Bain Capital Hunting for Film, TV Studio Space in NYC

Bungalow Projects, a development firm founded by Susi Yu and Travis Feehan to create film and TV production studios, has bought a Red Hook development site for $34 million.

Bain Capital Real Estate provided funds for it to purchase 145 Wolcott Street, in Brooklyn, where Bungalow plans to build a 225,000-square-foot production facility by early 2027. The total project cost is estimated at $194 million.

“New York studios can be second- or third-rate compared to cities like Los Angeles, Atlanta, Vancouver or Toronto,” said Feehan. “We wanted to bring the LA experience to New York.”

The Red Hook studio is slated to include four soundstages, each spanning 18,000 square feet with about 40 feet of height before reaching the lighting grid.

“A lot of film and TV studios in New York are often old warehouses without many of the modern production facilities that we are going to deliver,” echoed Yu.

“There is a pronounced supply-demand imbalance for high-quality infill purpose-built soundstages in New York,” Joe Marconi, a partner at Bain Capital, said in a statement, “and we believe there will be enduring demand growth.”

The seller, a joint venture between Four Points and Twenty Lake Holdings, had planned a large mixed-use project alongside Alexandros Washburn. Despite circumventing the City Council member who killed Industry City’s rezoning in Sunset Park, the project never came to fruition.

Yu is the former head of development at MaryAnne Gilmartin’s MAG Partners, while Feehan hails from Normandy Real Estate Management, which was bought by office REIT Columbia Property Trust in 2019.

While the pair had little prior knowledge of film and television studio development, they found supportive partners in Bain, which with Bardas Capital is now at work building a similar portfolio of film studios in Los Angeles.

The New York project will benefit from government financial incentives including NYCIDA and ICAP, meant to support the redevelopment of industrial property in the city. The state’s generous tax credit for film production goes to individual production companies, stoking demand for studio space.

The Red Hook site is the second acquisition by the newly formed Bungalow. Earlier this year it bought a development site at 215 Moore Street in Bushwick, Brooklyn, near a Netflix studio, where it plans to build a film studio of similar size.

Bain and Bungalow aim to build 1 million square feet of studio space in New York, according to Yu, whose company is now looking to buy two more sites where studios can be built.

Besides its film studio projects, Feehan said, Bungalow plans to focus on real estate development for companies that create media in other realms, such as video games.