Culture & Entertainment

Is Netflix Making a Big Real Estate Move In L.A.?

Is Netflix Making a Big Real Estate Move In L.A.?


For years, Netflix has been the anchor tenant at Sunset Studios, making the ICON building its Los Angeles headquarters and occupying the EPIC and CUE buildings as part of the complex on Sunset Boulevard.

The streaming giant run by co-CEOs Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters has a lease on those buildings through 2031 with the owner, Hudson Pacific Properties, which receives $27 million in base annualized rent from Netflix.

As of early March, Hudson Pacific CEO Victor Coleman described at an investor conference that “our conversations with them are fluid” regarding future leases. Netflix is the No. 2 tenant for Hudson Pacific among its office tenants, occupying 722,305 square feet of space, just behind Google, so a loss of the streaming giant would be a big one for the soundstage operator.

“We remain fully engaged with Netflix and believe this portfolio is the optimal long-term solution for their L.A. office needs, given the quality, location and expansion potential of these assets,” Coleman had said on the company’s February earnings call.

But it seems like an exit could be a stronger possibility now. Netflix is in talks with Goldman Sachs to buy the Radford Studio Center, Bloomberg reported, citing unnamed sources, on Tuesday. Netflix declined to comment on the story. A Hudson Pacific rep did not reply for comment.

The historic studio was in the hands of the then-named ViacomCBS corp until 2021 when it was sold — as part of a slimming down of the Shari Redstone-run empire — to Hackman Capital Partners and Square Mile Capital Management for $1.85 billion.

The Michael Hackman-led firm had bet that studio infrastructure would be a hot commodity as majors had been bulking up on spending for streaming shows near the height of what was then a race to catch up to Netflix. Wall Street and private equity firms also saw the upside in studio lot infrastructure at the time, which was not too far removed from the COVID-19 pandemic, when office space was seen as a shakier bet.

Then, ahead of the 2023 dual labor strikes from the Writers Guild and SAG-AFTRA, the content spend pullback hit and stage occupancy started waning. (Now uncertainty about how AI workflows will impact content creation also factor in to big bets on soundstage infrastructure.)

Investment bank Goldman Sachs had taken over the Radford lot after Hackman defaulted on its mortgage, Bloomberg reported in January, citing a letter to investors that wasn’t made public. Hackman also operates the historic Raleigh Studios in Los Angeles, the Sony Pictures Animation Campus in Culver City and more major soundstages and production facilities.

Last year Hackman put a “For Sale” sign on a Raleigh sibling location, Saticoy Studios in Van Nuys, at an $18 million price tag, with an exec at the company telling The Hollywood Reporter that it was “non-core to our wider studio portfolio, which focuses on larger, flagship properties.” The main Raleigh Studios location, located on Melrose Avenue, has Netflix as the anchor tenant through 2031 as well.

Netflix, which just received a $2.8 billion break up fee in connection with its abandoned pursuit of Warner Bros., has made an effort to build its soundstage bases over the years, outside of its L.A. office. Those include the formerly named ABQ Studios in Albuquerque, New Mexico as well as $1 billion to build its East coast base at the former site of Fort Monmouth, New Jersey (which won’t be ready for a few years).

That’s not counting its expanding global office and studio space portfolio. This year alone, Netflix unveiled its Mexico City headquarters, opened a Buenos Aires, Argentina office and touted an expansion of its Poland central European hub as it builds infrastructure to provide a content pipeline to serve its 325 million subscribers.

Sunset Studios soundstage operator Hudson Pacific, meanwhile, has looked to the East coast for an expansion, opening its purpose-built Sunset Pier 94 Studios in Manhattan in January with Paramount Television Studios’ Dexter: Resurrection signing on to produce its second season at the location.



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I studied medicine at Trinity College, Oxford, and qualified as a doctor. There are already many excellent blogs exploring faith, humanism, atheism, politics, rationalism, philosophical doubt and everything in between. But I don't intend to limit myself to any particular subject. This is simply a space where I'll share whatever comes to mind, whether it's something I've been thinking about for years or just a passing thought from the day.