As The Desert Sun reported, drivers heading south on Palm Canyon Drive near Camino Monte Vista this month are passing a construction fence with a banner that reads "Luxury new homes from the low $2 millions." In most Palm Springs neighborhoods, that would read as an aspirational price point. In Old Las Palmas, where the three-month median sale price stood at $4.2 million as of April 2026, it reads more like a bet.
The project is called The Twelve at Old Las Palmas, and it is the first new-construction offering this neighborhood has seen in decades. That alone would make it worth watching. What makes it worth understanding, if you are weighing Old Las Palmas against other Coachella Valley neighborhoods, is what the price actually trades away and what it trades around, including a proposed utility assessment whose boundary affects the cost comparison.
The first new construction here in decades
Old Las Palmas was laid out in the mid-1920s on former citrus grove land developed by builder Alvah Hicks and developer Prescott Stevens, and it still holds roughly 290 single-family homes at the base of Mount San Jacinto, according to the Old Las Palmas Neighborhood Organization. New product simply has not been part of the story here. The Twelve changes that on a 0.95-acre site wedged between Palm Canyon Drive and Camino Norte, approved by the Palm Springs Planning Commission in 2022 and the city council in 2023, and now under construction with 12 detached condo units ranging from 2,200 to 2,700 square feet.
The site is not isolated from the rest of the corridor's change. Aloe Palm Canyon, a 71-unit affordable senior living complex that opened in the fall of 2025, sits just to the north. A two-story office building borders it to the south. A few blocks up the same street, the Planning Commission has granted a time extension through April 2027 for a separate 2.45-acre mixed-use proposal at 575 North Palm Canyon Drive that would add 24 more condo units and roughly 5,400 square feet of commercial space, according to city planning records. Further down, the Days Inn site is slated for redevelopment into a hotel and resort. None of that touches the historic estate core a few streets over, but it does mean the northeast corner of Old Las Palmas is absorbing more new product in the next two years than it has in the last several decades combined.
What "comparable" means in the marketing copy
The Twelve's own marketing describes the last unit remaining in its first phase as the best value opportunity in the project, and states that comparable homes in Old Las Palmas trade between $4 million and $19.5 million. That range offers one point of comparison, though the homes differ substantially in land, age, and architectural character.
The homes it is being compared to are the neighborhood's actual product: century-old single-family estates on large lots, some with the kind of provenance that shows up in architecture books rather than listing sheets. This is a neighborhood that has counted Clark Gable and Elizabeth Taylor among its residents historically, and its homes range from Old Spanish revival to modernist landmarks. A detached condo on a 0.95-acre shared parcel is not competing for the same buyer who wants an acre and a half of assembled land with multiple structures and a private compound feel. It is offering a different trade: a fully built, professionally finished home with an in-residence elevator, a rooftop deck with an outdoor kitchen and fireplace lounge, and a private cocktail pool, all inside a neighborhood where that kind of land and architectural pedigree usually costs two to nine times as much.
That is a legitimate value proposition. It is just a different value proposition than the marketing's price comparison implies, and the difference matters if what actually draws you to Old Las Palmas is the land itself.
Read the sales numbers as a thin market, not a trend
The neighborhood-level data backs up the same caution. Average sale price in Old Las Palmas ran roughly $3.47 million as of a recent monthly snapshot, up 54.2 percent year over year. Over the three months ending April 2026, the picture flips: median sale price actually fell 15.5 percent year over year to $4.2 million, even as days on market compressed sharply, from 313 days the prior year down to as few as 35 to 90 days depending on the measure, and hot listings reportedly moving roughly 1 percent under list price.
Those numbers are not contradictory so much as they are small-sample. April 2026 saw six recorded sales in the neighborhood, up from two the year before. When a monthly count moves from two transactions to six, a single high-dollar estate closing can swing the average by double digits while the median tells an entirely different story. If you are comparing Old Las Palmas to a neighborhood with more transaction volume, the headline percentage changes here deserve less weight than they would somewhere with fifty sales a month. What is real and durable, based on the pattern across both figures, is that homes are sitting on the market for meaningfully less time than they were a year ago. What is noisy is the exact price trend, because six sales is not enough to smooth out the outliers.
A proposed utility assessment to include in the cost comparison
There is a second number that matters more to anyone comparing new construction against an older Old Las Palmas home, and it has nothing to do with the sale price. As Hoodline reported, on August 26, 2026, the Palm Springs City Council preliminarily approved the engineer's report for an Old Las Palmas underground utility assessment district, a formal step toward creating a property tax assessment zone that would fund burying the neighborhood's overhead power lines. Homeowners in the district are expected to pay over $100,000 each for their share of the shared undergrounding work, and that figure does not include the separate "cutover" cost, the private line running from the street to each home's own electrical panel, which Southern California Edison has estimated at $8,000 to $40,000 per property.
The push started at a neighborhood kickoff meeting on April 23, 2025, after Palm Springs passed an ordinance letting individual neighborhoods petition to form their own assessment districts rather than waiting on the utility to act. Old Las Palmas is currently the furthest along of any neighborhood pursuing this, and the Racquet Club Estates Neighborhood Organization has since formed its own subcommittee to weigh a similar district for its streets.
If you are comparing a resale estate in Old Las Palmas to a unit at The Twelve, this is the question worth asking your agent before you write an offer: does the new-construction parcel fall inside the proposed assessment district's boundary, or was undergrounding already a condition of the project's own development approval? A new build wired underground from day one would sidestep a six-figure bill that longtime owners a few doors down are actively budgeting for. The answer should be confirmed in the project's disclosure documents, the preliminary title report, and the city's assessment district materials before an offer is written.
What actually changes at this price point
Strip away the marketing language and the comparison comes down to a straightforward trade. At the low $2 millions, you get a finished, maintenance-managed home with modern systems, a rooftop as your primary outdoor space, and the ability to lock the door and leave for the season without worrying about landscaping or exterior upkeep. What you do not get is land, a large private lot, or the kind of architectural history that gives the rest of Old Las Palmas its reputation. Phase two units at The Twelve are already set to price higher, according to the developer's own materials, which means this entry window is temporary by design rather than a lasting feature of the project.
Whether that trade makes sense depends less on the topline price and more on what you actually came to this neighborhood for. If it is walkability to the shops and restaurants in the Uptown Design District and a low-maintenance foothold in one of the desert's most recognized addresses, a unit at The Twelve does what it says. If it is the land, the privacy of a walled acre, or the kind of provenance that comes with a decades-old estate, no amount of rooftop deck closes that gap, and the six-figure utility assessment question becomes one more reason to read the fine print before you decide which version of Old Las Palmas you are actually buying into.
A few direct questions
Is The Twelve part of the neighborhood's pending utility assessment district? That has not been confirmed publicly as of this writing. It is a specific diligence item to raise with the city and the project before signing, since the answer changes the real cost comparison between new construction and an existing home in the same assessment zone.
Will more new construction follow The Twelve? Yes, at least in the same corridor. A separate 24-unit mixed-use proposal at 575 North Palm Canyon Drive has a city-approved extension through April 2027, and The Twelve's own second phase is expected to price above its current units. The historic estate core further into the neighborhood has not seen comparable proposals.
Does the recent jump in average sale price mean Old Las Palmas is appreciating faster than it looks? Not necessarily. With as few as two to six recorded sales in a given month, one large estate closing can move the average sharply without reflecting a broader shift, which is why the median and the sales count matter as much as the headline percentage.
Comparing a new build against a century-old estate in the same zip code is not really a single-neighborhood question. It is a question about what you are actually paying for, and that answer changes with every parcel, every HOA structure, and now, every assessment district boundary. If you are trying to work out which version of Old Las Palmas fits what you are looking for, Kurt Bayek can walk the comparison with you property by property before you write an offer.
This article is general information, not legal, tax or financial advice. Consult a qualified professional about your situation.
