Anthony Licciardello | May 7, 2026
Netflix
By Anthony Licciardello, The Prodigy Team
NYS/NJ Licensed Broker · Long Branch & Monmouth Coastal Specialist
Netflix's The Four Seasons Season 2 filmed in Ocean Grove and staged out of Point Pleasant Beach in October 2025. The series returns to Netflix on May 28, 2026. Two months earlier, Netflix Studios Fort Monmouth closed on its 292-acre Mega Parcel for $55 million and started clearing the site. For Jersey Shore real estate, those two events are not separate stories — they're the same story on two timelines, and the local data already shows it.
For the broader county-level read, see the Netflix Effect on Monmouth County overview. This post goes deeper on the coastal corridor specifically — the towns where filming is already happening, the local market data behind the headlines, and where Ocean Grove, Long Branch, and Asbury Park sit on the buyer map.
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$933K Ocean Grove Median Aug 2025 closed |
+17.3% OG Price/SF YoY $594/SF current |
+51% Monmouth $1M+ Condos YoY through July '25 |
$1.32M Long Branch Listing Median May 2026 |
The Season 2 trailer dropped May 5. A portion of what subscribers will see in the new season was filmed last October on the side streets of Ocean Grove, with production staging operations out of Point Pleasant Beach. Confirmed celebrity sightings during the shoot included Tina Fey, Will Forte, Colman Domingo, and Marco Calvani.
That's significant because Season 1 was a Hudson Valley production — Beacon, Cold Spring, Poughkeepsie, Vassar College in Arlington, with a brief detour to Puerto Rico. Series co-creator Tina Fey told Netflix's Tudum that "New York is a beautiful and magical state" and that's why they shot there. One year later, the production crossed a state line.
It's a small data point on its own. Stacked next to what's happening twenty minutes inland at the former Fort Monmouth, it stops being small.
⬢ Buyer Note
Production scouts don't pick a town once. When The Four Seasons used Ocean Grove for Season 2 exteriors, it created a working location file at Netflix that will outlast this show. Once a town is in that file — pre-cleared for permits, with crews who know the streets and homeowners willing to host equipment — it gets reused. Ocean Grove just became a recurring address in the Netflix production system.
Netflix Studios Fort Monmouth closed on the Mega Parcel on December 5, 2025. That's the date the project stopped being a press release and started being a construction site. Demolition has actually been running under a pre-closing agreement since May 2025 — roughly 88 obsolete military structures coming down to clear over a million square feet of long-vacant base property.
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$55M Land Purchase 292-acre Mega Parcel |
$900M+ Capital Investment Total project |
12 Soundstages ~500K SF total |
1,500 Permanent Jobs 3,500 in construction |
The build is phased. Phase 1A delivers four soundstages on the 39-acre McAfee parcel in Oceanport on a 2027 schedule. Phase 1B adds eight more stages in Eatontown on a 2028 schedule. When complete, this will be Netflix's second-largest production facility globally, trailing only Albuquerque.
The first operational job postings went live February 23, 2026. Director of Studio Operations: $420,000–$790,000. Manager of Studio Site and Services: $181,000–$323,000. Those salary bands tell you exactly which housing tier Netflix is preparing to recruit into the local market.
"New Jersey's film and television industry has never been stronger — and today marks yet another leap forward."
— Ted Sarandos, Co-CEO Netflix · Fort Monmouth Groundbreaking
▶ Watch · Prodigy Real Estate
A 25-minute “Above The Streets” tour of Ocean Grove — the Camp Meeting Association land-lease system, the Great Auditorium, Tent City, the boardwalk, and the 2025 market data driving record sales. Watch on YouTube.
Ocean Grove was the most photographed Monmouth County town in October 2025. It's also one of the tightest small markets in the state. Buildings constrained by the Camp Meeting Association, an active historic district overlay, and effectively zero buildable lots.
| Metric | Ocean Grove (Aug 2025) | YoY Change |
|---|---|---|
| Median sale price | $933,000 | +0.1% |
| Median price per square foot | $594 | +17.3% |
| Median days on market | 55 | +7 days |
| Homes sold (month) | 10 | +25% |
The headline median is flat. The price-per-square-foot is up 17.3% year-over-year. That divergence is the entire story of a Victorian historic district market — when buyers compete on the same fixed inventory of well-preserved, deed-restricted homes, they don't bid up the median (the inventory mix isn't changing); they bid up the per-foot price (they're paying more for the same square footage).
⬢ Buyer Note
New supply in Ocean Grove is effectively zero. When a media event drives interest into a market with no new supply, the price-per-square-foot moves first and the median follows on a 12–18 month lag. Watch the 2026 Q3 numbers carefully — they're the first full window where Four Seasons exposure can show up in closed comps.
Long Branch is the town carrying the highest expected uplift from the Netflix executive class — and it's already pricing it in. The closed-sale median and the listing median are both correct at the same time, and the gap between them is what tells you what's happening.
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$723K Closed Median Redfin, Aug '25 |
$1.32M Listing Median May 2026 |
$1.68M Active Inventory Median Movoto, May '26 |
+25.8% LB City Price/SF YoY Per-foot pricing |
Closed sales reflect older contracts. Listings reflect what sellers think they can ask given new demand. The gap between $723K closed and $1.32M listed is the Netflix premium being priced into the market in real time.
That premium has hard infrastructure underneath it. The Atlantic Club Residences — 132 oceanfront units, 2,000 to 4,000 square feet, priced from $1.2M to $6.5M — broke ground in 2025 and have already sold roughly 40% of inventory, predominantly to local buyers and Manhattan commuters. A few miles down the coast, the Lido Asbury Park — an 8-story, 112-unit oceanfront condominium with nearly 50,000 square feet of amenities — completes in 2027. The same year Phase 1A of Netflix Studios Fort Monmouth opens.
| New Development | Town | Units | Price Range | Delivery |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Atlantic Club Residences | Long Branch | 132 | $1.2M–$6.5M | Phased |
| Lido Asbury Park | Asbury Park | 112 | Oceanfront luxury | 2027 |
| The Aegean | Asbury Park | 27 | Boutique luxury | Now delivering |
| The Vive | Asbury Park | Townhomes | Luxury | Active |
⬢ Anthony Licciardello
The Jersey Shore corridor between Eatontown and Asbury Park is repricing in real time. When you list with me, your property doesn't just hit the local MLS — it plugs into one of the most powerful marketing pipelines in New Jersey real estate.
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✓ NY → NJ Pipeline Direct relationships with active Manhattan, Brooklyn, and tri-state buyers searching for Jersey Shore luxury. |
✓ YouTube Reach One of the largest real estate YouTube channels in the State of New Jersey — qualified buyers domestic and global. |
✓ Building-Specific Hyper-local Monmouth coastal expertise. The boards, the views, the floor plans, the comp history. |
Call/Text: (718) 873-7344 · Schedule: ProdigyRE.com
Free home valuation. No pressure. Just real numbers from someone who knows this market block by block.
Asbury Park doesn't need Netflix to be a luxury market. It already is one. Netflix just changes the buyer profile.
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$648K Downtown Median 2025 |
+4.4% YoY Price Change Closed comps |
29 Days Median DOM 17 days for hot homes |
+7% Hot Homes Over List Compete Score: 48 |
Hot homes — the well-prepared, well-priced ones — clear in 17 days at 7% over list. That competitive intensity exists before a single Netflix production cycle has rotated cast and crew through the boardwalk for a six-month shoot.
What changes in 2027–2028 isn't the Asbury Park market direction — it's the buyer mix. Today the buyer is a Brooklyn or Manhattan creative paying cash for a turnkey one-bedroom at the Asbury Ocean Club. In 2027, that buyer is competing with a Netflix line producer who needs a furnished three-bedroom for an eight-month shoot, and a streaming-side executive who's just been told her group is relocating to Eatontown.
⬢ Buyer Note
The Asbury Park condo market and the long-term rental market are about to converge. Productions with 6–9 month shooting schedules don't want hotels — they want furnished apartments. Owners of two-bedroom-plus units near the boardwalk who can deliver fully furnished, season-long leases will be the ones repricing the rent stack. This is already happening for traveling nurses; Netflix scales it.
Map the demand by buyer type, not by zip code. Three concentric rings of impact, three different timelines, three different price points.
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Ring 1 Host Municipalities |
Eatontown · Oceanport · Tinton Falls · Shrewsbury · Workforce Housing · Peak 2026–2027 Towns absorbing the daily-operations workforce — production assistants, set carpenters, mid-level studio managers. Eatontown is also absorbing a decade of municipal capital improvements via its $47M PILOT payment from Netflix. |
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Ring 2 Sanctuary Suburbs |
Rumson · Fair Haven · Little Silver · Red Bank · Holmdel · Colts Neck · Above-the-Line · Peak 2027–2028 Where directors, showrunners, and Netflix VPs in those $400K–$790K salary bands actually buy. The strongest pull goes to Rumson and Holmdel for estate-tier acreage; Fair Haven and Red Bank for walkable downtowns and waterfront. Rumson's median already clears $2.8M; the executive class firms the floor under it. |
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Ring 3 Coastal Corridor |
Long Branch · Asbury Park · Ocean Grove · Bradley Beach · Belmar · Project-Based · Peak 2028+ Towns that absorb cast, crew, and production-cycle talent on 3-to-9-month assignments. The furnished luxury condo stack — Atlantic Club, Lido, Asbury Ocean Club, the Vive, the Aegean — was always going to fill. Netflix guarantees the absorption rate. |
⬢ The Real Estate Reality
Two things can be true at once. The Netflix project is the largest entertainment infrastructure investment in New Jersey history, and the local market response will compound over years rather than months. What's already in the data: Ocean Grove $/SF up 17.3%, Long Branch listing-to-closed gap of $600K, Monmouth $1M+ condo sales up 51% YoY, Atlantic Club 40% pre-sold. What's not yet in the data: a county-wide median price explosion driven by Netflix specifically. The structural demand is moving in. The headline appreciation will follow on the lag.
Q
The Four Seasons Season 2 returns to Netflix May 28, 2026. Filming for Season 2 took place in late September through October 2025, with Hudson Valley locations from Season 1 plus new Monmouth County, NJ locations — primarily Ocean Grove, with production staging in Point Pleasant Beach. Cast members confirmed in Ocean Grove during filming included Tina Fey, Will Forte, Colman Domingo, and Marco Calvani.
Q
Phase 1A — four soundstages on the McAfee parcel in Oceanport — is targeted for 2027. Phase 1B — eight additional soundstages in Eatontown — is targeted for 2028. Demolition has been running since May 2025; the Mega Parcel closed December 5, 2025.
Q
Long Branch and Asbury Park for the lifestyle/entertainment buyer; Rumson, Fair Haven, Little Silver, Red Bank, and Holmdel for the executive/family buyer; Ocean Grove and Bradley Beach for the boutique/discreet buyer. Oceanport and Eatontown will see the most direct workforce housing demand from Netflix operations.
Q
The fundamentals matter more than the Netflix timeline. Monmouth County was already an inventory-constrained seller's market before the studio closed. If you're buying for a 5-to-10-year hold on schools, commute, or coastal access, 2026 is a reasonable entry point. If you're buying purely on the assumption of a fast Netflix flip, the data doesn't yet support that thesis at current prices.
Q
Forecasting a precise Netflix premium isn't responsible — too many variables, including national rates, inventory cycles, and production-volume assumptions. What's measurable: 51% YoY growth in $1M+ Monmouth condo sales (July 2024–July 2025), and 17.3% YoY growth in Ocean Grove price-per-square-foot (August 2024–August 2025). This sits inside the broader split happening across the New Jersey housing market — luxury and coastal corridors moving on different fundamentals than the rest of the state. The structural demand is already in the numbers.
The cameras came to Ocean Grove. The studio is being built in Eatontown. The capital is repricing Long Branch. The pattern is set; the years are on the calendar. Reach out before relying on any pricing or rental yield figures — current comps, recent assessments, and submarket-by-submarket inventory shift the buy/no-buy decision materially. Related reading: The Netflix Effect on Monmouth County · Oceanport: Ground Zero for the Netflix Effect · Long Branch Luxury Condo Investment Thesis · Where NYC Buyers Are Moving in New Jersey · Every Active Monmouth County New-Construction Development.
About the Author
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NYS/NJ Licensed Broker · The Prodigy Team 20+ years and 5,000+ closed transactions. Long Branch and Monmouth coastal corridor specialist. ProdigyRE.com. |
Prodigy Real Estate is an innovative real estate company offering high-end video production, home valuation services, purchasing, and home sales. Serving New York and New Jersey.