Bel Air jumbo loans and 2026 loan limits.

Bel Air was laid out in the 1920s in the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains. Sunset Boulevard is its southern edge, the San Diego Freeway and the Sepulveda Pass are to the west, Mulholland Drive runs along the ridge to the north, and Beverly Glen is to the east. Two gateways on Sunset Boulevard, known as East Gate and West Gate, mark the main ways in. Stone Canyon Reservoir lies in the hills above.

The homes are houses, from older estates on the lower streets to newer houses on graded pads along the ridges. Roads are narrow and winding, many lots are steep or oddly shaped, and long driveways and gates are common. There are almost no condominiums or apartment buildings, and a few communities with private streets and homeowners associations stand near the crest of the hills.

Mostly the appraisal and the insurance. On hillside lots no two properties are alike, and Bel Air is fire country, so both take more time than they do on level ground.

An appraiser values a house by comparing it with similar homes that sold recently. Where each lot has its own slope, view and size, close matches are few, and the search can reach further back in time or further away. On a larger jumbo loan a lender may order a second appraisal. Graded pads, retaining walls and drainage can bring questions, and work done without permits is noted.

The Bel Air fire of 1961 and the Skirball fire of 2017 both burned homes in these canyons, and the hills are mapped by the state as fire hazard zones. Lenders require homeowners insurance, and here it can be slow to place, sometimes through the California FAIR Plan with a second policy beside it. Get quotes before you make an offer.

East Gate is the older, eastern part of Bel Air, entered through the gateway where Bel Air Road meets Sunset Boulevard, near Beverly Glen Boulevard. From the gate, Bel Air Road, St. Cloud Road, Nimes Road and the streets around them climb the hillside in long curves. This is where the first lots of the 1920s subdivision were sold.

Lots here are among the larger ones in Bel Air, often screened by hedges and walls, with a main house and sometimes a guest house or a pool house. Many houses have been rebuilt or greatly enlarged over the years. For a lender, the questions are the ones that come with any large, individual property: an appraisal with few close comparisons, a possible second appraisal on a larger loan, and whether every building on the lot has permits. A second kitchen or a separate guest house does not make the property a two-unit building unless it is legally one, so the one-unit limit normally applies. Hillside fire-zone insurance applies here as well.

West Gate is the western entrance to Bel Air, at Bellagio and Sunset Boulevard, opposite an entrance to the UCLA campus. Bellagio Road, Stone Canyon Road, Chalon Road and Roscomare Road lead up from this side. The Hotel Bel-Air sits on Stone Canyon Road, and the Bel-Air Country Club’s golf course winds through the canyons nearby.

The homes range from houses on fairly regular lots along Roscomare Road to large properties tucked into Stone Canyon. Lots beside the golf course or on the canyon floor can be flatter than those on the ridges, but access is still by narrow two-lane roads. Lenders look at the usual jumbo file, which is income, savings and credit, and then at the property: the appraisal, the permits and the insurance. Canyon-bottom lots can raise drainage questions, and the whole area is in mapped fire hazard zones. If you are comparing a house here with one on the level streets south of Sunset, expect the hillside house to take longer to appraise and to insure.

Bel Air Crest is a community with private streets and a staffed gate near the summit of the Sepulveda Pass, off Sepulveda Boulevard north of the Getty Center, below the Skirball Cultural Center and Mulholland Drive. It was built as a planned development, starting in the late 1980s, on terraces cut into the hillside, and it is reached from the western side of Bel Air, not through the Sunset Boulevard gates.

Unlike most of Bel Air, the houses here were built to a common plan on graded lots, and the community has a homeowners association for the guard gate, the clubhouse and the other shared grounds. A lender adds the association dues to the monthly housing cost when it works out what you can borrow, and may ask for the association’s budget and insurance. Because the homes are closer in age and style, an appraiser usually finds comparable sales more easily than elsewhere in Bel Air. The setting is still hillside, beside open brush land, so it is in a mapped fire hazard zone: ask for homeowners insurance quotes early, and ask what the association’s own policy covers.