'A Transformational Moment': Will The Rise Of Women's Sports Ripple Through Real Estate?

When the National Women’s Soccer League team now known as the Seattle Reign competed in the playoff semifinals in late 2021, all Jen Barnes wanted was to go to a local bar and watch the game. She couldn’t find one that had it playing.

It was a lightbulb moment. About a year later, in December 2022, she opened Rough & Tumble Pub in Seattle, one of the first U.S. sports bars to play men’s and women’s events equally across its 18 screens. The pub was turning a profit within a few months, and this March, it brought in $250K in revenue — proof the concept, now popping up from coast to coast, has legs, Barnes said.

“There's such a sense of joy with the women's sports fan base at a place like Rough & Tumble because you've waited all your life to have a space where you can watch these games together,” she said.

The palpable enthusiasm for spaces like Rough & Tumble is just one sign of a massive cultural shift. Women’s sports have skyrocketed in popularity over the past few years, racking up massive TV ratings, drawing scores of fans and netting significant money from hungry investors. 

And as women’s sports grows, its real estate is primed to grow with it, according to investors and analysts interviewed by Bisnow. This includes the stadiums and practice facilities the teams play and train in, accompanying real estate like hotels and restaurants around such facilities, and venues like Rough & Tumble, all eager to capture a piece of what many predict will be a fast-expanding pie.

A 'Blue Ocean' Of Potential

Real estate is at the tentative beginning of its women’s sports journey. But this year, Deloitte forecasts women’s elite sports will generate about $1.3B in revenue, surpassing the $1B mark for the first time. The consulting firm projects the two most valuable revenue-generating sports will be soccer at $555M and basketball at $354M. 

There is reason for that optimism. DraftKings saw nearly four times as much money wagered on the 2024 NCAA women’s college basketball tournament than the year before. The women’s title game, which featured the South Carolina Gamecocks taking down Caitlin Clark and the Iowa Hawkeyes on their way to an undefeated season, drew a larger TV audience than the men’s championship for the first time ever. 

The potential has some investors seeing green, especially given data indicating women’s sports have a far longer runway than their male counterparts in terms of targeted investment. A 2022 report from the Sports Consultancy called women's sports “the blue ocean,” an unexploited, almost uncontested marketplace in comparison to the mature and overstuffed men's market. The London-based firm expects annual investment growth of 12.5% annually in the space. 

"Sports teams used to just be ... I own a sports team. I got some players. I got some coaches. I got some people to sell tickets and hot dogs and sponsorships, boom, that was the business model. We're in a much different place now," said Kunal Merchant, partner and chief operating officer at Revitate, an investment company that helped acquire the NWSL’s Portland Thorns.

"These are diversified platforms that have multiple business lines underneath them and for many of the leading teams, if not most of the major teams, a real estate vertical is a critical part of being a sports team," Merchant added.

A Development That Could Spawn 'Copycats'

Investor confidence is already bankrolling glitzy stadiums and training facilities for teams across the country. One project, in particular, is poised to test the market.

The Kansas City Current, a team in the NWSL, opened a $117M stadium along the Missouri River in March of this year, making history as the first stadium in the world specifically built for a women’s professional team. Boston Unity Soccer Partners are in the process of renovating the 75-year-old White Stadium in Boston at a cost of over $30M in preparation for the NWSL’s 15th expansion team, set to begin play in 2026. 

A month after the Current opened CPKC Stadium, the team revealed plans for a mixed-use district anchored by the stadium, Berkley Riverfront Park and the Missouri Riverfront.

The team is at the forefront of a movement for women’s clubs to own their stadiums and generate their own revenue, said David Caputo, data scientist at Moody’s Analytics. 

“When other cities and teams see how this development works out and what kind of profits it brings for the team itself, I think there's going to be a lot of teams trying to copycat that whole plan,” Caputo said. 

Included in the riverfront development plan around CPKC Stadium is the Origin Hotel Kansas City, about a 10-minute walk from the pitch. The hotel is set to open later this summer, and the boom in women’s sports and the ability to attract team fans played a major role in site selection, said Karlee Tanel, corporate director of marketing for Tandem Hospitality Group.

“That's going to be a huge part of our business mix,” Tanel said. “Both fans and, we're hoping, locals that want to come in and do a staycation and go to the games.” 

But with only 13 regular season home games per season for each team in the NWSL, all eyes will be on the performance of the stadium and its associated development.

Tanel said it will be key for The Origin to work with companies and organizations during slower periods, hosting conferences and working with local groups to offer negotiated rates. Merchant said he’s seeing an emphasis on multifamily properties as another major anchor for sports districts like the one in Kansas City, creating a consistent draw for area retail and restaurants on the hundreds of days of the year when the team isn’t playing.

Women Leading The Charge

Soccer isn't the only women's sport growing its real estate. A number of WNBA teams are also investing in expensive training facilities. And in both cases, at least some of the newfound enthusiasm for investment in women's sports is being led by women. 

The Seattle Storm opened its $64M training facility in April, funded privately by its all-female ownership group. The 50K SF building will also regularly host community events. The Phoenix Mercury, in collaboration with the NBA’s Phoenix Suns, is developing a $100M project that includes a new business headquarters and 58K SF practice facility for the women’s team. 

The league is also rapidly expanding. The WNBA announced last week it had awarded Toronto an expansion team, which will begin playing in 2026 as the league’s 14th franchise. The Golden State Valkyries, the league’s 13th team and its first expansion franchise since 2008, will play its first season in 2025 in the Chase Center, which also houses the NBA’s Golden State Warriors.  

“The valuations of those clubs are going up,” said Kirsten Sibbit-Johnston, director of consulting at the Sports Consultancy. “There are more women's sport-focused funds and investors, which are largely led by women who feel more confident in the sport.”

The NWSL’s Portland Thorns, a team the sibling duo of Lisa Bhathal Merage and Alex Bhathal acquired for a then-record $63M in January, added five new investors to its ownership group last week, including Merchant, who runs Revitate on behalf of the family. Merchant helped advise the initial acquisition and is one of the new investors. 

But just a few months later, the owners’ record purchase price was outstripped by the $113M sale of the San Diego Wave to the Levine Leichtman family in March, Sportico first reported. 

“Right now you're seeing an incredible, transformational moment in women's sports,” Merchant said. “We've talked a lot of talk for a long time about trying to elevate women's sports and give it the resources and the respect it deserves. It was candidly undercapitalized for a very long time, and some very savvy people who deserve enormous credit saw around the corner of, ‘Wait a minute, there's real opportunity here.’” 

Women-led investment fund The Monarch Collective launched a $100M fund last year with the goal of “investing in women’s sports teams, leagues, and adjacent revenue streams.” Its first investment was in Boston's NWSL expansion team, which includes the White Stadium refurbishment and a new training facility.

Mercury 13, led by sports entrepreneur Victoire Cogevina Reynal, also plans to invest $100M in acquiring women's soccer clubs in Europe and Latin America. The group recently picked up Como Women from Italy’s Serie A. 

“We foresee a bright future for women's football, with Mercury 13's acquisition of Como Women marking a pivotal moment in the sport's evolution,” Cogevina Reynal said in an email to Bisnow. “This move not only underscores the growing recognition of women's football but also signifies a seismic shift in the industry's landscape.”

Caitlin Clark And Caution

It’s impossible to talk about the change in the landscape of women's sports without mentioning the “Caitlin Clark effect.” 

The Iowa Hawkeyes star and Indiana Fever’s No. 1 overall pick in the 2024 WNBA Draft captivated sports fans across the country and generated renewed interest in women’s basketball en route to setting the all-time NCAA record for points scored in a collegiate career — in both men’s and women’s hoops. Sponsors aggressively pursued Clark, with Nike inking her to a lucrative $28M, eight-year shoe contract in April and State Farm, Gatorade and Panini America signing her to endorsement deals before that.

But as fervor surrounding Clark’s rookie season accelerates, multiple experts wondered if the hype was sustainable and warned against overexpansion.

Michael Leeds, a professor of economics at Temple University, said he was exercising caution over the potential boom in women’s sports, as there have been similar moments of excitement surrounding them in the past. The WNBA has had many players billed as game-changers who haven’t quite flipped the narrative, and women’s soccer in the U.S. has seen multiple failed attempts to start up leagues, he said.  

There are reasons to believe that this moment is different from previous years, like the significant increase in TV ratings for women’s basketball, Leeds said. 

But “that potential has been there before,” Leeds said. “Is Caitlin Clark really different? Is she different from Rebecca Lobo? Is she different from Sabrina Ionescu? Is she different from Cheryl Miller, or Ann Donovan? Is women's soccer at a moment that it wasn't at in 1986 or any of the years that they won the Women's World Cup?”

Question marks remain surrounding what it will take for the growth of women’s sports to accelerate, and there is no proven model for sustainability in the area, Sibbit-Johnston said. It takes time to develop dedicated fans, and they won’t become extremely passionate overnight, she said. 

“We'll know there's a tipping point when that audience is not just there for the World Cup or for the big moments, but it's there all the time,” Sibbit-Johnston said. “It's every day. It's every week. It's, ‘I actually want to go and see these players all the time.’”

At Rough & Tumble and similar concepts across the country, that audience is starting to show up.

The Sports Bra in Portland was the first bar dedicated exclusively to women’s sports when it opened in April 2022, just months before Rough & Tumble. Since then, their number has grown, with bars centered around women’s sports opening across the U.S. and Canada, including A Bar of Their Own in Minneapolis and Peaches in Toronto.

“Women's sports is the best place to put your money,” Barnes said. “It is such a high return on investment from a revenue perspective that it's silly not to play women's sports.” 

Two years after Barnes couldn't find a Seattle Reign postseason game on any bar TV in the area, the team was in a 2023 playoff semifinal against the San Diego Wave. Only this time, Rough & Tumble was packed to the gills as the team’s home bar, and there were roughly 40 other bars in western Washington playing the game.

Barnes said it was a huge step in the right direction.

“There are points now with larger games where we can fill up every bar in every restaurant in most of Ballard with our overflow,” Barnes said. “That's a huge signifier out there that not only is this concept working, but it can work for a bunch of places at the same time.”