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Homes for sale in Toluca Lake sit on 1.22 square miles at the southeastern corner of the San Fernando Valley, roughly 12 miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles. Universal City is to the south, Studio City to the west, North Hollywood to the north, and Burbank to the east. The neighborhood spills across the Burbank city line, and that line decides school district, permitting authority and transfer tax. Confirm the parcel’s city of record with a title company before you write an offer.
The core was subdivided starting in 1923, so 1920s and 1930s period-revival houses sit next to post-war ranch and mid-century homes, with contemporary rebuilds layered on top. This is flat Valley floor, so lot geometry, street position and what backs the rear fence — lake, golf club or commercial edge — drive price more than square footage. Condition is the other variable: older houses often carry deferred electrical, sewer and foundation cost.
Current listings across the Toluca Lake area appear below. For the parcel-level read on jurisdiction, school assignment and lake access before you tour, contact The Knight Group.
Toluca Lake sits in the southeastern corner of the San Fernando Valley. The Los Angeles Times draws the boundaries as Universal City to the south, Studio City to the west, North Hollywood to the north, and Burbank to the east. The neighborhood spills over into Burbank, and different civic organizations draw their own working boundaries for administrative purposes.
That last detail is the one that matters commercially. A home marketed as Toluca Lake may sit inside the City of Los Angeles or inside the City of Burbank, and those are separate jurisdictions with separate school districts, building departments and transfer tax regimes. Real estate marketing treats the name as one neighborhood. Municipal government does not.
The practical consequence: before you write an offer, confirm the parcel’s city of record with a title company. Do not infer it from the listing headline, the mailing address or the ZIP code.
The Tongva people occupied this part of the Valley for roughly 8,000 years before Spanish arrival in the 1790s. After Mexican independence in 1823, the land fell within Rancho Ex-Mission San Fernando. General Charles Forman, a Nevada mining and lumber figure, bought a large parcel in the late 1880s and worked it as the Forman Toluca Ranch, producing peaches, apples and walnuts by 1923.
That same year, investors began developing the land as Toluca Lake Park, later renamed by the Toluca Lake Company. The stated ambition was a first bedroom community for Los Angeles. The Lakeside Golf Club, designed by Max Behr in 1924, gave the subdivision an anchor amenity and pulled in prominent residents almost immediately.
The entertainment industry did the rest. Bob Hope lived here from the 1930s until his death in 2003, and Amelia Earhart moved in after 1931. Bette Davis, Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra and Mary Astor all held addresses here, and composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold lived here from 1938 to 1957. The pattern held: Steve Carell, Miley Cyrus, Viola Davis, Kirsten Dunst, Melissa McCarthy and Octavia Spencer have all been residents, and Kelly Clarkson purchased a 1936 mansion here in 2021.
The benchmark transaction remains the Bob Hope estate. Ron Burkle purchased the 5.2-acre property in June 2018 for $15 million, with proceeds benefiting the Bob and Dolores Hope Foundation. That sale is instructive for anyone pricing a large-lot trophy here: the acreage, not the improvements, carried the number.
Yes, and it is not accessible to the general public. The lake covers roughly six acres, is privately owned, and is managed by the Toluca Lake Property Owners Association, established in 1934. It is gated and functionally invisible from the surrounding streets.
The lake was historically fed by artesian springs. Water extraction through the late 19th and 20th centuries, combined with the channelization of the Los Angeles River in 1938, dropped the water table. Community wells now maintain the level, and the lake bottom carries about four inches of asphalt concrete to prevent seepage. This is an engineered amenity with an ongoing cost structure behind it, not a natural one.
For a buyer, the operative question is whether a given property carries lake frontage or association rights at all. Most homes marketed under the Toluca Lake name do not touch the water. If lake access is part of why you are buying, get the association’s governing documents and confirm the rights attached to the parcel in writing before you remove contingencies. We do not publish dues or membership terms here because the association, not a listing agent, is the authority on them.
The housing stock reflects the development timeline. The core was subdivided from 1923 forward, so period-revival houses from the 1920s and 1930s sit alongside post-war ranch and mid-century construction, with a layer of contemporary rebuilds and gut renovations on top. Kelly Clarkson’s 1936 house is representative of the older tier. The Hope estate, at 5.2 acres, is the outlier that defines the ceiling.
Lot geometry drives price dispersion more than square footage does. This is flat Valley floor, so hillside engineering is not the constraint it is in the Hollywood Hills. What varies is parcel size, street position, and whether the lot backs onto the lake, the golf club or a commercial edge. Two houses of similar size on the same street can price very differently based on what sits behind the rear fence.
Condition is the second variable. A pre-war house that has never had its electrical service, sewer lateral or foundation addressed carries real deferred cost. Treat any un-permitted addition as a negotiation item rather than a bonus. We do not quote a median price here because the number moves and the sub-areas below trade at genuinely different levels. Ask us for comparable sales on the specific block.
Treat Toluca Lake as three distinct shopping problems rather than one. The name is used loosely across a wider footprint than the original subdivision, and the sub-areas differ in housing stock, density and price tier.
The historic core is what most buyers mean by Toluca Lake: the blocks nearest the private lake and the Lakeside Golf Club, with the largest lots, the deepest period architecture and the highest ceiling in the area. Inventory is thin by design, because the subdivision is small and turnover on the best streets is slow. Start at Toluca Lake homes for sale.
West Toluca Lake sits on the Studio City and North Hollywood side of the neighborhood, away from the lake itself. The trade is straightforward: you give up proximity to the water and the golf club, and in exchange you generally get a lower entry point into the same commercial corridor and the same commute geometry. For buyers who want the location without paying for lake adjacency they will never use, this is usually the more rational purchase. Current listings are at West Toluca Lake homes for sale.
Toluca Woods is the smaller pocket on the North Hollywood side, with tighter lots and a higher share of modest post-war construction than the core. It functions as the accessible tier of the Toluca Lake name and draws buyers who want the address and the studio commute at the lowest available basis. Inventory turns faster here than in the core, which matters when you are shopping on a timeline. See what is available at Toluca Woods homes for sale.
Because organizational boundaries differ, a property may be listed under one sub-area name by one brokerage and another name by a second. Shop all three pages.
This is the most common source of buyer error in Toluca Lake. The neighborhood is split between two districts: the portion inside the City of Los Angeles is served by Los Angeles Unified School District, and the portion inside the City of Burbank by Burbank Unified School District.
Toluca Lake Elementary School, an LAUSD campus, sits at 4840 Cahuenga Boulevard. The private Toluca Crossroads School is next door at 4814 Cahuenga Boulevard. Those two addresses explain a meaningful share of why families shop this neighborhood rather than the surrounding Valley.
Do not assume an assignment. Attendance boundaries are set by the district, revised periodically, and they do not follow neighborhood names. Verify the assigned school for a specific address with the district before you write an offer. We do not publish school ratings here because rating systems change methodology and a stale score is worse than no score.
Commute quality is the strongest structural argument for this neighborhood. Toluca Lake sits directly adjacent to Universal City to the south and Burbank to the east, which is where a large share of the region’s production employment sits.
Transit is real here too, which is unusual for the Valley. The North Hollywood station at 5357 Lankershim Boulevard, in the NoHo Arts District, is the northwestern terminus of Metro’s B Line subway, which opened on June 24, 2000, and connects through Hollywood and downtown Los Angeles to Union Station. The G Line busway, which opened on October 29, 2005, runs east to west along a former rail corridor and meets the B Line at the same station. Metro added a second B Line entrance beside the G Line platform in August 2016 to ease the transfer.
The trade-off is the one every Valley buyer accepts. Summer heat on the Valley floor runs hotter than the coastal basin, and air conditioning capacity is infrastructure rather than a nicety. On any older house here, verify the HVAC system, the electrical service size and the attic insulation before you close. Retrofitting all three at once is a real number.
Riverside Drive is the commercial spine, and it is why Toluca Lake reads as a village rather than a Valley subdivision. It carries everyday retail, restaurants and services within walking distance of the residential blocks, which is not the norm for the eastern Valley.
The corridor’s landmark is Bob’s Big Boy at 4211 Riverside Drive in Burbank. Built in 1949 and designed by architect Wayne McAllister in a Streamline Moderne idiom that anticipated the 1950s coffee shop style, it is the oldest surviving Bob’s Big Boy in the United States and was designated a California Point of Historical Interest in 1993. Weekend carhop service returned after the 1993 restoration, and the lot still hosts a weekly classic car show. Bob Hope, Mickey Rooney and The Beatles, on the band’s 1965 U.S. tour, all ate there.
The second anchor is the Lakeside Golf Club, laid out by Max Behr in 1924. Course adjacency affects pricing on the streets that back onto it.
It depends entirely on which city the parcel is in, and this is the most expensive question on the page.
Measure ULA, the City of Los Angeles transfer tax often called the mansion tax, applies to transfers inside the City of Los Angeles at 4 percent above the lower threshold and 5.5 percent above the upper one. Effective July 1, 2026, those thresholds are $5,400,000 and $10,900,000. The tax is assessed on the entire sale price, not the portion above the line, which creates a hard cliff at each threshold.
Because Toluca Lake straddles the Los Angeles and Burbank city limits, two comparable estates on opposite sides of that line net very differently at the same contract price. The Burbank side is a separate city and is not subject to Measure ULA. On an eight-figure property, that is a seven-figure difference to the seller.
If you are selling above the lower threshold, model net proceeds against the confirmed jurisdiction before you set a list price. Pricing just above a ULA threshold is almost always worse for a seller than pricing just below it. If you are buying, a seller on the LA side has a structural reason to resist a price that lands barely over the line, and that is negotiating information.
Four items deserve real diligence, and none are deal breakers if you price them.
Jurisdiction ambiguity. The LA and Burbank split affects taxes, permits, code enforcement and schools. Confirm the city of record in writing.
Age of improvements. Housing built from the 1920s through the 1950s carries predictable deferred maintenance: original panels and knob-and-tube remnants, clay sewer laterals, unreinforced chimneys and un-permitted additions. Order a sewer scope and pull the permit history from the correct city.
River and water table. The Los Angeles River was channelized in 1938, which dropped the local water table, and the private lake now relies on community wells and an engineered bottom to hold water. Any property near a waterway should have its flood zone status pulled from the current FEMA map and its insurability confirmed before contingencies are removed. We will not guess at a zone designation for your parcel.
Studio-driven demand. The premium here rests on proximity to production employment, which is a concentrated economic base. It has held for a century, but Toluca Lake pricing tracks the health of the entertainment industry more closely than a comparable Valley neighborhood without that adjacency.
The neighborhood is small and stable. The 2000 census counted 7,782 residents, and a 2008 estimate put the figure at 8,563. The same 2008 profile reported a median household income of $73,111, a median age of 37, and 48.4 percent of residents holding four-year degrees. Those figures are close to two decades old and describe character rather than current economics.
Toluca Lake is represented by the Greater Toluca Lake Neighborhood Council, and the Los Angeles portion falls under City Council member Adrin Nazarian and State Assembly member Jesse Gabriel. The neighborhood also keeps an honorary mayor, a post held by former NBC-4 weatherman Fritz Coleman, which is a fair signal of how the community sees itself.
It has a place in the culture too. Quentin Tarantino set the Bonnie Situation sequence of Pulp Fiction here in 1994, and the Silent Hill video game series, from 1999 forward, built its fictional town on the shores of a fictional Toluca Lake.
Buyers shopping this pocket are usually choosing between it and Studio City, North Hollywood or Burbank, all of which sit within a few minutes’ drive. What separates Toluca Lake real estate is the combination of a 1923-forward subdivision pattern and a private, association-controlled lake most parcels never touch. That means the premium you pay is often for adjacency and address rather than a usable amenity. Decide early whether you actually need frontage or association rights, because if you do not, the same era of house on a comparable lot elsewhere in the area may serve you better.
The jurisdiction split is the other lever. Because the neighborhood crosses the Burbank city line, two otherwise similar houses can carry different school assignments, permitting paths and transfer tax exposure. If you plan to renovate a pre-war house, that difference shapes both your timeline and your budget. Sort out city of record, lake rights and inspection scope before you narrow your list, not after.
No. The roughly six-acre lake is privately owned, gated and managed by the Toluca Lake Property Owners Association, established in 1934. It is not accessible to the public. Access rights attach to specific properties, so confirm what a given parcel conveys.
Both, depending on the parcel. Toluca Lake is a neighborhood of the City of Los Angeles that spills over into the City of Burbank, and different organizations draw the boundary differently. Verify the city of record with a title company rather than the mailing address.
It depends on the city. Homes inside the City of Los Angeles are served by LAUSD, and homes inside the City of Burbank by Burbank Unified. Toluca Lake Elementary, an LAUSD school, is at 4840 Cahuenga Boulevard. Confirm the assignment for a specific address with the district.
Only on the Los Angeles side of the line. Measure ULA applies inside the City of Los Angeles at 4 percent above $5,400,000 and 5.5 percent above $10,900,000 as of July 1, 2026, calculated on the full sale price. Parcels inside the City of Burbank are not subject to it.
Toluca Lake proper is the historic core nearest the private lake and Lakeside Golf Club, with the largest lots and the highest ceiling. West Toluca Lake sits toward the Studio City and North Hollywood side, away from the water, at a generally lower entry point. Toluca Woods is the smaller pocket toward North Hollywood with tighter lots and more post-war stock.
Most of the core dates from 1923 forward, when the land was subdivided as Toluca Lake Park, with heavy 1920s and 1930s period-revival construction and a post-war layer on top. Expect the diligence that goes with pre-war housing: sewer laterals, electrical service, foundations and un-permitted additions.
It is one of the better locations in the region for it. The neighborhood borders Universal City to the south and Burbank to the east, and the North Hollywood Metro station on Lankershim Boulevard connects the B Line subway to downtown Los Angeles and the G Line busway across the Valley.
Backing onto the Lakeside Golf Club, which Max Behr designed in 1924, changes the rear-yard condition permanently: open sightlines and a use that is not going to be redeveloped. On flat Valley lots of comparable size, what sits behind the fence is one of the strongest price variables.
We start with the jurisdiction question, because in Toluca Lake it drives everything else. Before we show you anything, we confirm the city of record, the school assignment, the transfer tax exposure and whether the parcel carries lake or club rights. That takes a title pull and two phone calls, and it prevents the most expensive mistake buyers make here.
On the sell side, we model net proceeds against the Measure ULA thresholds before we set a list price, not after an offer arrives. On a property near either threshold, the list price decision is worth more than the marketing budget.
Browse the current inventory below, or tell us which of the three sub-areas fits your basis and your timeline. We will send comparable sales for the blocks that matter and tell you plainly where we think the pricing is wrong.
The Knight Group is here to help you with all your realty needs. To get started, fill out the form below and one of our experienced agents will contact you as quickly as possible.
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