Former Oakland Raiders HQ Auction Draws 65 Bidders

The Oakland Athletics baseball team soon will follow the Oakland Raiders to Las Vegas, but more than four years after the NFL franchise left the city, Oakland finally is getting around to disposing of some real estate the football team left behind.

At least 65 prospective bidders have registered to participate in an Alameda County auction of the former Oakland Raiders headquarters, a 100K SF building at 1220 Harbor Bay Parkway with an adjacent 18K SF training facility.

Alameda County, which jointly owns the 17-acre property with the city of Oakland, set a minimum bid of $35.8M when it voted last fall to auction off the property. The city and the county are planning to split the proceeds, with Alameda County allocating its share to a surplus property development trust.

According to the auction rules, all written bids were due on Wednesday. A live auction-during which auctioneers will accept oral bids at least 5% higher than the highest received written bid-is scheduled to take place on July 10, according to a report in the San Francisco Business Times.

Last fall, when it set up the auction, Alameda County hired Dublin-based DCG Strategies to market the property. The former Raiders HQ is in proximity to Alameda’s Harbor Bay Business Park, which is zoned for commercial manufacturing and currently is occupied by several life science companies. Several developers reportedly are considering acquiring the site for conversion to a life science facility, or for redevelopment as a ground-up life science facility, the Business Times reported.

The Raiders moved their NFL franchise-which started in Oakland as an original AFL franchise in 1960 (seven years before the two football leagues merged) and then moved to Los Angeles in 1981 before moving back to Oakland in 1995-before moving to Las Vegas in 2019.

Last month, Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo signed a bill guaranteeing the Athletics $380M in public funds for a new baseball stadium on the Vegas Strip, clearing the way for Oakland’s MLB franchise to move to Sin City.

The Athletics are planning to build a $1.5B stadium with a retractable roof on the current site of the Tropicana Las Vegas hotel-casino. The new stadium is scheduled to open in 2028, pending an expected approval from at least 23 of the 29 MLB team owners.

Now that the A’s have ended their decades-long negotiations with the city and made it clear they’re moving to Nevada, they want to get out town as fast as they can.

The franchise reportedly has told MLB it wants to play the 2025-2027 baseball seasons in minor league ballparks in Las Vegas and Reno that currently are home to Class AAA teams, a move that may require approval from the MLB Players Association.

Now that Vegas suddenly has a bounty of pro teams, it’s already working on accumulating the hardware that comes with sports success: last month, the Las Vegas Golden Knights just brought home the Stanley Cup, the first NHL expansion franchise to put its name on the trophy in its first six years of existence.