Woodland Hills vs. Encino vs. Tarzana: Why the List Price Isn't the Real Story Right Now

If you've spent any time comparing these three West Valley neighborhoods on a portal, you've probably landed on the same conclusion: Tarzana costs meaningfully more than Woodland Hills. As of May 2026, Tarzana's overall median list price sat at $2,347,000. As of early August 2026, Woodland Hills' median list price was running around $1,450,000, which puts Tarzana's headline number roughly 60 percent higher. That's a real gap, and it's the number most comparison guides stop at.

Here's what they miss. Recent citywide sale-price data puts Tarzana's actual closed transactions at around $1.19 million, a figure that lands within a percentage point of Woodland Hills' $1.2 million median sale price over the three months ending in May 2026. Two neighborhoods that look worlds apart on the list-price chart are, in practice, selling for almost identical money.

That gap between what's listed and what's closing isn't a data error. It's the most useful thing you can know before you start touring homes in this stretch of the Valley, because it tells you the headline comparison you've already read is measuring the wrong thing.

The List Price Is Noisy. The Closed Price Is the Market.

The reason Tarzana's list price runs so far ahead of what actually sells comes down to something simpler than market strength: there's barely any inventory to average. As of May 2026, Tarzana carried just 62 active single-family listings, the tightest of the three neighborhoods by a wide margin. Encino had 151. Woodland Hills had 203, more than three times Tarzana's count.

When a market has only 62 listings, a handful of estate-level properties can drag the median list price upward without reflecting what typical buyers are actually paying. Encino's top quartile of listings reached $7,275,000 in that same window, almost double Tarzana's top quartile of $4,599,000, yet the entry-level tier of both markets was nearly identical: $1,575,000 in Encino and $1,599,000 in Tarzana. The two neighborhoods that look most different at the top look nearly the same at the bottom.

Woodland Hills tells a different story precisely because it has more inventory to tell it with. Roughly 29% of Woodland Hills listings carried a price reduction as of that same period, which reads less like weakness and more like a market with enough supply for sellers to test a number, get corrected, and land closer to what the neighborhood will actually bear. A thin market can't self-correct that way. A deep one does it constantly.

The Woodland Hills list-price figure reflects an early August 2026 snapshot while the Encino and Tarzana list-price figures come from May 2026 Altos Research data, so treat the comparison as directional rather than a same-week apples-to-apples read.

None of that explains why Woodland Hills has three times the inventory of Tarzana in the first place, and that answer is the real thesis of this piece.

The Difference Isn't Dollars. It's a 52-Acre Construction Site.

Woodland Hills is currently the only one of these three neighborhoods sitting on top of a named, dated, decade-long redevelopment, and it's changing the shape of the local market before a single new building has gone vertical.

The site is Warner Center, specifically the former Promenade Mall, which opened in 1973 and spent its final years as what locals openly called a dead mall. Vacancy topped 80% by 2016. Tenants left one by one: Ruth's Chris Steak House announced it would vacate in 2022 and didn't finish relocating within Woodland Hills until December 2023. Maggiano's Little Italy closed for good at the end of April 2025, likely the last operating business inside the mall.

Rams owner Stan Kroenke assembled the site in pieces: the Promenade itself for $150 million in March 2022, the adjacent 31-acre former Anthem office tower for $175 million that June, and the neighboring Village outdoor retail center for $325 million that December, roughly $650 million across the combined 96-acre footprint. In April 2025, the Kroenke Organization made it official, unveiling Rams Village at Warner Center, a $10 billion mixed-use development on the 52-acre combined Promenade and Anthem parcel, designed by Gensler.

One detail that gets skipped in a lot of coverage matters more than the price tag. The zoning didn't arrive with the Rams. The Warner Center 2035 Plan, adopted by the city in 2013, already allowed the density and walkability this project needs, permitting up to 20,000 residential units and 14 million square feet of commercial space across the district with a streamlined environmental review process. Woodland Hills didn't get rezoned for a football team. A football team bought into a plan the neighborhood had already written for itself more than a decade earlier, which is a large part of why this project can move at its current scale and speed.

Here's where the project actually stands:

1. 2013 — Warner Center 2035 Plan adopted, establishing the zoning that makes this scale of development possible.
2. March–December 2022 — Kroenke acquires the Promenade, the adjacent Anthem office tower, and The Village for a combined $650 million.
3. April 2025 — Rams Village at Warner Center formally announced: a permanent 350,000-square-foot headquarters and training facility with an additional 150,000-square-foot indoor practice field seating up to 2,500, more than 3,000 homes across high-rise, mid-rise, and live-work formats, nearly 2 million square feet of retail and office space, two indoor performance venues seating roughly 5,000 and 2,500, and close to 10 acres of public open space.
4. January 2026 — Demolition of the Promenade began.
5. 2027 — Vertical construction targeted to start, beginning with the Rams headquarters.
6. Around 2037 — Full build-out complete, in phases, over roughly a decade.

That's the mechanism behind Woodland Hills' deeper inventory and its higher price-reduction rate. Sellers and buyers are both pricing against a project that is real, underway, and years from finished, which produces exactly the kind of churn you'd expect: more listings testing the market, more corrections, and a median that moves around as the story develops rather than sitting still.

The Comparison Inside Woodland Hills Matters More Than the Comparison to Its Neighbors

Treating Woodland Hills as a single number obscures more than it reveals, because the neighborhood is really three markets stacked on top of each other. Hillside estates south of Ventura Boulevard sell in a different band than the established flats to the north, and the Warner Center condo stock, the segment sitting closest to the actual construction site, trades in a different band again. A buyer comparing "Woodland Hills" to "Encino" without specifying which of those three tiers they mean is comparing the wrong things.

Encino and Tarzana don't have this same internal split driven by a single megaproject, but they have their own version of a number that misleads if you don't look closer. Encino's median sale price rose 6.9% year over year for the three months ending in May 2026, which sounds like straightforward appreciation. Its median price per square foot fell 20.2% over the same period. Those two numbers moving in opposite directions means the increase is largely a mix shift toward larger homes selling, not a blanket rise in what buyers pay for a given square foot. Encino isn't getting more expensive per foot. Bigger homes are simply what's changing hands right now.

Buying the Story vs. Buying the Finished District

Every buyer looking at Woodland Hills right now is choosing between two very different purchases, even if the address looks the same. A 2026 purchase is a bet on proximity to a plan: the headquarters isn't built yet, the residential towers haven't broken ground, and the retail village exists as a rendering. A purchase closer to 2028, once the headquarters and early phases are visibly under construction, is a bet on a district that's starting to function. Neither is wrong, but they're different bets with different pricing logic, and confusing the two is how a seller underprices a long-term story or a buyer overpays for a promise that's still a decade from delivering.

Developers building around major sports facilities have pointed to Hollywood Park in Inglewood as a comparison point, the SoFi Stadium-anchored district that pulled a long-overlooked submarket into the broader conversation and helped lift surrounding home values over time, not overnight. If that pattern holds here, the upward pressure on Woodland Hills values is likely to build gradually alongside visible construction rather than arrive as a single jump, with the largest percentage gains showing up in the more affordable pockets closest to Warner Center rather than at the very top of the market.

FAQ

Does this mean Woodland Hills prices will jump once construction starts? Nothing in the current data points to a sudden spike. Comparable stadium-anchored districts have shown value increases building over years as construction becomes visible and early phases open, not as an immediate reaction to a groundbreaking.

Is Tarzana actually more expensive than Woodland Hills or not? It depends which number you're reading. Overall list prices say yes, by a wide margin. Recent closed-sale data and entry-level list prices in both neighborhoods say the gap is far smaller than the headline suggests.

Which part of Woodland Hills feels the construction disruption first? The blocks immediately bordering Topanga Canyon Boulevard, Erwin Street, Owensmouth Avenue, and Oxnard Street, the footprint of the Rams Village site itself, will see the most direct construction activity over the next several years. The hillside and flats areas further from Warner Center are more likely to feel this as a slower, valley-wide effect rather than a next-door disruption.

If you're weighing Woodland Hills against Encino or Tarzana and want help reading which tier, which timeline, and which of these numbers actually applies to the home you're considering, Tholfaqar Al Emara can walk through the current comparables and what a decade-long megaproject like this one really means for your specific purchase. Let's Connect.