Netflix buying Radford: what it means for Studio City
Studio City · Neighborhood news
Netflix is under contract to buy the 55-acre Radford Studio Center, the lot that gave Studio City its name, with a close expected this quarter. Here is where the deal stands, and what it would mean for the neighborhood.
The short answer
As of June 2026, Netflix is under contract to buy Radford Studio Center, the 55-acre Studio City lot, for a reported 330 million to 400 million dollars, less than a third of its 2021 price. Bloomberg reported the signed contract on June 18, with a close expected in the third quarter of 2026. Goldman Sachs controls the property after the previous owner defaulted. If it closes, it would be Netflix's first owned studio campus in Los Angeles, a long-term commitment to a neighborhood that has spent three years watching production leave. The deal is not final, so nothing here is guaranteed yet.
Drive down Radford Avenue in the last six months and you can tell something is shifting at the lot. The neon-trimmed signage that for decades read CBS Studio Center, and more recently Radford Studio Center, has been quieter than usual. Lights still on. Trucks still moving. Anyone who has lived in Studio City long enough to read this neighborhood the way you read a familiar face can tell when the energy on a property changes.
That energy has been changing for a while, and it is about to change a good deal more.
After months of reporting from The Hollywood Reporter, the Los Angeles Times, and Bloomberg, the picture firmed up in mid-June. Netflix is now under contract to buy the 55-acre Radford Studio Center for a reported 330 million to 400 million dollars. Goldman Sachs is on the sell side. Bloomberg reported the signed contract on June 18, 2026, with the transaction expected to close in the third quarter. It had not yet finalized as of early July, and neither Netflix nor Goldman Sachs has issued a detailed public statement on terms. Hackman Capital Partners, the previous owner, has declined to comment.
So there is not a fully closed deal yet. What there is, is a signed contract and a fairly clear picture of what it would mean for this neighborhood once it lands. Debbie Pisaro has sold Studio City homes for 24 years from four blocks away, and that picture is worth walking through, because the lot at 4024 Radford Avenue has been the single most important piece of real estate in Studio City since before there was a Studio City.
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Join the Just Studio City list or call (310) 362-6429A short history of the lot that named the neighborhood
In May 1928, a silent-film comedy producer named Mack Sennett, the man behind the Keystone Cops and an early platform for Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, opened a brand-new studio on what was then a stretch of San Fernando Valley lettuce fields at Ventura Boulevard and Radford Avenue. The studio was so consequential to the surrounding development that the area around it took on a nickname that stuck: Studio City.
That is not metaphor. That is literally how the neighborhood got its name.
Sennett went bankrupt in the Depression. The lot passed to Mascot Pictures, then Republic Pictures, which spent the 1940s making B-movies and Westerns for Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, and a young John Wayne. By the 1950s and 1960s, with film giving way to television, CBS leased the property and then bought it outright in 1967 for 9.5 million dollars. The list of shows that came out of those soundstages over the next half-century is staggering: Gunsmoke, Gilligan's Island, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Bob Newhart, St. Elsewhere, and Seinfeld, which built its New York Street backlot on the property in 1994 and shot most of nine seasons on Stage 9. Then came 3rd Rock from the Sun, Will and Grace, Malcolm in the Middle, That 70s Show, Parks and Recreation, and Big Brother, which still shoots on Stage 18, along with The Talk, Entertainment Tonight, and SEAL Team.
In 2021, ViacomCBS, now Paramount Skydance, sold the property to Hackman Capital Partners and Square Mile Capital for nearly 1.9 billion dollars, in what was at the time the largest studio real estate transaction in Los Angeles history. Hackman announced ambitious plans for a 1 billion dollar modernization, including new all-electric soundstages, a resurrected Ventura Boulevard entrance at Carpenter Avenue, and a new bridge over the Tujunga Wash at Moorpark that would close a longstanding gap in the LA River Greenway.
That plan ran into the headwinds every Studio City resident has watched: a writers' strike, an actors' strike, and runaway production fleeing California for Atlanta, Toronto, and London. By January of this year, Hackman had defaulted on a 1.1 billion dollar mortgage. Lenders led by Goldman Sachs took over the property. The first round of bids reportedly came in under 300 million dollars. Netflix did not participate in that round. It came in later, and apparently decisively.
Why Netflix is buying
This is where the strategic logic gets interesting, because it says something about how Netflix thinks about Los Angeles.
Netflix is famously asset-light. The company has historically rented its production space rather than owning it. Its primary Los Angeles footprint has been a long-term lease at Sunset Bronson Studios in Hollywood, an arrangement with Hudson Pacific Properties that is now nearing the end of its 10-year run. The company also leases stages in Brooklyn, the United Kingdom, and Spain, and owns a single major studio campus in Albuquerque plus a build-out underway at Fort Monmouth in New Jersey.
Buying Radford would be the first time Netflix owns a major studio property in Los Angeles. Twenty-two soundstages. About 484,000 square feet of production office space. Three backlots: the New York Street, the Central Park area, and the Residential Street. A permanent home in the city where most of its top creative talent already lives.
It also fits a much bigger pattern. Netflix is in the middle of acquiring Warner Bros. in a deal explicitly framed around expanding United States production capacity. Seen against that backdrop, owning a flagship Los Angeles lot is less a one-off real estate play than a piece of a company-wide push to control more of where and how it makes content. For a neighborhood that has spent the last three years watching production walk out the door, that is a meaningful shift. It is the kind of long-term commitment Studio City has been quietly worrying about losing.
Off-market
A large share of the best Studio City houses trade quietly, before they ever reach the open market. Debbie keeps a running list of pocket listings for buyers who want the first look.
See the pocket listingsWhat it could mean for the neighborhood
Nobody has a crystal ball for a deal that has not fully closed. Still, Debbie Pisaro lives four blocks from this lot and has watched what happens around it for 24 years, and a few things are worth paying attention to in the months ahead.
Employment and traffic. Radford has historically employed thousands of crew members, post-production workers, drivers, caterers, security, and administrative staff, many of whom live in Studio City, Sherman Oaks, Toluca Lake, North Hollywood, and Burbank. A serious Netflix presence would stabilize that workforce. It would also keep Radford Avenue, Colfax Avenue, and Ventura Boulevard as the daily migration corridors they have been for half a century. The traffic does not go away, but the rhythm becomes predictable again.
The redevelopment plan. Hackman's billion-dollar Radford Studio Center Plan, approved at the city level in 2024, is the active entitlement attached to this property. A new owner can revise it, accelerate it, or sit on it. The publicly interesting elements, including the new Carpenter Avenue gate, the LA River Greenway bridge, the all-electric stages, and the preservation of the Mack Sennett Building and Stages 9 and 10, were the reasons the Studio City Neighborhood Council and the Conservancy supported the plan in the first place. Whether Netflix maintains those community-facing commitments is the single most important local question of this transaction. It also bears directly on the homes nearest the lot, including those along the Carpenter Avenue boundary.
The Tujunga Wash bridge in particular. Right now the LA River Greenway, that 51-mile bike and pedestrian path, dead-ends at Radford because there is no crossing of the Tujunga Wash at Moorpark. The Hackman plan included a new bridge that would have closed that gap and let cyclists and pedestrians complete the route. Studio City has wanted that bridge for a generation. If Netflix carries it forward, that is a quiet civic win no streaming-business reporter will write about, and it changes how the neighborhood works.
The 1928 buildings. Two of the original soundstages on the lot date to Mack Sennett's first year, and the Sennett Bungalow is still standing. These structures are not formal Historic-Cultural Monuments yet, but they are the architectural origin point of the neighborhood. Any owner, Netflix or otherwise, needs to be in conversation with the community about what happens to them. The Brady Bunch House just earned its Historic-Cultural Monument designation for being culturally significant, and the deeper story of the streets around the lot lives on Debbie's Studio City architectural homes map. The literal building that named the city deserves at least the same thought.
The texture of Studio City itself. A studio lot is not a passive land use. It shapes lunch traffic at Aroma and the neighborhood cafes. It fills the parking lots of Trader Joe's and the Sportsmen's Lodge. It accounts for the steady stream of crew vans on Laurel Canyon at 5 a.m. and the late-night taco runs. It is why the corridor has so many costume shops, prop houses, and dry cleaners that handle wardrobe. A vibrant studio at full operating capacity is the heartbeat of the commercial corridor, while a diminished studio would be a slow leak. The neighborhood has been holding its breath for a couple of years now. A Netflix purchase, once it closes, would let it breathe again.
What it could mean for your home's value
This is the question Studio City owners ask Debbie most, so here is the direct answer: a deal like this does not move your home's value overnight, but it shapes the trajectory.
Home values in a neighborhood like Studio City rest on the things that make people want to live here, and a fully operating studio under a committed long-term owner reinforces most of them. It keeps thousands of well-paid creative and crew jobs anchored within a short commute. It keeps the commercial corridor along Ventura Boulevard busy. It protects the very identity that lets Studio City command a premium over comparable Valley neighborhoods. A shuttered or hollowed-out lot, by contrast, would chip away at all of that, slowly and quietly.
That said, a headline is a blunt instrument for pricing a specific home. The effect of the Radford deal on a house near the Carpenter Avenue gate is different from its effect on a hillside home in Fryman Canyon or a place near Footbridge Square, and each of those is smaller than the effect of your home's own condition, submarket, and pricing. Debbie maps all of those pockets on the Studio City neighborhoods guide, so the comparison starts at the level of the block rather than the zip code.
If you are weighing a move, the live market data in the Studio City market report is a better starting point than any single news story, what you would actually net on a sale matters more than the macro narrative, and the transfer-tax math under Measure ULA in Studio City can move the number more than the Radford headline will. For the bigger picture, Debbie's work as the best real estate agent in Studio City and her guide to the best time to sell a home in Studio City lay out how she reads a market like this one.
What is it worth
Want a real number for your street, built from your net and current comps rather than a zip-wide average or a Zestimate? Ask Debbie for a Studio City net sheet.
Request a Studio City net sheetWhat we do not know yet
The contract is signed, but the deal has not closed. The final price could still move within the reported range. The terms, including what Netflix keeps, what gets leased back, what gets redeveloped, and what happens to the long-term broadcast leases on the property, all remain to be reported once the sale is final. The neighborhood is going to learn a lot more this quarter.
What is clear is that the most consequential 55 acres in Studio City is changing hands again, almost a hundred years to the month after Mack Sennett opened the gates. The neighborhood survived every previous owner, and it will survive this one too. The open question is what shape it takes on the other side.
Frequently asked questions
Is Netflix buying Radford Studio Center?
As of June 2026, Netflix is under contract to buy Radford Studio Center, the 55-acre lot in Studio City. Bloomberg reported the signed contract on June 18, 2026, with a close expected in the third quarter of 2026. The transaction had not fully finalized as of early July, and terms could still change.
How much is Netflix paying for Radford Studio Center?
Reported figures put the price in the range of 330 million to 400 million dollars, less than one-third of the nearly 1.9 billion dollars that Hackman Capital Partners and Square Mile Capital paid for the property in 2021. The exact figure has not been publicly confirmed.
Why is Radford Studio Center being sold?
Hackman Capital Partners defaulted on a 1.1 billion dollar mortgage in January 2026 after a stretch of strikes and runaway production weakened the studio business. Lenders led by Goldman Sachs took control of the property and put it up for sale, which is how Netflix entered the picture.
Why does Netflix want to own a Los Angeles studio lot?
Netflix has historically leased its production space. Buying Radford would be its first owned major studio campus in Los Angeles, giving it 22 soundstages, roughly 484,000 square feet of production offices, and three backlots in the city where most of its creative talent lives. It also fits a broader push to expand United States production capacity that is part of the rationale behind its pending acquisition of Warner Bros.
Will the Netflix deal change Studio City home prices right away?
No. A headline about a lot changing hands does not reprice a block overnight. As of early July the deal is under contract, not closed, and any effect on prices would show up gradually through jobs, the commercial corridor, and neighborhood confidence rather than in a single month. Your own home's condition, submarket, and pricing still matter far more than the news.
What would Netflix owning Radford mean for Studio City home values?
If the sale closes and Netflix runs Radford as a committed long-term owner, that would support the local economy, employment, and the commercial corridor that make Studio City desirable, all of which underpin home values over time. A diminished or shuttered lot would do the opposite. Nothing here is guaranteed while the deal is still pending, so for a specific read on your block a local valuation matters more than the headline.
What happens to the Radford redevelopment plan?
Hackman's billion-dollar Radford Studio Center Plan was approved at the city level in 2024 and remains the active entitlement on the property. A new owner can revise it, accelerate it, or pause it. The community-facing pieces, including the Carpenter Avenue gate, the LA River Greenway bridge over the Tujunga Wash, and the all-electric stages, are the elements Studio City will be watching most closely.
Why is it called Studio City?
The neighborhood takes its name from the studio at Ventura Boulevard and Radford Avenue that Mack Sennett opened in 1928. The area that developed around it became known as Studio City, so the Radford lot is literally the reason the neighborhood has its name.
What shows were filmed at Radford Studio Center?
Across nearly a century the lot produced Gunsmoke, Gilligan's Island, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, St. Elsewhere, Seinfeld, 3rd Rock from the Sun, Will and Grace, Malcolm in the Middle, That 70s Show, Parks and Recreation, and Big Brother, among many others. Seinfeld built its New York Street backlot on the property in 1994.
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Talk it through with Debbie Pisaro
Wondering what the Radford sale means for your own Studio City home, whether you are thinking about selling this year or simply want to understand where the neighborhood is heading? Reach Debbie directly.
Reach DebbieWritten by Debbie Pisaro, a 24-year California luxury agent and the founder of Coastline 840, DRE #01369110. Debbie lives four blocks from the Radford lot and works every one of the ten Studio City micro-markets, with a focus on architectural, historic, and design-forward homes. For more on the streets around Radford, explore her work as an architectural homes specialist or read the founding story at Coastline 840. Coastline 840 · Studio City