Westlake Village was built tract by tract over about twenty-five years, and each builder made a decision about stairs that still governs what a buyer can find today. Five tracts were built on one level throughout, and they are where a one-story search should start. Several more were sold with a single-level plan alongside two-story ones, so a one-story home turns up there periodically without the whole street being flat. In the big two-story tracts a handful of one-level homes exist as the builder’s smaller plan or as an original owner’s custom. And on the custom-lot side — North Ranch, the North Ranch Country Club estates and Lake Sherwood — single-level is an architectural choice rather than a tract decision, which is where the large one-story houses are. That is why the sold list below is spread across many more neighborhoods than the built-on-one-level list would suggest.

Built on one level

Triunfo West, Northshore, Village Green, the Terrace townhomes and, with a caveat, Westshore. Northshore is the clearest case and the most active: every plan on file for the tract is drawn on one floor, and thirteen one-story Northshore homes closed in the last two years, more than any other named tract in the community. Triunfo West is the other clear case: all 134 of its homes sit on Portola and Crespi Circles, every one of its recent sales is recorded as one story, and the median is a 1,500-square-foot home. Westshore belongs on the list with a caveat — most of its plans are on one level, but the larger Westshore Lane homes are recorded as two and three levels; the Terrace townhomes and Village Green are the attached ones. These are the tracts where a downsizing buyer is competing with other downsizing buyers, and where knowing an owner before the listing goes up is worth more than any search alert.

One-story plans inside mixed tracts

Lakeshore, Summer Shores and Stoneybrook each mix single-level homes with two-story ones. So does First Neighborhood, whose original series included the single-level Aspen, Cypress, Redwood and Spruce alongside the two-story Willow — a point worth making because First Neighborhood is often described as an all-single-story neighborhood and it is not. Village Homes, Westlake Hills, Southshore Hills and Foxmoor all produced one-story sales in the last two years. In Three Springs, single-level living appears in more than one builder’s series: La Promenade’s Naples, Hillsboro’s Plan Two, Griffin’s Breccia and Oakmont Hills’ Camberley are all drawn on one floor. Westlake Trails has a single-story plan among its 1990s drawings, and The Bluffs has one in its Vista Del Sol series.

Plan names come from the drawings on file with the Conejo Simi Moorpark Association of Realtors. That archive is what survives rather than a complete builder record, so other one-story plans, elevations and options may have been offered in these tracts.

The high end: one level at North Ranch and Lake Sherwood

Forty-five of the 211 one-story sales in the last two years closed at $2 million or more, twenty-two above $3 million and eight above $5 million. As a group they ran to a median $2,965,000 at about 3,585 square feet and $845 a square foot — a different market from the tract homes, and one where a single level is a design decision made lot by lot rather than a builder’s plan repeated down a street.

The three areas behave differently. Lake Sherwood and the Sherwood Country Estates produced ten of those sales at a median $4,300,000, about 4,249 square feet and $1,051 a square foot, the highest per-foot figures in the search, with several recent single-level houses on Queens Garden Drive and Williamsburg between $4.8 and $6.6 million. North Ranch produced thirteen at a median $3,325,000 and about 4,349 square feet, including the largest sale on this page, a 9,895-square-foot one-level home in the Country Club Estates at $13,000,000, and a 5,692-square-foot single-story on Lakeview Canyon Road at $5,192,000. The rest of Westlake Village produced twenty-two at a median $2,840,000 and about 3,309 square feet. A buyer who wants a large house without stairs and has been searching only the older Westlake tracts is looking in the wrong half of the market.

Where one-story homes actually changed hands, 2024–2026

Counts are closed residential sales recorded as one story in the CSMAR multiple listing service between September 2024 and September 8, 2026. Fifty-two one-story sales carried no subdivision name in the record and are not in the table, so these figures understate every neighborhood, and the custom-lot areas most of all. Ridgeview Estates, Lakeshore, Foxmoor Hills, Foxmoor Cove and Griffin’s Three Springs tract each recorded one.

The list above is built from the stories field in the listing record, which an agent fills in by hand. It is right most of the time and wrong often enough to matter, in four specific ways.

Split-levels read as one story or two depending on who typed the listing. Westlake Village has a great many 1960s and 1970s homes with a living room or a bedroom wing three or four steps up or down from the entry. Some are coded one story, some two. A buyer who cannot manage stairs should treat every listing as unverified until the house has been walked or a floor plan produced.

A blank field drops a home out of the search. A small number of listings leave stories empty, and those homes will not appear in the panel above even when they are on one level. That is one reason a search alert is not a substitute for an agent who knows the tracts.

One level is not the same as no steps. Westlake Village is built on hillsides. A single-story house can still have a flight from the driveway to the front door, a sunken living room, a step down into the family room, or a garage below the living level. On the attached side, an upper-floor condominium is one level and reached by stairs unless the building has an elevator, which most here do not.

Primary suite down is not the same as single story. Several two-story plans in Westlake Village put the primary bedroom on the ground floor with the secondary bedrooms above — the Oak in First Neighborhood, plans in Three Springs and Westlake Trails among them. For a buyer whose real requirement is living on one floor day to day, these widen the search considerably, and they do not show up in a one-story filter at all. Gary Jacobs can pull them out of the same feed on request.

Single-story homes here are smaller and more expensive per square foot than two-story homes, and the gap is consistent across detached houses, attached homes and the high end alike. These are closed sales in Westlake Village, North Ranch and Lake Sherwood in the twenty-four months to September 8, 2026.

The pattern holds across the whole range: a one-story home costs about fifteen per cent more per square foot detached and about thirteen per cent more attached, and at the top of the market the figure climbs rather than falls — the $2 million-and-up one-story sales ran to $845 a square foot, and the Sherwood group to $1,051. The premium is for the absence of a staircase, not for the space, and the buyers paying it are usually not comparing the home with a two-story house at all. Note what the size column does: the median one-story sale is nearly nine hundred square feet smaller than the median two-story sale, which is the trade most buyers are actually making. Days on market say the rest quietly — detached one-story homes go into escrow faster than two-story houses, 36 days against 40, despite there being far fewer of them to choose from. Attached one-story homes take longer, 54 days against 50, which reflects the condominium market rather than the stairs.

The practical consequence for a seller of a one-story Westlake Village home is that the plan itself is a selling feature that belongs in the first line of the listing, not in the remarks. For a buyer it is that waiting for the price to soften is usually a poor strategy: the shortage, not the market, is what sets the number.

With roughly a hundred one-story sales a year across Westlake Village, North Ranch and Lake Sherwood together and a dozen on the market at any moment, the open market is not where most of these homes are found. What works here is knowing, tract by tract, which owners are within a year or two of moving, and being the buyer who is already qualified and flexible on timing when they decide. Gary Jacobs has sold and leased in these neighborhoods since the 2000s, keeps the original floor plans for the tracts on file so a plan can be matched to an address before a showing, and tracks the one-story inventory across Westlake Village as a single list rather than one search per neighborhood.

The second half of the problem is usually the sequencing. Most one-story buyers in Westlake Village already own a larger home a few minutes away, and the hard part is never selling it — a well-prepared Westlake family home sells — but buying the replacement in a market this thin without ending up homeless or carrying two houses. That problem, and the ways through it, are covered in the Westlake Village guide under “Downsizing in Westlake without leaving Westlake.”