Median Permit in 91604: $13,397 on 72 Filings — June 2026

ZIP 91604 sits in the Studio City stretch of Los Angeles, and over the reporting window of May 11 – June 9, 2026, it produced 72 residential building permits. That single figure is the reason this post exists: it is a small, self-contained slice of a much larger sealed snapshot, and it tells you exactly how busy one hillside ZIP was in a single 30-day window.

Every number on this page is a cut of the Los Angeles metro snapshot — not a separate dataset, not a re-survey, just the rows that carry the 91604 postal code. A building permit is the public record a city issues before legal construction or alteration can begin, which makes the permit table the earliest paper trail of who is about to spend money on a property. This report reads that trail for one ZIP: what got pulled, how the dollars cluster, and how 91604 stacks up against its Los Angeles neighbors.

The scope is narrow on purpose — 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.

The Numbers, Side by Side

Because 91604 only means something next to its peers, here is the ZIP set first — this is the comparison the rest of the post hangs on.

ZIP 91604 recorded 72 permits worth $3.4M over May 11 – June 9, 2026 — mid-pack on count and modest on dollars next to the 90272 outlier.

The first thing this table makes obvious is the scale gap at the top. ZIP 90272 alone logged 388 permits worth $66.2M — an order of magnitude above everyone beneath it on the dollar line. Against that, 91604 is a steady, ordinary residential ZIP: enough activity to matter to anyone working it, nowhere near the luxury-coast volume of the Pacific Palisades postal code.

The ZIPs immediately around 91604 on the count ladder — 91364 at 79, 90042 at 71, 90039 at 67 — sit within a handful of permits of each other, which tells you the middle of this distribution is dense and competitive.

Why 91604 Looks the Way It Does

Two ZIPs in this set carry the same permit count band but very different dollar totals, and 91604 is a clean example of the pattern. Its 72 permits map to $3.4M in declared valuation, with a median permit of $13,397. Hold that median next to the metro: across all of Los Angeles, the median residential permit valuation is $7,000, so the typical 91604 job is filed at a higher declared value than the typical job citywide.

That is the most useful single read on this ZIP. A median above the metro median, paired with a total that is not enormous, says 91604 is doing fewer giant projects and more substantial mid-size ones — the remodel-and-improve tier rather than the teardown-and-rebuild tier or the cheap-permit churn.

The median 91604 permit is filed at $13,397, above the $7,000 Los Angeles metro median — this ZIP skews toward larger, declared-value jobs.

To see how wide the metro spread is, the snapshot also carries percentile cuts for Los Angeles as a whole: the lower-quartile permit valuation is $2,500 and the upper-quartile is $35,000. A metro where a quarter of permits come in at or below $2,500 while the top quarter clears $35,000 is a market of many small filings and a thinner band of large ones.

The single most expensive permit anywhere in the Los Angeles snapshot was declared at $4,000,000. Against that backdrop, a 91604 median of $13,397 lands comfortably in the upper-middle of the distribution — not the cheap end, not the trophy end.

What Is Getting Built in 91604

The top permit type in 91604 is Bldg-Alter/Repair / 1 or 2 Family Dwelling — what we label, in plain English, as an Alteration & Repair permit — and it accounts for 34 of the ZIP's permits. More than anything else pulled here, this is the kind of work that defines the neighborhood.

An alteration-and-repair permit on a one- or two-family dwelling is the workhorse of an established residential ZIP. It covers work on a structure that already exists: kitchen and bathroom remodels, re-roofs, new windows and exterior cladding, foundation and seismic retrofits, electrical and plumbing upgrades pulled under a building scope, garage conversions, and the interior reconfigurations that come with a renovation rather than a ground-up build. It is the permit you pull when you are improving a house you intend to keep — or staging one to sell.

That 34-permit concentration matters because of who pulls these permits and when. Alteration-and-repair work clusters around two life events: an owner settling in for a long renovation, and an owner preparing a property for market. Both are signals. For a remodeling contractor, 34 alteration permits in one ZIP in 30 days is a clear map of where renovation budgets are landing right now. For a real estate agent, a wave of pre-sale alteration filings in a pocket like 91604 is a leading indicator that listings may follow. The permit record sees the intent before the MLS does.

The metro mix tells the same story at scale. Across Los Angeles, the largest category is Bldg-Alter/Repair / 1 or 2 Family Dwelling with 2,486 permits, followed by Bldg-Addition / 1 or 2 Family Dwelling at 422 and Bldg-New / 1 or 2 Family Dwelling at 359. Alteration work dominates the whole metro, not just this ZIP — Los Angeles is overwhelmingly a market of improving existing homes rather than building new ones, and 91604 is a faithful miniature of that pattern.

ZIP 91604 at a Glance

Note what is and is not in this table. The 72 permits and $3.4M total are the ZIP-level slice; the $13,397 median is the midpoint of the declared valuations on those filings. There is no manufactured trend line here — this is one window, sealed once, reported as it stands.

How 91604 Sits Inside Los Angeles

The metro frame puts the ZIP in proportion. Los Angeles is the largest market in this edition by both measures we track.

Los Angeles logged 4,042 residential permits worth $201.2M over the window, ranking #1 for permit count and #1 for total valuation across the 8 metros in this edition. The full edition aggregates to 7,334 permits and $688.3M in declared value, which means Los Angeles alone carries a large share of every number in the edition.

ZIP 91604 is 72 of the 4,042 residential permits Los Angeles sealed this window — one small tile in the metro that leads the 8-metro edition.

Valuation coverage is the honesty check on these dollar figures. In Los Angeles, 3,779 of the 4,042 permits carried a usable declared valuation — a coverage rate of 93.5%. Across the full edition, 6,171 of 7,334 permits carried valuation, for 84% coverage. High coverage matters: a total valuation is only as trustworthy as the share of permits that actually reported a number, and Los Angeles at 93.5% is among the cleaner rows in the set. The 91604 totals inherit that same clean LA coverage because they are drawn from the same rows.

If you want the full metro picture behind this ZIP, the Los Angeles building permit report for June 2026 carries every category and the citywide tables. For a neighboring pocket read the same way, the 91367 ZIP report covers the Woodland Hills code that sits a few rungs above 91604 on the count ladder.

Methodology

Every figure in this report is a ZIP-level cut of the same sealed daily permit snapshots captured for Los Angeles — the 91604 rows are filtered out of the metro file, not collected separately. The source is the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety via data.lacity.org (Socrata).

The honesty statement governs everything above: all figures are computed directly from US Tech Automations' sealed daily permit snapshots; nothing is estimated, modeled, or extrapolated. Where a number is not in the sealed snapshot, it does not appear here.

A note on scope, repeated because it changes how you should read the totals: 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. The 72 is the residential permit count for 91604 over the window — not a measure of every shovel in the ground.

How the snapshot is built:

1. Collect. Pull the day's residential permit records for Los Angeles directly from data.lacity.org via the Socrata API.

2. Normalize. Standardize category labels, postal codes, and declared valuation fields, and drop the commercial and sub-trade rows that fall outside the residential scope.

3. Seal daily. Content-hash each day's normalized set and write it append-only, so the record for any date cannot be quietly rewritten later.

4. Aggregate over the window. Sum and rank the sealed days across May 11 – June 9, 2026, then slice the 91604 rows out of the metro total to produce this ZIP report.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Is this every construction permit pulled in 91604?
A: No. The 72 count is residential building permits only — single-family and small multi-family. Commercial and sub-trade permits are excluded at ingest, so this is a deliberate slice of the full permit picture, not a total.

Q: Why is the 91604 median valuation higher than the Los Angeles median?
A: The 91604 median is $13,397 against a metro median of $7,000. A higher ZIP median means the typical job here is filed at a larger declared value than the typical job citywide — fewer minor filings, more substantial remodel-scale work.

Q: What does the top category actually cover?
A: The top type, Bldg-Alter/Repair / 1 or 2 Family Dwelling, accounts for 34 of the ZIP's permits. It covers work on existing one- and two-family homes: remodels, re-roofs, retrofits, and interior reconfigurations — the renovate-or-prepare-to-sell tier of work.

Q: How does 91604 compare to other Los Angeles ZIPs?
A: At 72 permits it sits mid-pack. It trails the 90272 outlier at 388 permits and $66.2M, and runs close to 91364 at 79, 90042 at 71, and 90039 at 67. On dollars its $3.4M is modest but not the smallest in the set.

Q: How current and how complete are these numbers?
A: The window is May 11 – June 9, 2026, sealed daily. For the parent metro, 3,779 of 4,042 permits carried a usable valuation — 93.5% coverage — and the 91604 figures are drawn from those same rows. The dollar totals are only as complete as that coverage allows.

Put Permit Data to Work

A single ZIP report like this is most useful to the people who already work the neighborhood. A remodeling or roofing contractor reads the 34 alteration permits in 91604 as a live map of where renovation budgets are landing this month. A building-materials supplier reads the same concentration to time inventory and crew scheduling. A real estate agent treats a cluster of pre-sale alteration filings as an early listing signal — the permit record moves before the MLS does. A lender reads the median against the metro to gauge renovation demand in a specific pocket.

The bottleneck is never the data, which is public; it is the work of watching it every day, across every ZIP that matters to you, and turning a fresh filing into a timely outreach. That is the workflow US Tech Automations builds.

The raw permit corpus behind this report is browsable at permits.ustechautomations.com, and our automations layer on top of it — monitoring new filings by ZIP and category, routing fresh permits to the right person as leads, and drafting the first-touch outreach so a contractor or agent acts on a permit the day it posts instead of the week it shows up on a listing.

If you want permit signals like the 91604 alteration wave turned into an automated lead-and-outreach pipeline for your own market, see how US Tech Automations wires it up for real estate teams. The discipline that produces this report — sealed daily, nothing estimated — is the same discipline behind every signal we route, which you can trace in the permit prediction ledger for June 2026.

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