Every time a production crew needs a hospital corridor, a mid century ranch house, or an empty corporate office park to double as a fictional world on screen, someone has to find that space, vet it, and get it into a producer’s hands fast enough to keep a shooting schedule intact. In New Jersey, a growing share of that work now runs through Reset Locations, a Lakewood Township based scouting agency that has positioned itself as one of the state’s most active bridges between property owners and the film, television, and commercial production crews increasingly choosing the Garden State over Manhattan and Brooklyn soundstages.
Reset Locations was built by CEO Moshe Gross, whose path into the location scouting business did not begin in entertainment at all. Gross came up through commercial real estate, and his formative professional experience involved work on the development of Bell Works in Holmdel, the sprawling adaptive reuse project that transformed the former Bell Labs headquarters into one of New Jersey’s most recognizable mixed use campuses. That project gave Gross a front row seat to a pattern he would later build an entire company around, which is that production crews are constantly hunting for physical space, and that property owners sitting on underused square footage, whether that is a vacant office floor, a warehouse, or simply a distinctive looking suburban home, can generate meaningful revenue by opening those spaces to film crews without ever signing a long term lease. That insight became the founding thesis of Reset Locations, a business model built entirely around matching supply that already exists with demand that is increasingly hard to satisfy through conventional means.
What Reset Locations has built since then is, at its core, a heavily organized database. Headquartered in Lakewood, the company maintains a categorized catalog of Tri-State area properties that spans an unusually wide range of settings, including hospitals, corporate office buildings, warehouses, private suburban homes, and architecturally distinctive sites that would be difficult or impossible to reproduce on a soundstage. That breadth matters because modern film and television production increasingly demands specificity. A script calling for a 1970s era hospital wing or a mid century modern home with a particular kind of window light is not a request a generic backlot can satisfy, and agencies like Reset Locations exist precisely to close that gap between what a script describes and what actually exists, sitting mostly unused, somewhere within driving distance of a production’s base camp.
The timing of the company’s growth is not incidental. New Jersey has spent the past several years aggressively expanding its film tax incentive programs, and the results have been difficult to miss for anyone paying attention to where major productions are actually shooting. Apple TV’s “Severance,” one of the most talked about television series of the past few years, filmed extensively in New Jersey rather than the Manhattan office towers its plot might suggest, and the Bob Dylan biopic “A Complete Unknown” similarly leaned on New Jersey locations rather than defaulting to a New York City shoot. Those are not isolated examples so much as evidence of a broader migration, one where productions that once treated New York as the only viable regional base are now crossing the Hudson River specifically because New Jersey offers a combination of tax credits, available space, and proximity to New York talent and crews that is difficult to match anywhere else in the region.
That shift has been reinforced by serious capital investment in physical production infrastructure. New mega studio projects, including 1888 Studios in Bayonne and a Netflix facility at the former Fort Monmouth site, represent exactly the kind of long term commitment that signals New Jersey’s film ambitions extend well beyond opportunistic tax credit chasing. When a company the size of Netflix commits to building permanent production infrastructure inside a state, it validates the entire surrounding ecosystem, from soundstage construction crews to catering companies to, notably, location scouting agencies like Reset Locations that need a steady pipeline of productions actively shooting in state in order to justify their own growth.
Reset Locations is far from the only player in this space, and the broader location scouting ecosystem in New Jersey has expanded in step with the productions themselves. The Scout Source, headquartered on Central Avenue in Montclair, has operated since 1997 and maintains an extensive database representing hundreds of urban, suburban, and rural residential properties, with a particular specialty in matching North and Central Jersey homes and buildings with commercial shoots, print photography sessions, and television productions. On the directory side, ProductionHUB maintains a New Jersey specific location scout guide that functions less like a single agency and more like an industry wide index, connecting producers with independent, union, and non union scouts working throughout the state.
Government resources play a substantial role in this ecosystem as well, and in some ways function identically to a private listing agency, just without the commercial layer. The New Jersey Motion Picture and Television Commission, based at One Gateway Center in Newark, maintains an official searchable film location photo library, and the submission process is notably accessible. Any New Jersey resident or commercial property owner can submit photographs of their property to the state’s database at no cost, giving Hollywood productions scouting the region a direct, free channel to discover spaces without ever going through a private intermediary. In South Jersey, a regional cooperative performs a similar function for the state’s southern counties, actively marketing local diners, wineries, sports complexes, and corporate office space directly to scouting executives working on behalf of incoming productions.
Perhaps the most distinctive piece of New Jersey’s location infrastructure is a program called Film Ready NJ, which takes a fundamentally different approach than either the private agencies or the state’s photo library. Rather than cataloging individual properties, the program certifies entire municipalities as shoot ready, a designation earned when a town appoints a local liaison to map out its municipal buildings, parks, and participating private properties into an organized library that scouts can access quickly once they know a given town has already done the legwork of identifying what is available and securing cooperation from local property and business owners. Jersey City, Newark, Asbury Park, Atlantic City, and Cranford have all emerged as particularly active, certified film ready communities under this framework, and each has seen a corresponding rise in production activity as crews learn they can move faster and with fewer logistical headaches in towns that have already done the preparatory work.
Taken together, this layered infrastructure, spanning private agencies like Reset Locations and The Scout Source, industry directories like ProductionHUB, state and regional government resources, and the Film Ready NJ municipal certification program, explains why New Jersey has been able to absorb such a significant share of production activity that once would have defaulted to New York or Los Angeles almost automatically. A production looking for space in New Jersey today has multiple, overlapping paths to finding it, whether through a specialized private database, a free state submitted photo library, or a town that has already organized its own inventory of shoot ready sites. Reset Locations sits squarely inside that ecosystem, built on Moshe Gross’s original observation that idle commercial and residential real estate represents an underused asset class, and expanding alongside a state film industry that shows no sign of slowing its growth.
It is also worth noting, purely for the sake of clarity, that the word “reset” surfaces in several unrelated New Jersey contexts that have nothing to do with film production, and readers searching more generally may be looking for one of those instead. Several wellness and spa businesses across the state use some version of the name, including a head spa in Red Bank, a lymphatic drainage focused studio in Ramsey, and a massage therapy practice in Wall Township. Separately, retail industry coverage has used the word “reset” to describe a format overhaul at five New Jersey Container Store locations, including Cherry Hill, Paramus, and Princeton, as those stores integrate a new co-branded layout with Bed Bath and Beyond. And in an entirely different corner of state government, New Jersey business owners sometimes use the term “reset” informally to describe the process of reinstating an LLC or corporation through the Division of Revenue after its charter has been revoked or voided over missed annual filings. None of those uses have any connection to Reset Locations or the film industry, but given how often the word appears across unrelated New Jersey business contexts, it seemed worth drawing the distinction clearly.
For property owners and producers alike, though, the throughline is straightforward. New Jersey’s film industry has grown fast enough, and its tax incentive structure has proven durable enough, that an entire support industry built around finding, vetting, and matching physical locations has taken root and is still expanding. Reset Locations, born out of a commercial real estate insight rather than an entertainment industry background, has become one of the more visible names inside that infrastructure, and its growth from a single founder’s observation about underused space into a functioning Tri-State database mirrors the trajectory of the broader New Jersey production boom it now helps sustain.
