Creating Resilience

Assessing the Property Impact of the Unfolding Los Angeles Tragedy

Map of the Month

January 29, 2025 2 Minute Read

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The images coming out of Los Angeles these past few weeks can be difficult to bear, especially for anyone with friends, family and colleagues in the area. While the devastating human toll is the foremost concern, coming to grips with the property impact is also important for real estate investors.

Our January Map of the Month uses the Eaton fire to show how we can track the status of buildings across the affected area. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) play a key role. Our GIS team procured map layers for the fire perimeter, evacuation zone and the evacuation warning zone. The National Interagency Fire Center updates these GIS layers daily.

We overlayed these layers onto a base map of Los Angeles and integrated commercial building data from our proprietary database. We married the building points to a footprint layer, which gives a sense of a building’s size relative to its neighbors. We then color-coded the buildings by sector. This enables us to work with others to assess each structure's condition at the building address level. The result of this stage in the process yields a table of the square footage of buildings by sector that we are tracking in the Eaton fire area.

As heart-wrenching as this situation is, CBRE EA will continue to track the status of buildings as the tragedy – and eventual recovery – unfolds. Our hearts go out to everyone in the Los Angeles area.

Figure 1: Eaton Fire Square Footage

Chart of commercial real estate data showing totals for fire perimeter, evacuation orders, and warnings across industrial, multifamily, office and retail properties.