130 Permits, $7,500 Median: ZIP 90049 — June 2026

This report covers residential building permit activity in ZIP 90049 — the Brentwood area on Los Angeles' Westside — for the May 11 – June 9, 2026 reporting window. The headline is a tension: 130 permits, a volume only one other ZIP in our Los Angeles top-ZIP list exceeds, set against a median valuation of $7,500 — small-job money in some of the most expensive residential blocks in the country. Every figure here is a ZIP-level slice of the sealed snapshot behind our Los Angeles June report.

Scope: residential building permits (single-family and small multi-family); commercial and sub-trade permits are excluded at ingest. This is not a count of all construction permits issued in each city.

Key Findings

• ZIP 90049 recorded 130 residential building permits in the 30-day window, according to US Tech Automations' sealed permit snapshots.

• Reported valuation in 90049 totals $4.9M for the window, per the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety via data.lacity.org (Socrata).

• The median 90049 permit is valued at $7,500, above the citywide $7,000, per the same sealed snapshot data.

• Alteration & Repair leads the ZIP with 59 of 130 permits, per the Department of Building and Safety records.

• Among top Los Angeles ZIPs, only 90272 at 388 permits logged more, according to the sealed cross-ZIP slice.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How many residential building permits did ZIP 90049 receive in this window?
A: 130 residential building permits in the May 11 – June 9, 2026 window, carrying $4.9M in reported valuation. The figures are a ZIP-level slice of the sealed daily snapshots of the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety feed on data.lacity.org (Socrata) — the same records behind the citywide report.

Q: Why is the median permit valuation only $7,500 in a neighborhood as expensive as Brentwood?
A: Because the median describes the permitted work, not the property under it. Most 90049 filings are small alteration and repair scopes — a remodel phase, a structural fix, a window or roof package — and applicants declare the cost of that scope alone. The citywide median is $7,000, so Brentwood's typical filing is only slightly larger on paper than the typical Los Angeles filing.

Q: What kind of work dominates 90049 permitting?
A: Alteration & Repair — 59 of the ZIP's 130 permits fall under the source label "Bldg-Alter/Repair / 1 or 2 Family Dwelling." Qualitatively, that is remodel and upkeep work on existing houses: kitchens, baths, structural repairs, reconfigured interiors. New construction and additions make up the remainder of the mix.

Q: Does this report count every construction permit in 90049?
A: No. It covers residential building permits (single-family and small multi-family); commercial and sub-trade permits are excluded at ingest. It is not a count of all construction permits issued in each city — standalone electrical, plumbing, or mechanical filings, for example, are out of scope.

Q: How does 90049 compare with other Los Angeles ZIP codes?
A: In the snapshot's top-ZIP list, only 90272 — at 388 permits and $66.2M — logged more. 90049's 130 permits put it clearly ahead of the next tier, where 91344 recorded 95 permits and 90066 recorded 94. Citywide, Los Angeles logged 4,042 residential permits in the same window.

Q: Where do these numbers come from?
A: From sealed daily snapshots of the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety feed published on data.lacity.org (Socrata). Each day's capture is hashed and stored before analysis, then aggregated over the 30-day window. Nothing is estimated or modeled — see the Methodology section below.

ZIP 90049 Permit Activity, May 11 – June 9, 2026

The headline figures below are copied directly from the ZIP-level slice of the sealed snapshot. Valuations are applicant-declared at filing, not appraisals.

ZIP 90049 logged 130 residential permits worth $4.9M in reported valuation over the 30-day window — and half of those filings were valued at $7,500 or less.

The volume-versus-ticket tension is the story. A ZIP that produces 130 filings in a single 30-day window is a busy market by any Los Angeles standard, yet the $7,500 median says the typical job is modest: a single trade or a single phase, not a ground-up build. The total of $4.9M confirms it — this is a market of many small jobs rather than a few large ones.

For context, the citywide distribution runs the same way. Across Los Angeles, a quarter of permits with valuations come in at $2,500 or below, while the upper quartile starts at $35,000 — a wide spread between routine repairs and substantial projects. Brentwood's slice sits squarely in that small-job pattern, just with a slightly higher typical ticket than the city as a whole.

What that implies for who works here: 90049 is a maintenance and remodel market in this window. The contractors winning work in Brentwood are running many short engagements in parallel — and the homeowners pulling these permits are improving houses they intend to keep, not clearing lots.

What Is Getting Built in 90049

The ZIP's leading category carries the source label "Bldg-Alter/Repair / 1 or 2 Family Dwelling," which the snapshot tracks as Alteration & Repair. It accounts for 59 of 90049's 130 permits — and understanding what sits behind that label is most of understanding this market.

In Los Angeles, an alteration or repair permit on a one- or two-family dwelling covers changes to an existing house: interior remodels, structural repairs, foundation work, re-framing, window and door replacements that alter openings, and fire or water damage restoration. It is the permit a general contractor pulls before opening walls in a kitchen, the one a structural engineer's retrofit plan triggers, and the one that legalizes the unglamorous middle of residential construction — the work that keeps an older, high-value housing stock standing.

That fits Brentwood's physical reality. The neighborhood's housing is largely established single-family stock, much of it decades old, on streets where owners renovate rather than relocate. Continuous upkeep on expensive homes generates exactly this signature: steady filing volume, modest per-permit valuations, and a category mix tilted hard toward alteration work. For a deeper cut of this permit type across the whole city, see our Los Angeles alteration and repair report.

The ZIP's mix mirrors the city's. Across all of Los Angeles, the category table looks like this:

Citywide, alteration and repair filings dwarf additions at 422 and new dwellings at 359 — a remodel-first market in this window. Brentwood is a concentrated expression of the same pattern: established neighborhoods generate permits by changing what exists, not by building what doesn't.

For trades, the practical read is about cadence. Alteration-heavy demand is distributed and recurring — electricians, plumbers, framers, and finish carpenters cycle through many addresses — whereas addition and new-build demand concentrates value in fewer, longer projects. A 90049 pipeline built on this window's data is a volume pipeline, not a whale hunt.

How 90049 Compares in Los Angeles

The table below places 90049 among the other top ZIP codes in the same sealed Los Angeles slice, with the citywide row for scale.

90272 leads Los Angeles ZIPs with 388 permits and $66.2M in reported valuation; 90049 follows at 130 permits — but only $4.9M.

The gap at the top of the table is structural, not subtle. ZIP 90272 — Pacific Palisades — is an outlier in both volume and dollars, consistent with the rebuilding effort that followed the January 2025 wildfires: its valuation total is an order of magnitude beyond every other ZIP on the list. 90049 is the strongest of the ordinary markets — the busiest ZIP in the slice whose activity reflects routine demand rather than disaster recovery.

Within that ordinary tier, 90049's profile stands out for volume rather than dollars. Mar Vista's 90066 posted 94 permits and $4.2M — nearly the same dollar total on noticeably fewer filings — while Granada Hills' 91344 logged 95 permits at $2.4M. Atwater Village's 90039 inverts the Brentwood pattern: just 67 permits but $6.0M in reported valuation, a market where fewer, larger projects carry the total.

The comparison sharpens the interpretation of Brentwood's median. ZIPs across very different price tiers — Studio City's 91604, Highland Park's 90042, Westchester's 90045, Reseda's 91335 — all show the same broad shape: dozens of filings, single-digit-millions totals. Neighborhood wealth shows up in permit data less as bigger typical jobs and more as sustained filing volume on an aging, well-maintained housing stock.

Methodology

Source: Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety via data.lacity.org (Socrata). All figures are computed directly from US Tech Automations' sealed daily permit snapshots; nothing is estimated, modeled, or extrapolated.

Every number in this report is a ZIP-level cut of the same sealed snapshot used in the citywide Los Angeles report — the 90049 rows are filtered out of the metro records, not collected separately. Citywide, 3,779 of the metro's 4,042 permits carry a reported valuation — 93.5% coverage — so valuation totals should be read as floors, summarizing only the filings that declare a dollar amount.

How the numbers are produced:

1. Collect. Pull the Department of Building and Safety's public permit feed from data.lacity.org daily.

2. Normalize. Map the source fields onto a common schema and apply the residential scope filter at ingest — single-family and small multi-family only.

3. Seal daily. Hash each day's snapshot and store it append-only, so any figure here can be re-derived from the exact records behind it.

4. Slice and aggregate. Filter the sealed records to ZIP 90049 and summarize over the May 11 – June 9, 2026 window, with no estimation, interpolation, or backfill.

This edition is cross-sectional: it describes one window and makes no trend claims, because comparable historical windows do not yet exist in this series. The same sealing discipline runs our forward-looking work — the permit prediction ledger seals predictions before outcomes are observable, so they can be scored honestly later.

Put Permit Data to Work

A ZIP like 90049 rewards whoever reads it correctly. For a remodel contractor, this window's data says Brentwood is qualified territory: 130 permits in a 30-day stretch is proof of active, paying demand, and a $7,500 median says the winning offer is responsive small-job capacity, not a big-project pitch. For suppliers, an alteration-heavy ZIP means steady, distributed orders — finish materials, fixtures, repair-scale lumber — rather than lumpy new-construction packages.

Real estate agents read the same rows differently. Permit filings are one of the earliest public signals that an owner is investing in a property — and clusters of small remodel permits on a street often precede listings. Lenders and insurers, meanwhile, use coverage-aware permit totals as a ground check on renovation activity claims in a territory.

The bottleneck is rarely the data; it is the watching. Permits post publicly every day, but most firms see them in quarterly summaries long after the work is bid. US Tech Automations turns these signals into automated workflows — monitoring new filings in target ZIPs as they post, routing matches to the right trade or territory, and drafting outreach grounded in the actual record. The live data behind this report is at permits.ustechautomations.com, and if you want 90049-grade signals wired into your own pipeline, contact us.

Source: US Tech Automations Research — computed from sealed daily permit snapshots, May 11 – June 9, 2026.