On September 9, 2026, the Studio City Neighborhood Council's Land Use Committee held its monthly meeting in Meeting Room 3 at 4024 Radford Avenue, inside Radford Studio Center. The agenda covered a proposed alcohol permit for a business near Colfax and Ventura and an update on what's happening at that intersection. Public comment, a vote, adjournment. Ordinary neighborhood business, in an extraordinary building.
What's harder to see from inside that meeting room is what happened to the property around it over the seven months before that gathering. In January 2026, the studio's owner defaulted on $1.1 billion in debt and handed control to a group of lenders led by Goldman Sachs. By June, Netflix had signed a contract to buy the 55-acre lot for somewhere close to $400 million, a fraction of what it sold for five years earlier. The neighborhood council kept meeting there anyway, because the room doesn't care who holds the deed.
What 1928 Built
The lot that gave Studio City its name opened in 1928, when Mack Sennett built his studio on Ventura Boulevard, a couple of blocks east of Laurel Canyon. Over the following decades, under a rotating cast of owners, it became known as CBS Studio Center and turned into one of the most productive sitcom factories in the country. Seinfeld shot there. So did The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Gilligan's Island. The lot is the reason the neighborhood is called Studio City rather than something else, and for most of its history that fact sat quietly in the background of daily life here, true but rarely relevant to anyone's week.
It became relevant again in 2021, when Paramount's predecessor, ViacomCBS, sold the property to Hackman Capital Partners and Square Mile Capital Management for $1.85 billion. The new owners renamed it Radford Studio Center and, in 2023, unveiled plans for a $1 billion renovation meant to add as much as a million square feet of new soundstages and production space. Hackman senior vice president Zach Sokoloff described the plan as designed to fit the scale and character of Studio City and to position the studio for another century of use.
How a $1.85 Billion Lot Became a $400 Million One
That renovation never fully materialized in the form it was pitched. In January 2026, Hackman defaulted on roughly $1.1 billion in bondholder debt and relinquished the property to its lenders rather than force a restructuring. Goldman Sachs, as lead lender, took control through the debt enforcement process, not through a sale in the ordinary sense.
By mid-June, Bloomberg reported that Netflix had signed a contract to buy the lot, with a price close to $400 million and a close expected sometime in the third quarter of 2026. Run the math against the 2021 sale and the drop is stark: $1.85 billion across 55 acres works out to roughly $33.6 million an acre. A $400 million deal on the same acreage comes to about $7.3 million an acre, a decline of roughly 78 percent in five years. Per square foot, the shift is from about $1,542 to $333.
That kind of collapse doesn't happen because a studio stops being useful. It happens because the economics around it changed faster than the building could. Production activity across Los Angeles slowed sharply after the 2023 writers' and actors' strikes, financing costs rose, and soundstage occupancy across the region was still running well below pre-pandemic levels into early 2025. Radford wasn't singled out. It was caught in a citywide repricing of what a soundstage is worth when fewer productions are booking one.
As of this writing, neither Netflix nor Goldman Sachs has publicly confirmed that the sale has closed. The third quarter Netflix targeted for closing ends this week, which means the deal is either finalizing right now or running past its own deadline. Either way, the contract is signed and the direction is set.
Twenty-Two Stages, Three Backlots, Seventy-One Percent Leased
None of this happened to an empty building. Radford's 22 soundstages and roughly 1.2 million square feet of production space sit on three distinct backlot areas: a New York City street built for exterior shoots, a Central Park area with grass and paths that can be flooded to create a pond, and a Residential Street made up of two separate blocks of houses used across decades of television. As of mortgage filings from March 2026, the lot was still 71 percent leased. Productions kept shooting through the default, the foreclosure, and the sale negotiations, because a soundstage under a debt dispute is still a soundstage with a call sheet taped to the door.
That's the part that doesn't show up in the financial coverage. A $1.1 billion default reads like a headline about a company. Seventy-one percent leased reads like a description of a Tuesday morning on Radford Avenue, with crew call times and craft services tents, mostly indifferent to who's going to own the parking lot in three months.
A Hundred Trees for a Hundred Years
The neighborhood council's other September update had nothing to do with Netflix or Goldman Sachs. It was a progress note on a centennial initiative to plant 100 trees marking 100 years, posted the same week as the Land Use Committee's meeting inside the studio. The council didn't tie the two together, and there's no indication the tree count is meant to line up with the studio's own history. But the studio Sennett built in 1928 is, on its own separate clock, closing in on its own hundredth year. Two centennial-scale timelines are running through the same few blocks of Studio City at once, one counted in trees planted by neighbors, the other in soundstages that have outlasted five ownership groups.
The neighborhood's calendar didn't pause for any of it. The council's Community Cleanup met at Vitello's Restaurant on Tujunga Avenue on September 20. The Land Use Committee has more meetings scheduled through the fall, on its usual rhythm, regardless of who signs the closing documents on Radford Avenue. A Tujunga Village ArtWalk is set for October 3. None of that changes based on a wire report about a hedge fund's lenders.
The studio that named this neighborhood has changed hands, lost most of its paper value, and is now on the verge of becoming Netflix's first owned production campus in Los Angeles. The neighborhood council still books Meeting Room 3 for its Land Use agenda. Both things are true, on their own timelines, at the same address.
If you're watching what happens on Radford Avenue from a few blocks away and want to talk through what any of this means for your specific corner of Studio City, Amanda Watkins is easy to reach and always glad to talk shop about the neighborhood, deal or no deal.
