(KRON) -- The people working to purchase the Oakland Coliseum site say they are on track to close the deal before the end of the year.
The African American Sports and Entertainment Group, along with their financial partner Loop Capital, hopes to turn the 112-acre site into a sports and entertainment complex as well as bring housing and jobs to the area.
“It’s a business endeavor, but it's a passion project. It's really to uplift the community and the surrounding communities,” said Bill Duffy with The African American Sports and Entertainment Group.
To do that, they must complete the purchase of the 50% stakes in the property owned by both the City of Oakland and the County of Alameda.
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OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA - SEPTEMBER 19: Aerial view of the Oakland Arena and Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum on September 19, 2024 in Oakland, California. (Photo by Kirby Lee/Getty Images)
“We're all committed to getting this done by 12/31, and as we sit here today, the pieces are in place to actually get us there,” said Jim Reynolds, the CEO of Loop Capital. “We're going to change lives. We're going to put housing there, economic vibrancy there, (and) grow the city's GDP there. But all that is also going to involve business growth, revenue growth, profit … returns for the investors' growth. All those things actually go together."
Reynolds and Duffy spoke to KRON4 along with Ray Bobbitt, the founder of The African American Sports and Entertainment Group.
“We are definitely in position to take on the financial responsibility of the site, and so part of our due diligence is to go through and forensically look at every single cost,” Bobbitt said.
Bobbitt says his group is meeting weekly with both the city and county to get that examination done.
Once the deal is complete, Phase 1 will be to sell the arena to music mogul Irving Azoff’s Oak View Group for $100 million and get the venue refurbished.
The Coliseum itself is a well-known money loser, so its future hasn’t been decided, but Reynolds says bringing sports to Oakland will definitely be part of the project
“When you couple what we're going to do with sports teams, along with what OVG is going to do to the arena in and around that, bringing people to there, it's going to be an amazingly attractive venue to attract crowds, to actually feed revenues to businesses, to drive hotel growth,” Reynolds said. “All those things are really key beneficiaries of successfully building out a sports and entertainment district in your area.”
