With the smoke starting to clear from the Los Angeles-area fires, the full extent of the damage they caused is beginning to come into view.

The two largest blazes, the Palisades and Eaton fires, combined burned nearly 40,000 acres across dozens of neighborhoods in the region, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

Now, exclusive data from Homes.com and CoStar Group reveals that together, those two wildfires destroyed about $29.7 billion worth of single-family housing. In all, about 11,000 homes across 18 neighborhoods were wiped out by the two wildfires.

The brunt of that loss was felt in Pacific Palisades, where the Palisades Fire charred more than $17 billion worth of homes, and in Altadena, where the Eaton Fire destroyed about $7.6 billion worth of houses, according to Homes.com and CoStar. Accuweather estimated that the total cost of the fires’ damage, business disruptions and economy to be between $250 billion and $275 billion.

It’s a catastrophic loss for the state, and the United States as a whole, according to Jesse Gundersheim, senior director of CoStar Market Analytics for Los Angeles, and one of the researchers who worked to compile the latest data.

“The Eaton and Palisades fires were by far the most destructive in Southern California’s history,” he said, noting that the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires were “far more destructive” than the combined effects of the next worst five in Southern California’s history.

The extent of damage came as a shock, even to California residents who have weathered previous wildfires throughout the state, according to Jason Oppenheim, a broker and 25-year resident of Los Angeles.

“We just never thought this could happen,” he said in an interview earlier this month. “It’s honestly just hard to even comprehend.”

Part of the reason that this year’s fires were so costly is because of the neighborhoods where they were concentrated.

The Palisades Fire, for example, tore through neighborhoods such as Pacific Palisades, where the median single-family home price for the past 12 months is more than $4 million.

Other impacted neighborhoods included Topanga, where the median single-family home price is close to $2 million, and Big Rock, where the median price is more than $4 million.

“The higher value of real estate destroyed in the Palisades probably ranks it as the costliest fire in the nation's history in terms of real estate value lost,” according to Gundersheim.

It’s a similar story in the neighborhoods razed by the Eaton fire. In Altadena, the median single-family home is priced around $1.3 million, according to Homes.com. Upper Hastings Ranch, another neighborhood decimated by the fire, has a median price above $1.5 million. And in the Kinneloa Mesa, that value is nearly $2 million.

Already, the city of Los Angeles is making plans to rebuild the neighborhoods lost to the fires.

Mayor Karen Bass appointed Steve Soboroff, a former police commissioner and property developer, as the city’s chief recovery officer to oversee the city’s recovery and rebuilding efforts. The mayor said that within the next 90 days, Soboroff will work to develop a framework to remove debris from the city and streamline rebuild approvals.

At the same time, billionaire real estate developer Rick Caruso has said he is forming a nonprofit to help speed up the rebuilding process, the Wall Street Journal reported. The nonprofit won’t work with homeowners, but it will make it easier for them to find resources to rebuild, he said.

Even with those efforts underway, it could be years before even a small part of the destroyed neighborhoods is restored, according to CoStar’s Gundersheim. He pointed to the 2018 Camp fire that destroyed 18,000 structures and cost about $16.5 billion in damage in Paradise, California.

“If you look at past examples in the state, homebuilding in Paradise seven years later has only replaced a fraction of homes lost in the Camp fire,” Gundersheim said. “Following the Tubbs fire that destroyed over 3,000 homes in Northern California in 2017, few new homes had been completed a year after the fires, despite expedited building approval measures. More rebuilds were completed in about three years, and it took five years and even longer for some, particularly in areas where the terrain was uneven, like you have in the Palisades and Altadena.”

In the meantime, many displaced Los Angeles residents are seeking semi-permanent housing in the nearby cities of Santa Monica, Brentwood and Newport Beach.

Local real estate agents have said that they’re seeing strong demand from clients, many of whom are willing to pay anything to get into a property.

“We are seeing some properties with multiple applications, sight unseen,” said Angela von Detten, an agent specializing in Pacific Palisades and Santa Monica, in an interview this month. “At this point, clients are looking for either furnished or unfurnished. Really, they just need to get a roof over their heads.”