Hackman Capital Partners continues to expand its portfolio in the red-hot film production studio market, now $8B and counting.
The company's latest acquisitions include a 70% stake in Raleigh Studios, a century-old 500K SF Hollywood facility located at 5300 Melrose Ave, and Saticoy Studios, a 49.5K SF facility in Van Nuys.
The Raleigh stake was purchased for $140M, or about $400 per SF, from Raleigh Enterprises in a transaction financed with a $90M loan from Bank of the West. The Van Nuys studio also was sold by Raleigh for an undisclosed price. Hackman has been operating both facilities since 2021.
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Raleigh Studios, which opened in 1915, has 13 soundstages encompassing 310K SF and 186K SF of office space.
Hackman also is planning to build a 1.8M SF studio complex that will be a redevelopment of LA's Television City, a project that thrust the company into the middle of the recent Los Angeles mayoral election.
During his campaign for mayor, developer Rick Caruso—who eventually lost to Rep. Karen Bass—touted his support for bringing film and TV jobs to Los Angeles and promised to make it harder for opponents of film production development projects to lodge "frivolous" objections under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA).
However, in September, a shopping center owned by Caruso next door to Television City—known as The Grove—filed a 374-page letter challenging a draft environmental impact report (DEIR) analysis of the Television City project it said was "fatally flawed," according to a report in Variety
Among other objections, the letter cited an alleged failure to properly consult with Native American tribes; failure to consider noise impacts from TV production, including slamming stage doors and stage gunshots; failure to fully address the risk of a methane gas explosion or crane collapse during construction; misstating the distance from the project site to the Hollywood Fault (an identified earthquake fault line in LA); and failure to consider the health risks related to hauling soil from the project site the Santa Ana winds.
The Grove's letter also raises concerns with the DEIR's discussion of the site's historical features. The DEIR does address the adjacent Gilmore Adobe, a historic site dating from 1852, but, according to the Grove letter it fails to "consider if Native American labor was used to construct the original adobe building or if Native Americans were used as domestic help or ranch hands at the Adobe and adjacent lands."
The Grove letter also cites a failure to mention La Brea Woman, a set of human remains excavated from the nearby La Brea tar pits in 1914; and a failure to mention Guaspet, a Gabrielino/Tongva village a few miles away from the site that was abandoned sometime before 1820.
Hackman Capital fired back, accusing Caruso of "hypocrisy" for claiming to support the film production industry while opposing Hackman's $1.25B Television City redevelopment.
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