Malibu Road Homes for Sale

Malibu, CA

Why People Move to Malibu Road

More than 250 houses, and every one of them is either on the sand or looking at it. The road leaves the highway at the back gate of Malibu Colony and runs about two and a half miles west above the beach, with the ocean on one side and the bluffs on the other.
The city protects the ocean view here by name. Malibu Road is one of five streets the city's coastal plan singles out for view protection, and the limits land on the beachfront houses rather than on the ones behind them.
One open public stairway on two and a half miles of beach. The agency that runs Malibu's beach accessways lists a single open stairway for the whole road, and the people who use it stay close to it. Walk a few minutes in either direction and you have the sand to yourself most days.
There are two ways to own on this road. Houses on the sand, and houses across the street whose upper floors look over them to open ocean for a fraction of the price.

The beach changes name as you walk it. The stretch by the Colony gate is Malibu Colony Beach, the middle is Amarillo Beach, the western end is Puerco Beach, and Dan Blocker Beach carries on past where the road stops. On foot there is no break between them.

Living on Malibu Road

Malibu Bluffs Park is on the bluff directly behind the road. Six acres at Pacific Coast Highway and Malibu Canyon with two baseball diamonds, a soccer field, a playground, a jogging path and a whale watching station, open every day until sunset. Walk up for a Saturday game and stay for the gray whales going by.
Surfrider Beach is a few minutes off the east end. It is the right-hand point break that made Malibu famous and a World Surfing Reserve, and from the east end of the road you can walk to it.
The beach takes swell from two directions. The curve of shoreline in front of the road catches southern swell head on and north Pacific swell that bends in around Point Dume, so there is something breaking most of the year.
The Malibu Lagoon and the Adamson House are just past the east end. Boardwalks run out over the wetland, herons and egrets work the shallows, and the tiled 1920s house stands on the point with the lagoon behind it and the ocean in front.

Addresses here are assigned to Santa Monica-Malibu Unified, and Malibu's move to run its own district is still working its way through. Confirm the campus for a specific address rather than for the road.

Neighborhoods on Malibu Road: the Beachfront Side, the Inner Side and the Western End

The beachfront side. Houses on the sand, with the water at the back door and the beach doing the job a garden would. This is the side people picture when they picture Malibu Road, and the wider lots are the ones families hold for decades.
The inner side. Across the street, with the bluffs or the hillside behind. A second floor here can look clean over the beachfront rooflines to open ocean. For a primary residence rather than a beach compound, this is the way onto the road.
The east end, by the Colony gate. The walkable end: the Civic Center, Malibu Colony Plaza and the Country Mart are all minutes away on foot, with the lagoon and the pier just beyond them.
The middle, under Malibu Bluffs. The steadiest sand on the road through the year, with the park on the bluff above it and the one open public stairway coming down nearby.
The western end at Puerco Beach. The widest and deepest sand of the three stretches, and the one part of the road where condominium buildings stand among the houses.
Malibu Colony, Carbon Beach, Latigo Beach and Broad Beach, up and down the coast. The four neighborhoods buyers on this road usually shop it against.

Work out which side of the street you are shopping before anything else. The beach side is priced on frontage width and sand depth. The inner side is priced on elevation and how much ocean you can see from the upper floor. Walk both in the same afternoon.

Homes for Sale on Malibu Road

Frontage width sets the resale ceiling. Beachfront lots measure anywhere from about thirty five to a hundred feet across the sand, and two comparable houses a few doors apart on different widths resell at very different levels. Our buyer's guide to the road works through how far that one measurement moves a price.
A rebuild on the beach side answers to the view rules. The city limits how tall and how wide a new house on the ocean side of this road can go, so the buildable envelope is decided before an architect starts drawing. Get that confirmed before the design does.
A Pritzker winner designed one of these houses. A beachfront house on the road is a Tadao Ando design, concrete and steel set on twelve pylons driven sixty feet into the sand, with about fifteen hundred square feet of deck on it.
There are condominium buildings at the west end. They stand above the widest sand on the road, and a unit in one is the smallest thing anybody sells on this beach.
Very little comes to market. Only a few houses on the entire road change hands in a year, so there are rarely more than a few on the market at once.

The inner side is the part of this road most buyers never price properly. A renovated house across the street can hold a clean second-floor view over the beachfront roofs for a fraction of what the sand itself costs, and the city's own view rules are what keep that view there.

Buying on Malibu Road with a Malibu Realtor

Our office is at 23732 Malibu Road, at the east end of the street. Get in touch with Shen Realty and we will measure a specific parcel's frontage with you, pull the easements recorded against its title, and show you where it stands against what has actually traded here. We have sold on this coastline for almost 30 years, out of Sotheby's International Realty.

Common Questions About Malibu Road

Can a neighbor build something that blocks my ocean view?

Less easily here than almost anywhere else in Malibu. Malibu Road is named in the city's coastal plan, alongside Pacific Coast Highway, Broad Beach Road, Birdview Avenue and Cliffside Drive, as a street whose ocean views have to be protected. Where a lot on the beach side slopes down from the road, a new house has to stay no higher than road grade. Where that cannot be done, the building may cover no more than eighty percent of the lot's frontage, and the remaining twenty percent has to stay open as one continuous view corridor, with see-through fencing and planting kept low. It is written into the Land Use Plan rather than left to a design review.

Who can walk on the sand outside the house?

The public, on more of it than most buyers expect. Wet sand below the average high tide line belongs to the state everywhere in California. Above that line, most titles on this road also have a walking strip recorded across them, written in years ago when the house was first permitted. Anything built out past that line (a deck, a wall, pool equipment) can draw Coastal Commission enforcement, so find out what is already there before you buy it. Our guide to private sand and public sand in Malibu explains how to read what is recorded against a particular title.

How do people get down to the beach here?

Down one stairway, mostly. The public accessway list shows a single open stairway on this road, at 24038 Malibu Road, dropping about thirty feet to the beach and opening up roughly a mile of walking at low tide. It took about twenty years of negotiation to open, and it has a handful of parking spaces and no restrooms. A second access point is down at the Puerco end. Everything between them is reached by walking the sand, so the beach in front of most of these houses stays quiet.

Does the sand change through the year?

It does, and it depends where on the road you are. The middle stretch holds the steadiest sand through all four seasons. The eastern end moves the most, and a run of winter storms can pull a good deal of beach off the front of the houses near the stairway before spring puts it back. The western end toward Puerco is the widest and the most stable of the three. If you want sand underfoot in February as well as August, look west.

What does it take to change a house on Malibu Road?

A coastal permit, on top of the usual city approvals, because every parcel on this road is inside the California Coastal Zone. A remodel, an addition, a deck or a new pool needs a Coastal Development Permit from the City of Malibu, and some of those decisions can be appealed to the Coastal Commission. Most houses on the road also run their own septic system instead of a sewer connection, so a rebuild means dealing with wastewater as well as with the building. Seawalls work differently: one is generally permitted only to protect a house that is already standing and under real threat, not to get ahead of erosion that has not happened yet. Our walkthrough of what building in Malibu actually involves covers the sequence.