$61 Million Buys Valley Boat Factory

The Catalina Yachts building in Woodland Hills has sold for $61 million.

Butler Family Trust sold the building to buyer W-F Catalina Owner IX, LP. 

According to an person familiar with the deal who requested anonymity, the buyer is Amazon.com Inc., which plans to use the site for entertainment production.

Gordon Mace and Josh Linn of Beitler Commercial Realty were listing agents on the industrial building at 21200 Victory Blvd. in Warner Center. Mace represented the buyer. 

The 187,000-square-foot industrial two-story building, which has 60,000 square feet of office space, was bought in 1978 from Rocketdyne. 

“It’s a historic building at Warner Center,” Mace said. “It was built for Rocketdyne to test jet engines back in the 1960s. It’s got 32-foot ceiling clearance. Not many buildings have that. And it’s in a great location.”

Beitler began listing the property in March 2021 not long after the November 2020 passing of Frank Butler.

Butler, who founded Catalina Yachts in the 1960s, grew the company into the largest builder of fiberglass production sailboats in the United States.

The building had been used to manufacture sailboats. Downstairs was used to make cushions and upstairs was used to make sails. The boat operation moved two years ago to a location near Tampa, Florida, according to Mace.

When Amazon turns this site into an entertainment production facility, it will become Amazon’s first such soundstages in North Los Angeles, where Amazon has been prolific expanding its e-commerce footprint with fulfillment centers and last-mile industrial sites in Burbank, Thousand Oaks, Simi Valley and Oxnard.