Stan Kroenke Buys Denver Building Near Ball Arena for $5.6M

Billionaire Stan Kroenke has bought an historic office building near his Ball Arena in Denver for $5.6 million.

The real estate magnate and his Denver Nuggets basketball and Colorado Avalanche hockey teams purchased the 21,500-square-foot building at 1123 Auraria Parkway, east of the arena, the Denver Post reported.

The seller was Alex Ringsby, owner of locally based Ringsby Realty. The deal works out to $260 per square foot.

Scott Patterson of Ringsby helped his boss, Alex, in the deal. Kroenke was represented by Darrin Revious of Pinnacle Real Estate.

Ringsby bought the four-story brick building in 1999 for an undisclosed price, then for years had based its office there. The 30-foot-wide building, built in 1901, was fully leased at the time of sale.

“Ball Arena was under construction and it just seemed like a whole new world was going to unfold down there in the Platte Valley and the railyards there,” Ringsby told the Post. “We’re just doing an internal restructuring and this just was an opportunity that arose out of Kroenke’s interest in owning everything down there.

“They’ve been knocking on the doors for years to buy it and we finally said yes.”

The 77-year-old billionaire, who owns The Kroenke Group, based in Missouri, and Kroenke Sports & Entertainment, based in Denver, plans to redevelop the parking lots around the 21,000-seat Ball Arena into a 70-acre neighborhood.

This year, the Denver City Council approved the necessary rezoning as part of a deal in which Kroenke agreed his sports teams would play at Ball through 2050.

It’s not clear what Kroenke wants to do with his 123-year-old purchase. He owns a handful of buildings that line Auraria Parkway on the arena side, including the real estate for Brooklyn’s, a bar frequented by fans before and after games, according to the Post.

Denver has rezoned the area for Kroenke’s redevelopment plans for 6,000 homes, 780 hotel rooms, shops and restaurants, a recreation center, a child care facility, new transit stops and a 3-acre park, along with increased connectivity to surrounding neighborhoods.

The pedestrian-centered urban retail village could break ground as early as next year, and be completed in 30 years.

Kroenke, worth $16.9 billion, owns 60 million square feet of real estate, including shopping plazas near Walmart stores, according to Forbes. The owner of sports teams that include the Los Angeles Rams, Colorado Rapids and U.K.’s Arsenal soccer club also oversees more than 1.6 million acres of ranches across the U.S. and Canada.

His wife, Ann Walton Kroenke, is a daughter of the late Bud Walton, co-founder of Walmart along with her late uncle Sam Walton.

— Dana Bartholomew