Your next landlord may be a pro sports team
CNN
Professional sports teams are becoming real estate empires, building luxury apartments and shopping malls.
Professional sports teams are becoming real estate empires, building luxury apartments and shopping malls. For decades, major league teams depended on ticket sales, concessions and TV deals to generate revenue. But team owners in recent years have turned to real estate development to bring in extra cash and drive up the asset values of their franchises. Billionaire owners have built dozens of new stadiums and arenas, often with hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer funding. State and local governments spent $33 billion in public funds to build stadiums in North America between 1970 and 2020, with the median public contribution covering 73% of costs, a study published last year found. As part of teams’ agreements with cities and states, they have been handed the rights to transform the land around these ballparks into offices, apartment buildings, hotels and shopping malls. “Stadiums are giant paper weights and are incredibly expensive,” said Geoffrey Propheter, who studies the economics of sports stadiums at the University of Colorado Denver. “Every time you get a new stadium, an owner wants to get real estate with it and the rights to develop everything around,” he said. “They can make more money with development rights than they can operating the stadium by itself.” Teams’ push into real estate has significant implications that is shaping both sports leagues and urban areas: Teams are now real estate plays for billionaire owners, stadiums increasingly serve as anchors for mixed-use shopping and entertainment districts, and development rights around stadiums for owners have become a key component of public financing for these projects.