For years, the Gold’s Gym brand’s only Southern California presence was its iconic Venice flagship — the birthplace of modern bodybuilding. That’s about to change in a big way.
Valencia-based Roknipour Investment Group, led by brothers Matt and Tyler Roknipour, has signed a franchise agreement with Gold’s Gym to open 15 new locations across Los Angeles and Orange counties over the next seven years. Eight gyms are slated for LA County, with the first expected to open within about a year. West Los Angeles is among the target areas, though exact addresses haven’t been announced yet.
The move fills a void left when the previous Southern California franchisee — who had held the rights for roughly 36 years — exited the market in fall 2025. Since then, the company-owned Venice location has been the only Gold’s Gym in the region.
The new gyms will be more compact than the roughly 40,000-square-foot Venice flagship, running 25,000 to 30,000 square feet, with floor plans built around weight training and performance-focused space rather than a little bit of everything.
Roknipour Investment Group isn’t new to running multi-unit franchise operations — the company already operates 24 Jiffy Lube locations and two Jersey Mike’s shops in the region, with two more Jersey Mike’s in the pipeline. Gold’s Gym itself has been through its own changes in recent years: the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2020 before being acquired by Germany’s RSG Group for roughly $100 million later that year. Today it operates more than 500 locations worldwide.
For LA-area fitness fans, the expansion means more access to a gym brand built on a decades-long legacy, with a model tuned for serious lifters rather than boutique-style group classes. For local commercial real estate and gym-adjacent businesses — equipment suppliers, personal trainers, nutrition shops — a wave of 15 new openings over the next few years could mean fresh opportunities to partner up as each location gets built out.
No specific opening dates or addresses have been released yet, but if the first location lands within a year as planned, Angelenos could be lifting at a new Gold’s Gym sometime in 2027.
Source: Los Angeles Business Journal
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