Original builds averaged roughly 17,000 square feet; recent construction averages closer to 25,000. Photography is prohibited inside the gates. Per Forbes in May 2024, the trailing twelve-month median list price was $47.5 million, with Alec Gores’ 31,000 square foot estate trading at $70 million in 2022 and 73 Beverly Park Lane listed at $89.9 million.
Mulholland Estates is 95 homes across a 188-acre development at Beverly Glen and Mulholland, guard-gated with patrol. The Summit holds roughly 80 homes at the confluence of Mulholland and Coldwater Canyon, also guard-gated with a security car patrol.
Hidden Hills is the structural outlier: it is a gated incorporated city, not a subdivision. It became the 73rd city in Los Angeles County in 1961, covers 1.69 square miles, and had a 2020 population of 1,725. Designed in the 1950s by landscape architect A. E. Hanson, it has no sidewalks or streetlights, two-acre lots behind white three-rail fencing, and 24-hour staffed entrance gates. City services and the community association overlay each other, which is a governance structure almost nowhere else in the county replicates.
Field note: the resurgence is real, not marketing. Hilton and Hyland president David Kramer told Forbes that gated communities have had a resurgence over the last ten years in terms of both value and security.
Every gated subdivision in California is a common interest development governed by the Davis-Stirling Common Interest Development Act, Civil Code section 4000 and following, enacted in 1985. That statute is the operating system for the entire category, and it determines what you own and what you owe.
Davis-Stirling expressly contemplates that dues fund security guards, including operation of a gatehouse for gated communities, along with common area maintenance: corridors, walkways, parking, landscaping, pools, fitness centers and tennis courts. Royal Oaks Colony in Encino is a clean local example, where the monthly fee covers general maintenance and the 24-hour guarded gate.
The developer records CC and Rs against the parcels, and those covenants bind every subsequent buyer. Associations must also conduct reserve studies and disclose financials, governing documents and meeting minutes to owners.
The item most buyers miss: private streets. When an HOA’s streets qualify as common area under Davis-Stirling, those streets belong to the membership collectively. Paving, drainage, lighting and repair are an owner obligation funded by dues, not a City of Los Angeles obligation. A deferred repaving cycle inside a gated community is a future special assessment with a date on it.
Next move: pull the reserve study before you remove contingencies, and read it for street and gate infrastructure specifically.
California is unusually generous here, and the disclosure packet is your best diligence tool. Under Civil Code sections 4525 and 4530, a seller in an HOA must deliver the CC and Rs, bylaws, rules and regulations, articles of incorporation or a statement of non-incorporation, the Annual Budget Report, the Annual Policy Statement, and disclosure of regular, special and scheduled future assessments plus delinquent assessments, unpaid fines and unresolved violations.
New for 2026: effective January 1, 2026, SB 410 amended section 4525 to add the most recent SB 326 exterior elevated element inspection report, covering balconies and decks, to the required packet. That matters for gated condominium product in Warner Center, Santa Monica and Point Dume.
One myth worth killing: a California HOA does not screen or approve your purchase. The mechanism is disclosure under section 4525, not buyer approval. If an agent tells you the board must approve you, ask them to cite the statute.
Often yes, and the answer turns on city limits rather than mailing address. This is the most expensive detail in the category and the one most frequently gotten wrong.
Measure ULA applies to property transfers inside the City of Los Angeles at 4 percent above the lower threshold and 5.5 percent above the upper threshold, on the entire price rather than the slice above the line. Effective July 1, 2026, those thresholds are $5,400,000 and $10,900,000.
The trap is the Beverly Hills Post Office area. Beverly Park, Mulholland Estates, The Summit, Beverly Ridge Estates and Wallingford Estates all carry a 90210 address but sit in the City of Los Angeles, which means ULA applies. Hidden Hills, the City of Beverly Hills, Calabasas, Malibu, Agoura Hills, Westlake Village and Santa Monica are separate cities, where it does not.
On a $12 million ridgeline estate, that distinction is a seven-figure line item. Confirm jurisdiction with a title company before you model net proceeds. Do not rely on the ZIP code.
Most of this inventory sits in the wildland urban interface, and the insurance picture changed materially in 2025. Treat coverage as a gating item, not a closing formality.
Cal Fire issued updated Local Responsibility Area Fire Hazard Severity Zone maps for Southern California, including the City of Los Angeles, on March 24, 2025, and state law requires jurisdictions to adopt the recommended maps by ordinance within 120 days. Foothill and canyon communities including Pacific Palisades and Malibu carry Very High designations, which is where traditional coverage becomes difficult.
The Board of Forestry is also establishing Zone 0, an ember-resistant zone in the first five feet around a structure, with a compliance target of January 1, 2027 for Very High severity properties. That requirement will collide with HOA landscaping covenants in hillside gated communities, and associations have not all updated their CC and Rs to match.
The FAIR Plan, California’s insurer of last resort, imposed a $1 billion assessment on member insurers after the early-2025 wildfires, half of which insurers may pass to policyholders as temporary surcharges.
Context that cannot be avoided in the Palisades: the January 2025 Palisades Fire destroyed 6,837 structures. Roughly 3,090 building and electrical permits have been approved in Pacific Palisades, more than any other city neighborhood, though issuance slowed markedly in late 2025.
Next move: verify the fire hazard severity zone for the specific parcel, confirm insurance availability in writing before removing contingencies, and ask the HOA whether its landscaping rules have been reconciled with Zone 0.
Three profiles dominate, and they want different things from the same gate. Entertainment and public-facing buyers are purchasing separation from paparazzi and unsolicited traffic, which is why Beverly Park’s photography prohibition is a genuine feature rather than a flourish. Finance and technology principals are buying operational security and a lock-and-leave footprint that survives long absences. Families are buying the quieter thing: streets with no through traffic, where children and horses are the expected users of the road, which is the entire design premise of Hidden Hills.
What unites them is a low tolerance for exposure. That is also why so much of this inventory never reaches the open market.
The range is the widest of any category we cover, and public price bands for individual communities are unreliable. Most published ranges come from undated brokerage marketing rather than audited market data, and they conflict with each other frequently.
What can be said with a dated source: per Forbes in May 2024, Beverly Park carried a trailing twelve-month median list price of $47.5 million, with recorded sales including $70 million (2022), $58 million (2022), $27.8 million (2021) and $26 million. That is the ceiling of the category.
Below that ceiling the market is genuinely broad. Valley guard-gated communities such as Renaissance in Porter Ranch and Mulholland Park in Tarzana serve a different buyer entirely from the Mulholland ridgeline, and gated condominium product in Warner Center and Santa Monica sits lower still.
We do not publish price bands we cannot source. Ask us for the current tape on a specific community and we will pull comparable sales rather than quote a marketing range.
Guard-gated means a staffed gatehouse screens entry, typically 24 hours, with visitors pre-registered. Gated can mean an unmanned card or code gate on a private street, and in some markets it refers only to a gate at the individual property. Confirm which model applies in writing before you offer.
Under the Davis-Stirling Act, dues typically fund the gatehouse and security guards plus common area maintenance including landscaping, pools, courts and private streets. Amounts vary widely by community and we do not publish figures we cannot verify. Request the current budget and reserve study for the specific association.
No. The California mechanism is disclosure under Civil Code section 4525, not buyer approval. Sellers must deliver the governing documents and assessment disclosures, but the association does not screen purchasers.
It depends on city limits, not the mailing address. Measure ULA applies inside the City of Los Angeles at 4 percent and 5.5 percent above thresholds of $5,400,000 and $10,900,000 as of July 1, 2026. Several 90210-addressed enclaves sit in the City of Los Angeles and are subject to it, while Beverly Hills, Calabasas, Hidden Hills, Malibu and Santa Monica are not.
Many are. Cal Fire’s 2025 hazard maps place numerous hillside and canyon communities in High or Very High severity zones, and the new Zone 0 ember-resistant requirement carries a January 1, 2027 compliance target for Very High properties. Confirm the zone for the specific parcel and secure insurance before removing contingencies.
No. Bell Canyon is in eastern Ventura County, though its main access runs through the Los Angeles community of West Hills. It is frequently marketed as a West Hills community, which is geographically misleading for tax and jurisdiction purposes.
Yes, and in this category it is often the only way. Gated inventory trades quietly because the same privacy that drives the purchase discourages open marketing. The Knight Group maintains relationships inside these communities and access to Compass Private Exclusives. Send us the community you are targeting and we will track it.
We work this category on three fronts. We verify the structure before you fall for the house: gate model, association health, reserve position, street ownership, and the jurisdiction that determines your transfer tax. We source quietly, because the best inventory inside these gates rarely posts. And we pressure-test price against in-community comparables rather than the marketing range, which in this segment can be off by millions.
Send the address or the community. We will tell you what the gate actually buys you, what the association is carrying, and where the leverage sits.
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