Why Single Story Ocean View Homes Are So Rare in San Clemente

Six minutes inside the one currently on the market: 306 Via Colibri, Palacio Del Mar.

The search usually starts the same way. One level. No stairs. Ocean view. San Clemente, or close to it. Then the filter runs and returns four homes, two of which have a bonus room down a half flight and one of which has eleven steps from the driveway to the front door.

The shortage is real, and it has a physical cause rather than a market one. It is the hill.

The terrain decided this before the first tract was drawn

San Clemente covers 18.45 square miles of what the city describes as rugged hills and coastal canyons, with 6.8 miles of ridgeline trails running through it (City of San Clemente, City Information). The parcels that see water are the parcels with elevation, and elevation here means slope.

On sloped ground, square footage is cheaper stacked than spread. A two story home gets its second floor from a framing crew. A single story home of the same size needs roughly double the level pad, and a level pad on a hillside is bought with earthwork and retaining walls. That is the whole answer, and every other factor is downstream of it.

What the grading rules do to a floor plan

San Clemente's own Grading Manual treats a site as hillside development once the existing grade reaches 20 percent or greater, or once the work calls for three feet of cut or fill. From there the standards get specific: cut and fill slopes no steeper than two horizontal to one vertical, terraces at no more than thirty foot vertical intervals on those slopes, benching into sound bedrock where fill goes over existing slopes taller than five feet.

Read that as a builder and the conclusion writes itself. Every extra foot of flat pad you want costs cubic yards of dirt moved and a retaining structure to hold what you cut. Widening a pad to fit a 2,000 square foot single story plan instead of a 1,000 square foot footprint under two floors is not a rounding error on a coastal hillside lot. It is a different project with a different budget.

So the hillside neighborhoods above the San Clemente coast filled up with two story and split level homes. Not because anyone decided buyers preferred stairs.

The view pushes the house upward too

There is a second force, and it works on the architecture rather than the dirt. On a downslope lot the room that sees water is the room sitting highest, because it clears the roofline of whatever sits below it. Give a designer one level and the view belongs to two or three rooms at the back. Give that designer a second story and the view reaches the primary suite and often a deck off the top floor.

Designers took the second option nearly every time, and I understand why. I also think it is oversold. A hillside view home where the entry is at street level and the living space is a flight down sells beautifully at 45 and gets returned to the market at 70. The view never changes. The climb does, roughly three times a day, plus groceries.

Walk the streets above Doheny in Dana Point and you see the pattern repeated: front door on the street, living below, the water visible from the level you have to descend to reach.

New construction is finally building flatter, just not here

Nationally, 48.6 percent of single family homes started in 2025 were one story. In the Pacific division the single story share reached 47.5 percent, up from 32.7 percent in 2017, rising in seven of the last eight years (NAHB analysis of the Census Bureau Survey of Construction).

That trend does almost nothing for a buyer who wants a water view in San Clemente. The coastal hillside neighborhoods were built out decades ago. Palacio Del Mar is a useful example: a comparable sale at 517 Avenida Del Verdor shows a build year of 1980 in public record. New single level supply is going up where there is flat land to put it on, which in Orange County means inland tracts, and inland tracts do not come with coastline.

The supply of single story ocean view homes in south county is therefore fixed. It does not grow. It only changes hands.

Who else is looking for the same house

Demand is moving the other direction. In AARP's 2024 Home and Community Preferences Survey, 75 percent of adults 50 and older said they want to stay in their current home as they age, and 51 percent said they need a home that supports living independently (AARP, December 2024).

The practical version of that in south Orange County looks like this: people who have lived near the water for twenty years are not moving to Arizona. They are trying to stay within a few miles of the same beach with fewer level changes in the house. That is the core of most downsizing conversations I have in San Clemente, and those buyers are competing for the same short list as second home buyers and as anyone with a knee that has opinions about stairs. Nearly all of them have a house to sell in order to buy this one, and the order those two transactions run in changes what the move costs.

What the few of them actually cost

Here is the current picture inside one community, Palacio Del Mar, using the active listing and two public record sales.

Two things in that table are worth sitting with. The per foot spread runs from $1,002 to $1,407, and the total dollars barely move: about $107,500 separates the lowest sale from the highest asking price. The single story home is the smallest of the three and carries the highest price per square foot.

My position on that, plainly: per square foot is the wrong lens for this category. You are not buying a commodity measured in feet, you are buying a floor plan that a limited number of parcels can physically support, and the seller of the 2,968 square foot home was competing with every other large two story home in the area while the single story seller was not. Note also that 517 Avenida Del Verdor closed at $2,975,000 against a $2,997,000 list, so the larger plan did trade below asking.

The honest caveat is that condition explains part of the gap too. A home with a new roof and new windows throughout is not comparable to a 1980 build in original condition, and when furnishings convey, some of the price is personal property rather than real estate. I have seen buyers overweight the per foot number in both directions.

How to actually find one

1. Search on the stories field, not on the marketing copy. The MLS carries a levels or stories attribute. Filtering for "single level" inside listing remarks returns homes described that way by an agent who counted generously.
2. Ask about the approach before you ask about the interior. A home can be one story and still sit behind a long run of exterior steps from the street or driveway. Nothing in the data tells you that. A photo of the front elevation usually does.
3. Read the remarks for level change vocabulary: bonus room down, lower level retreat, sunken living room, step down bar. Each one means a stair, and each one tends to appear in homes advertised as single level.
4. Widen the geography and narrow the community. Search Dana Point and San Juan Capistrano alongside San Clemente, then filter by the specific neighborhoods with wide graded pads rather than by city.
5. Check where the home sits on the street. A cul de sac position on a hillside tract usually means the pad at the end of the run, which is often the flattest and the most private ground in the tract.
6. Put a standing alert on the criteria and have your agent work the off market side. In a fixed supply category, the home you want may be owned by someone who has not decided to sell yet, and that conversation starts with a letter or a phone call rather than a search.

The one currently available in Palacio Del Mar

As of this writing, 306 Via Colibri, called Bella Vita, is the only true single story ocean view home available in Palacio Del Mar. It sits on a cul de sac in the community and looks out at unobstructed ocean and coastline, with 2 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms across 2,052 square feet. MLS# OC26172289. Offered at $2,888,000, with HOA dues of $390 per month.

The remodel is the part that changes how it shows. New roof, new windows, new flooring, custom cabinetry, whole house air purification, reverse osmosis at the kitchen sink, and solar with battery backup. Nobody has lived in it since that work finished.

The primary suite carries a fireplace, a reading nook and a desk, a walk in shower, a jetted tub, and a private in ground spa controlled from an app. The second bedroom is en suite with its own patio, which is the detail that makes a two bedroom house work for people who host their family for a week at a time. Along the side yard there is a coral reef themed garden bed that glows after dark, an unusual detail, and entirely its own feature.

It is offered fully furnished, and the 2024 street legal golf cart is included. In a hillside coastal neighborhood, that cart is transportation, not a novelty.

Paula Aragone
CEO and Founder, Aragone & Associates

Founded in 2003, with 23 years in business, 900+ transactions and $900M+ sold across Orange County. Paula holds CPRES, SRES, Certified Luxury, Certified REO and Certified Relocation designations, and brings a law school background to probate, trust, divorce, luxury and senior downsizing sales.

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