Speakeasy Fitness is quietly assembling a portfolio of LA real estate, snapping up former office and institutional buildings and converting them into gyms, a strategy that gives the operator control over costs and locations.

Its latest move is an eight‑figure acquisition of 1336 N. La Brea Ave., where Hollywood and West Hollywood meet, which was once part of the A&M Records complex and was most recently the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. The building is set to open in the spring as the newest location of Speakeasy Fitness. 

Most gyms lease their space, but Speakeasy owns about half of the properties it occupies through entities controlled by company President Jeh Meher. 

“Part of the equation is we do the real estate, so we're our own anchor tenant,” Meher said.

The total for acquisition and renovations to the property is $20M, Meher said. Owning is preferable to leasing for Meher because it allows him to avoid things like escalation clauses, regular negotiations and changes in charges for necessities like parking. 

With ownership, the transaction is one-and-done, especially if you lock in your interest rate, Meher said. 

About a year ago, Meher bought a building on Beverly Boulevard in Historic Filipinotown that will open within the next month or so, he said. 

“We want geographic concentration, as opposed to these locations spread all over Southern California, where the next one is 25 miles away,” Meher said. 

The company has San Fernando Valley locations in Panorama City, Sylmar, Canoga Park and North Hollywood and a gym in Pasadena in addition to a gym just south of Koreatown on Western Avenue and the soon-to-open Beverly location. The forthcoming La Brea gym will be the brand's eighth gym in operation. 

In 2025, Meher sold a North Hills building where there had been a Speakeasy location. The gym is reported closed on Yelp, and the location is no longer listed on the company’s website. 

“We’ve got a good Valley presence,” Meher said. “The idea is now we have a good Los Angeles presence.” 

Gyms have, at least since the pandemic, seen growth at the extremes of discount and high-end concepts. Midmarket operators can be crunched as they walk a tightrope between offering a reasonable price and keeping up their facilities and offerings, JLL Executive Vice President Ken Shishido said. 

There are certainly operators that are successfully pulling off the balancing act. Shishido represented Eos Fitness in a 43K SF lease in Canoga Park, where the gym took over a former Bed, Bath & Beyond location. Construction is set to begin next year, and Eos will be the anchor tenant at UBS’s Warner Marketplace retail center. The company signed nine leases nationwide, mostly in Texas, in the second quarter. 

Gyms can struggle to find space in retail centers regardless of their size because they are parking hungry. It’s not uncommon for a gym patron to work out for an hour or 90 minutes.

If the gym is not the anchor tenant, that anchor might be grumpy about the gym tying up precious parking for extended periods. Gyms can also be more costly in terms of tenant improvements than big-box tenants, which typically just need one big open space. 

“With gyms, sometimes they have pools, they have Jacuzzis and saunas,” Shishido said.

Many also need mirrored smaller rooms for spinning, yoga or other classes. Those are expensive to build out.

Despite traditional hurdles to finding space, the fitness sector is growing. The boutique fitness sector, a broad category that can encompass yoga and Pilates studios as well as high-intensity interval training studios and boot-camp-type fitness locations, is especially strong.

Boutique fitness operators, led by Club Pilates and Strong Pilates, have plans for more than 700 new U.S. store openings totaling over 1.5M SF in 2026, according to an August research brief from CBRE.

Location relative to competition is a consideration for many gyms. Most of the bigger gyms will take into account the types of businesses near a prospective location because they don’t usually want to have more than one or two competitors near them, Shishido said. 

Meher said he did consider proximity to potential competitors but didn’t make a decision based solely on that. There are at least five Pilates studios alone within a mile of the La Brea location along Santa Monica Boulevard, according to Google Maps. 

“A Pilates studio or a cycling studio is competition,” Meher said. 

“Even if they don't have the same amenities as we do, I can't ignore that,” he added. “But at the same time, I don't base my decisions on competition.”