What happens to a neighborhood's name when the movie lot behind it goes through a debt default, a foreclosure, and a sale to the biggest streaming company on earth, and the Sunday farmers market on Ventura Place doesn't skip a beat?
That's not a hypothetical anymore. Netflix is under contract to buy Radford Studio Center, the 55-acre lot at 4024 Radford Avenue that gave Studio City its name, for a price close to $400 million. Bloomberg reported the signed contract on June 18, 2026, with the sale expected to close before the third quarter ends. That's a fraction of what Hackman Capital Partners and Square Mile Capital Management paid ViacomCBS for the same 55 acres in 2021: $1.85 billion. As of this writing, the deal hasn't been confirmed closed. What it means for the blocks around it is worth working through now, because most of what people assume about a sale like this turns out to be wrong.
The Name Came Before the Sign
Mack Sennett opened his studio in May 1928 at what is now the corner of Ventura Boulevard and Radford Avenue, years before the surrounding streets had a name of their own to borrow. The lot outlived Sennett, outlived Republic Pictures, and became the place CBS ran Gunsmoke, My Three Sons, Gilligan's Island, and The Mary Tyler Moore Show through the decades when television was still shot on film. Seinfeld built its own New York Street on the backlot in the 1990s for exterior shots, and that set is still there, along with a Central Park area that can be flooded to double as a pond and a residential street built for whatever suburb a script needs that week.
None of that is nostalgia. It's still running. Radford currently houses CBS's summer competition show Big Brother, along with Entertainment Tonight, which moved to the lot in 2008 after 27 years at Paramount, and the local news operations KCBS-2 and KCAL-9, which relocated there in 2007 after leaving Columbia Square. Whoever holds the deed in October, those productions have leases that don't care who signed the closing documents.
Two Sales, One Lot
The number that actually explains this deal isn't the sale price. It's the gap between this sale price and the last one.
| 2021 sale | 2026 deal (pending) | |
|---|---|---|
| Seller | ViacomCBS | Lenders led by Goldman Sachs |
| Buyer | Hackman Capital Partners & Square Mile Capital | Netflix |
| Reported price | $1.85 billion | ~$330–400 million |
| Roughly per acre | $33.6 million | $6–7.3 million |
That's not a verdict on the lot's condition. It's a readout of what happened to Los Angeles production in the years between those two sales. Soundstage occupancy across the city fell to 62 percent in the first half of 2025, according to FilmLA data cited by Bloomberg, down from an average above 90 percent between 2016 and 2022, the exact years when Hackman was underwriting its $1.1 billion mortgage on Radford against boom-era assumptions. Hackman defaulted on that debt in January 2026 and handed the keys to its lenders rather than keep servicing a loan the property could no longer support. Netflix is buying into that same downturn at a price that reflects it.
The Lease Nobody's Renegotiating
Here's the part that gets lost in headlines about a landlord swap: most of Radford's usable office space is tied up in a long-term lease that ViacomCBS wrote for itself back in 2021, the same year it sold the lot in the first place. CBS pays to occupy space on a property it no longer owns, and that arrangement survives the ownership change regardless of who's cutting the checks upstream. One studio real estate executive, describing the property to The Hollywood Reporter, put it plainly: whatever Netflix decides, the lot is going to remain "a campus facility for soundstages."
That framing matches how the deal is actually being talked about behind the scenes. A source close to the negotiations described the purchase to Deadline as a great opportunity for Netflix at the right price, which is the language of someone buying a discounted asset, not the language of a company planning to relocate its headquarters by next spring. Netflix currently occupies more than 700,000 square feet at Sunset Bronson Studios across three buildings, paying $27.3 million a year in rent through September 2031, and it separately leases Raleigh Studios Hollywood from Hackman on a deal running to the same year. Even if Netflix eventually wants to consolidate its Los Angeles footprint at Radford, its own paperwork elsewhere doesn't expire for five more years.
So the honest version of this story has two clocks running at different speeds. The ownership clock moves fast: default in January, negotiations by April, a signed contract in June, a close expected any week now. The lease clock barely moves at all.
What's actually changing on Radford Avenue right now:
- Who holds title to the 55 acres, once the sale closes
- The debt structure behind the property, which resets to whatever Netflix pays instead of the $1.1 billion Hackman owed
What isn't, at least for now:
- Big Brother, Entertainment Tonight, and the KCBS/KCAL news operations, all filming under existing arrangements
- Netflix's own headquarters, which stays at Sunset Bronson through at least 2031
- CBS's office footprint on the lot, protected by the lease it wrote for itself in 2021
What You Can Actually See From the Bridge
Walk the Radford Avenue bridge over the Los Angeles River and you get a vantage point most people never think to use: looking downstream from the bridge deck, you can watch the river gather into its low-flow channel with the Studio Center backlot rising on the far bank. A short walk along the same bank, the LA River Greenway Park opened in 2004 and runs about six-tenths of a mile along the river's south side between Laurel Canyon Boulevard and Whitsett Avenue, with river-rock seating and native landscaping that make it one of the few public spots in the city where a studio lot and a public trail share a fence line.
A few blocks south, Tujunga Village has been absorbing whatever happens on that lot for decades without anyone at Goldman Sachs noticing. Aroma Cafe has anchored the corridor for more than 20 years, the kind of coffeehouse where studio executives have long shared a table with whoever's next in line. Vitello's, a few doors down at 4349 Tujunga Avenue, has been serving Italian food and running its upstairs jazz nights long enough that regulars stopped calling it new. On Sundays, Ventura Place a few blocks east turns into the Studio City Farmers Market, run as a nonprofit partnership between the Studio City Chamber of Commerce Foundation and the Studio City Residents Association, drawing more than 80 farmers, artisans, and food vendors most Sundays of the year. None of these businesses needed a Bloomberg headline to know when production slowed down. They've been reading that story in foot traffic for three years, well before it showed up as a $1.1 billion default on a lender's balance sheet.
The Only Honest Answer Right Now
The deal isn't finished. Final terms, what Netflix keeps intact, what gets leased out, whether the company ever puts its name on the gate at Radford and Ventura, haven't been made public, and neither Netflix nor Goldman Sachs has said much beyond confirming the contract exists. What isn't uncertain is the name on the map. Studio City has carried that name since 1928, through Republic Pictures, through CBS, through Hackman Capital, and now through whatever comes next. The lot has changed hands five times in a century. The neighborhood built around it has never once needed to rename itself to match.
If you're curious how a hundred years of ownership changes have shaped the streets behind Tujunga Village and along the river bluffs, RSR Real Estate has been reading Studio City's fine print for a while, from what's opening on Ventura Boulevard to what's quietly changing hands a few blocks off it. Request a Private Consultation whenever you're ready to talk about what any of it means for the block you're on.
