Goldman

Netflix Inc. is under contract to buy Radford Studio Center, a historic Los Angeles movie studio space, for a fraction of its 2021 $1.85-billion sale price after lenders including Goldman Sachs Group Inc. repossessed the property.

The price is close to $400 million, according to two people with knowledge of the transaction, which is expected to close in the third quarter.

The Times reported in April that Netflix had plans to buy the studio property.

The one-time silent movie lot has been home to many popular TV series over the decades, including “Gunsmoke,” “Gilligan’s Island” and “Seinfeld.”

Netflix wants to consolidate its real estate footprint in one place and has been considering relocating from a group of Hollywood buildings it leases from Hudson Pacific Properties Inc. The Hudson Pacific leases expire in 2031.

Radford’s current owner, Hackman Capital Partners, defaulted on $1.1 billion of bondholder debt and turned the property over to lenders led by Goldman after it was unable to reach a refinancing deal last year. The sale will wipe out close to two-thirds of the debt.

The value of Los Angeles studio real estate has tumbled since interest rates climbed and production plummeted following strikes in 2023 by unions representing writers and actors. Landlords unaffiliated with studios, such as Hackman, have been hit particularly hard as production moved to space owned by the entertainment giants. Occupancy of L.A. soundstages fell to 62% in the first half of last year, according to FilmLA, a local permitting group.

Representatives of Goldman and Netflix declined to comment. A Hackman representative didn’t immediately provide a comment.

Netflix, which has historically leased rather than owned real estate, has stepped up investing in studio lots. It’s currently developing a $1-billion production center in Fort Monmouth, N.J. The streaming service reported $12.3 billion in cash and equivalents in its most recent quarter. Netflix was paid a $2.8-billion breakup fee by Paramount Skydance Corp., which won a bidding war for Warner Bros. Discovery Inc.

Before the recent slowdown, Hackman went on a buying spree of movie lots, banking on ever-growing demand for streaming TV production. In March, Deutsche Bank AG sued Hackman to foreclose on its Kaufman Astoria Studios in New York. Hackman-owned Television City in Los Angeles and Manhattan Beach Studios in nearby Manhattan Beach are both being marketed after lenders led by Deutsche Bank pushed for the sale, Bloomberg reported in May.

Brokerage Cushman & Wakefield Ltd. is selling the $240-million loan on the 22-acre Manhattan Beach property, which it describes in a marketing document as “one of the most strategically positioned opportunities in coastal Los Angeles, combining an institutional-quality operating asset with some of the most irreplaceable underlying land in the South Bay.”

The Radford Studio lot was only 71% leased as of March, according to mortgage filings.

Gittelsohn writes for Bloomberg.

NEW YORK — A federal immigration court in Lower Manhattan has come to represent the Trump administration’s deportation campaign in New York City, with agents carrying out chaotic and sometimes violent arrests in the hallway as migrants leave hearings.

Now the court is serving as a front in a different kind of battle: one of the city’s most closely watched congressional races.

In the Democratic primary between incumbent U.S. Rep. Dan Goldman and former city Comptroller Brad Lander — for a district so solidly blue that the June primary is considered its deciding election — both candidates have made the Trump administration’s treatment of migrants at 26 Federal Plaza a feature of their campaigns, but with decidedly different approaches.

Goldman — an heir to the Levi Strauss denim fortune and former prosecutor who was lead counsel for President Trump’s first impeachment — has approached the topic with a lawyerly bent that leverages the power of his office.

He sued the administration to open immigration detention centers to members of Congress, conducts oversight visits and turned his office across the street into what he’s called a triage center that connects immigrants with advocacy groups and legal services that has, his campaign said, helped more than 30 people get released from federal custody.

After a recent visit, Goldman credited his oversight work as a reason conditions at a holding facility inside the building have improved.

“What you see from our multipronged approach is the way that I push back, which is not performative, but it is substantive,” he told the Associated Press outside 26 Federal Plaza after he toured the detention center that is closed to the public.

Meanwhile, Lander — a progressive city government stalwart who is running with the support of Mayor Zohran Mamdani — has acted as protester and court observer, watching hearings and attempting to accompany immigrants out of the building past masked federal agents.

His efforts have gotten him arrested twice, with the most recent case headed to a trial scheduled to take place just before the primary.

“I would characterize his oversight function as strongly worded letters,” Lander told AP when asked about Goldman’s approach. “And my oversight function is: Show up with hundreds of your neighbors and bear witness and accompany people and demand access and stay until they give it to you or they arrest you.”

Lander’s first arrest happened last year when he linked arms with a person authorities were attempting to detain in the hallway outside the court. Lander was running for mayor at the time, and the arrest gave his campaign a jolt of excitement at a time when Mamdani and former Gov. Andrew Cuomo were considered the front-runners in the race.

A few months later, after losing the mayoral primary but not long before launching his congressional campaign, Lander was arrested again during a large protest at the building and hit with a misdemeanor obstruction charge.

But instead of accepting a deal that would have made the case go away in six months, Lander instead opted to go to trial. He said the case would extract information about the federal government’s immigration enforcement efforts at the building during a tense period that predates Goldman’s oversight visits.

Goldman dismissed Lander’s efforts as performative.

“I don’t understand why someone would reject a dismissal of a case so that he can have a public trial, ostensibly to ask for information that I could provide him whenever he wanted because I have the answers from doing my oversight,” he said.

This week, Lander returned to 26 Federal Plaza to sit in on hearings. But just before entering the building, his team got word that federal agents were lingering outside an immigration hearing at a different federal courtroom in a building across the street. He raced over and eventually found the agents, who were wearing masks and milling around in the court’s waiting room.

“The challenge is trying to figure out who they’re going to arrest,” Lander said, popping out of the hearing, where he sat in a back row and took notes. After a while, the agents walked away from the hearing room, down a hallway and exited the floor. It was not clear why they left.

“Maybe we have different styles,” Lander said of his opponent after the agents departed. He later went back across the street and filmed a campaign video in front of 26 Federal Plaza.

Izaguirre writes for the Associated Press.