Netflix Nears Deal for the Seinfeld Lot at a Fifth of Its 2021 Price

Radford Studio Center sold for $1.85 billion in 2021, and now even Hollywood's biggest studios say their lots are overvalued.

The Studio City lot where Seinfeld and Gilligan's Island were shot sold for $1.85 billion in 2021. Netflix is now closing in on a deal to buy it for about a fifth of that, The Hollywood Reporter reported.

The lot is Radford Studio Center, and its price drop is the loudest sign of a reset running through L.A.'s soundstages. Investors poured billions into stage space when streaming money looked endless. Now production has thinned, and even the biggest studios are telling L.A. County their lots are worth a fraction of what it says, according to property tax records THR obtained.

ViacomCBS sold Radford to Hackman Capital Partners and Square Mile Capital in 2021, when buyers were scrambling for any stage they could get, and Hackman borrowed much of what it paid. Earlier this year the firm defaulted on the lot's debt, more than $1 billion of it, and lenders led by Goldman Sachs took the property, THR reported. Four of Hackman's five major L.A. studio properties are on the market, including Television City off Fairfax Avenue.

The big studios have a different move: they appeal. The records THR obtained show 269 appeals to the L.A. County Assessment Appeals Board since 2020 from the companies that control Hollywood's big production campuses, recovering roughly $319 million in the cases decided so far. Sony, Universal, Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery took home more than $245 million of that sum between them.

Sony did best. Across four appeals, the county knocked an estimated $166.3 million off Sony Pictures Studios in Culver City, 84% of its original $198 million assessment. Universal asked in 2023 for its 400-acre lot to be assessed at $60 million instead of $951 million. And Fox Corp. has argued, in a handful of appeals over its studio lot, that some parcels are worth as little as $2. Two dollars. No million.

The owners have reason to push. FilmLA, the region's film office, tracks stage use across 17 participating studios. Regional stage occupancy sat in the 90s from 2016 to 2022 and peaked at 96% in 2016, TheWrap reported. It then fell to 69% in 2023 and 63% in 2024, according to TheWrap. THR puts last year at 62%, the lowest the study has ever logged.

A booked stage isn't a busy one: a standing set only makes jobs while it's being built or shot on, and TV seasons now come with long gaps. "To see the real loss of work opportunity in this data, you have to focus on Stage Shoot Days," FilmLA spokesperson Philip Sokoloski told TheWrap. In 2023, the 17 studios in the study logged 8,671 stage shoot days, TheWrap reported; before the pandemic, just 13 studios logged 12,308.

The shows that used to keep the lights on are the ones vanishing. Episodic TV, the steadiest stage tenant L.A. had, was about 20% of stage and backlot work in 2023, against roughly 30% in earlier years, THR reported. In 2024, scripted series lost another 23% of their shoot days on participating stages, by THR's account. Big features aren't filling the hole: unions say most jobs on big studio movies are now outside the U.S.

That's where a studio that owns its lot and a landlord that borrowed to buy one part ways. When production dropped 30%, Hackman still had debt payments to make, THR reported, while the big studios don't need every stage to earn its keep. Warner Bros. Discovery has been steering its own shows onto its Burbank lot and ran at 91% occupancy last year, according to THR. "We were at highs effectively for all of last year," Simon Robinson, its president of global experiences and studio operations, told THR.

None of this has stopped the building. East End Studios opened its $230 million Mission Campus in January. Cinespace followed in March with six stages in Woodland Hills. Seven more studio builds or renovations are in the works, THR reported.

The next big test is Echelon, a $450 million studio in Hollywood due to open later this year. Its backers aren't counting on 26-episode seasons; they're pitching social media creators and microdramas, THR reported. "When you pay a lot for stuff, it's hard to hold on to it when you're weathering the downturns," David Simon, founder of BARDAS Investment Group, told THR. That's Radford's story in one sentence.

Source: The Hollywood Reporter, retrieved October 7, 2026. Other sources: TheWrap.