The Catalina Yacht plant that built thousands of fiberglass sailboats in Woodland Hills has been sold for $61 million to an entity owned by Amazon.com.
The Butler Family Trust sold the 187,000-square-foot industrial building at 21200 Victory Blvd. in Warner Center to W-F Catalina Owner IX, the San Fernando Valley Business Journal reported.
The buyer is actually Amazon.com, a person familiar with the deal told the newspaper, which plans to turn it into its first production facility in the San Fernando Valley.
The two-story building on 9.3 acres, sandwiched between Victory Boulevard and a Home Depot, includes 60,000 square feet of office space.
Catalina Yacht founder Frank Butler bought the building in 1974 and turned it into the largest production fiberglass sailboat factory in the U.S., according to the company website. But production of the sloop-rigged boats was shifted to Florida more than a decade ago. Butler passed away in 2020.
“The closing of the Woodland Hills operation signals the real and symbolic end of a grand era in California boatbuilding,” the company said.
The sale of the building whose smokestacks can be seen across the west Valley passes the torch from an era of manufacturing to digital production.
Gordon Mace and Josh Linn of Beitler Commercial Realty were the listing agents. Mace represented the buyer, an entity owned by Amazon.com.
“It’s a historic building at Warner Center,” Mace told the Journal. “It was built for Rocketdyne to test jet engines back in the 1960s. It has got a 32-foot ceiling clearance. Not many buildings have that. And it’s in a great location.”
The development of a soundstage would add to Amazon’s e-commerce footprint in northern Los Angeles County and neighboring Ventura County. The company has fulfillment centers and last-mile industrial sites in Burbank, Thousand Oaks, Simi Valley and Oxnard.
In the last few years, demand has surged for production and soundstage facilities across Los Angeles. As streaming services multiply, Los Angeles has found itself running out of production studios.
As a result, Wall Street dollars have begun to flood into the production space. In 2020, Blackstone Group paid $1.7 billion for a 49 percent stake in Hudson Pacific’s studio business.
In August, Blackstone and Hudson Pacific Properties — one of L.A.’s largest studio landlords — proposed building a 240,000-square-foot production studio complex in Sun Valley.
In May, Amazon inked an $8.45 billion deal to acquire MGM, primarily for its catalog of 17,000 TV shows and more than 4,000 films, including “Raging Bull,” “Rocky,” “Silence of the Lambs” and James Bond. MGM, founded in 1924, complements Amazon Studios, which has primarily focused on producing TV. programming.
The deal didn’t include its vast production lot, sold to Sony Pictures, or its pre-1986 film library of classic MGM films such as “The Wizard of Oz” and “Gone with the Wind,” sold to Warner Bros. decades ago.
In 2018, Amazon leased more than 70 percent of Hackman Capital’s Culver Studios in Culver City, taking around 505,000 square feet of space, for its production wing Amazon Studios.
[SFVBJ] – Dana Bartholomew
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