Vacant Culver City Sony Campus Hits Auction Block Today After $101M Default

The three-building former Sony Pictures Animation campus at 9050 Washington Blvd. in Culver City is scheduled to hit the public auction block today, the latest casualty in the debt-fueled collapse of studio landlord Hackman Capital Partners. The sale had originally been set for August 12 before being pushed back nearly two weeks, and it arrives with the roughly 200,000-square-foot creative office complex sitting completely empty.

Hackman Capital Partners and partner Affinius Capital paid $160 million for the Art Deco-style campus in 2019, and the firm has defaulted on the mortgage tied to the property, according to the Los Angeles Business Journal. Lenders moved in on the property in April, and Culver City-based Hackman has received multiple default notices this year, per the same report. Goldman Sachs originated the note secured by the campus, and lenders have claimed Hackman owes more than $100 million on it — a figure that, per The Real Deal, comes out to roughly $500 per square foot on a campus with no tenants at all.

Sony Pictures Animation vacated the Washington Boulevard buildings for Mid-Wilshire in 2024, and CBRE's lease offering now lists all floors of the complex as available. CBRE brokers declined to speak on the matter, the Business Journal reports. The emptiness matters for how the auction plays out: under California Civil Code § 2924, non-judicial foreclosure requires a mandatory 90-day reinstatement period after a notice of default, followed by at least 21 days of public notice before a trustee can hold a sale, according to the California Courts Self-Help Guide — a process that does not require a judge's involvement.

A Portfolio Unraveling Property by Property

The Washington Boulevard default is one piece of a much larger unwinding. Hackman went on a buying spree acquiring television and film production studios during the pandemic streaming boom, financed largely with short-term debt, and the firm lost Radford Studio Center to a Goldman Sachs-led lender syndicate after defaulting on a $1 billion mortgage there. Netflix reportedly agreed to pay $400 million for Radford, a deal Hoodline covered in its piece on the fire-sale Radford takeover.

The pattern has repeated across the country. In June, Deutsche Bank recorded a notice of default against Hackman over a $257.6 million loan balance on its MBS Media Campus in Manhattan Beach, prompting brokers to shop the 15-soundstage facility for a possible defense-technology conversion, according to Bisnow. Weeks later, a Deutsche Bank-led syndicate recorded a default claiming Hackman owed $357 million on Television City, the landmark lot the firm bought for $750 million in 2019, with Deutsche Bank retaining CBRE to shop that loan after negotiations stalled. And in March, Deutsche Bank moved to seize Hackman's historic Kaufman Astoria Studios in Queens, New York — a foreclosure fight Hoodline detailed in its report on the Kaufman Astoria seizure attempt, where Apple TV+ holds a 90,000-square-foot lease.

Speaking at a June real estate conference at The Lot at Formosa, Hackman Capital Partners CEO Michael Hackman addressed the mounting foreclosures directly, per Bisnow's account of the event: “We have a couple deals that we just made mistakes on, and we're going to lose a lot of money on those properties, but that happens.” Hackman Capital Partners did not respond to a request for comment from the Business Journal on the Washington Boulevard default.

Culver City Feels the Fallout

Hackman has also been trying to raise cash by unloading assets that are still fully leased. In May, the firm and Affinius Capital put the nearby 115,000-square-foot Culver Steps mixed-use complex at 9300 Culver Blvd. on the market for a rumored $150 million, or over $1,200 per square foot — a listing Hoodline covered when the Amazon-anchored property, refinanced in 2024 with a $75 million loan, first hit the market in its story on the Culver Steps listing.

The vacancy at the former Sony lot has rippled into the surrounding neighborhood. The departure of Sony Pictures Animation workers directly hurt downtown Culver City businesses, contributing to the 2025 closure of longtime restaurant Akasha, whose owner cited the loss of corporate dining traffic from Sony, according to Westside Today. That local strain sits inside a much larger regional slump: Los Angeles County office leasing activity fell nearly 32% year-over-year in the first quarter of 2026, while countywide office availability hovered near historic highs of 23% to 30%, per L.A. Business First. More than one-third of Culver City offices sat vacant during the second quarter of 2026, according to Colliers.

What Happens at the Auction

It remains unclear whether a third-party buyer will step in at today's sale or whether Goldman Sachs will take back the property through a credit bid, as has happened elsewhere in Hackman's portfolio. Also unresolved is how a potential conversion — aerospace, tech, or otherwise — might reshape this stretch of Westside entertainment real estate, a question that has already surfaced around Hackman's Manhattan Beach lot, covered in Hoodline's report on the Avatar studio's defense-tech pivot. For now, the Art Deco buildings that once housed Sony's animators sit empty, waiting to see who, if anyone, shows up to bid.