Eunice on Los Alamitos

This conversation was put together for Eunice's website from her notes and public sources; the places, events and figures are checked and linked below. Eunice lives in Rossmoor and works in Los Alamitos every week.

If you only read one line: Los Alamitos is a small city that's easy to live in: ten parks, one deli everyone knows, a December night on Pine Street with real snow, and the schools, at a price of entry Rossmoor can't match.

You live in Rossmoor, right next door. What's the honest pitch for Los Alamitos?

That it's easy. It's a small city, under 12,000 people, and you start seeing the same faces fast: at the youth fields on a Saturday, in the line at Katella Deli on a Sunday, at the park with the dogs. There's nothing to figure out. You just start living here and within a few months it's your town.

Describe a Saturday.

Little Cottonwood Park first, early, before it gets warm. It's the biggest park in the city and it has the two playgrounds and the covered picnic tables that families book up on weekends, so if you want a table you go early. Then Katella Deli. The hot pastrami, and something from the bakery case for later. If it's spring there's a youth game somewhere, and if it's summer the concerts are on Pine Street in the evening and you run into everyone.

Winter Wonderland?

My favorite night of the year here. The city closes Pine Street between Katella and Florista in December and fills it with real snow, an ice rink, a little train, food and a stage. It's free. About 7,500 people came in 2025, which in a city this size is basically everybody, and you will spend half the night in line for hot chocolate talking to your neighbors. I bring clients to it. It explains the place better than I can.

What about the base?

The Joint Forces Training Base takes up a big part of the city and it's part of the town's story, not a problem to hide. It's where the Fourth of July show is, and every February the Race on the Base runs right on the runways with the helicopters and the planes lined up: a reverse triathlon, a 5K, a relay, families everywhere. What I'm straight with people about is the flyovers. Some streets get them, some barely do, so I show a home at two different times of day before anyone writes an offer.

And the beach?

About ten minutes, straight down Seal Beach Boulevard to the pier. That's the thing people from out of the area don't expect: Los Alamitos reads like an inland small town, but Seal Beach's Main Street, the pier and the sand are a short drive, and so are Bolsa Chica's wetlands, Sunset Beach and Huntington Harbour one way and Alamitos Bay and Belmont Shore the other. Summer evenings a lot of families here do dinner on Main Street and the pier after, and they're home by nine.

Rossmoor is right there. How do you explain the difference?

Same ZIP code, same schools, different everything else. Rossmoor is unincorporated and all single-family homes behind the brick wall. Los Alamitos is an actual city with a city hall, and it has condos and townhomes as well as houses, which is why our median looks lower. That mix is the thing I love about it: a first-time buyer or a downsizer can get into Los Alamitos Unified here at a price that doesn't exist across the line. I wrote a whole comparison because people ask me every week.

Something a newcomer wouldn't know?

That the Los Alamitos Race Course isn't in Los Alamitos. It has our name and our address and it sits across the line in Cypress. People argue about it at dinner parties. Also that the hospital on Katella, which everyone still calls Los Alamitos Medical Center, became UCI Health – Los Alamitos in 2024 and is the biggest employer in town. A lot of my buyers are nurses and doctors who want to be five minutes from a shift.

What's the mistake buyers make here?

Reading the citywide numbers as if they're about one kind of home. They aren't. A detached home on the 1950s streets and a townhome by the main roads are two different markets with two different price lines. The other one is not checking which side of the Rossmoor line a listing is on. I check every time.

And sellers?

For a townhome, order the HOA documents before you list, because buyers here are careful and they'll ask. For a house, have the permits ready and do the little things. One of mine in this ZIP code, a three-bedroom, 2,290 square feet, sold in July 2024 for $1,775,000, eleven percent over the asking price, after seven days. That wasn't luck. It was a clean house, honest pricing and buyers who could see it was ready. In Jul–Sep 2026, Los Alamitos homes sold for 99.6% of asking on average and went under contract in about 76 days.

Questions people ask