In real estate, the idea of sharing property is hardly an extraordinary thing. Owning a residence or tenure within the same property with other people is a condominium. You have your own place, but you share some broader ownership like entrances, the grounds and the responsibility of managing these commonly owned things.
In the business world, properties have been shared for years, well before acceptance in residential real estate. Business brands have been shared, for a price, way back to the days of Popsicles and Coca Cola bottling.
Sharing sports teams has been done before too. Of all the businesses in the world, the purchase of a sports team is the kind of property purchase that is the most like the purchase of a home. That’s because it is so often driven by emotion.
People become attached to sports teams like they do their very own homes. Sometimes when a sports team moves, fans move right along with it. To this day there are die-hard Brooklyn Dodger baseball fans who continue to follow their team, despite the fact that they moved across the country to Los Angeles in 1958.
Sports teams often have moved because their original market is not big enough. On a few occasions in sports history, larger markets have stepped forward to help a small market sports property survive. An example of that would be the Green Bay Packers football franchise a number of years ago. The town of Green Bay was helped by a big city down the highway when the Packers played a few games in Milwaukee. Today people drive up from Milwaukee to buy tickets in Green Bay. They have an emotional bond with this out of town but close team.
Today in the Golden Horseshoe Area, a similar challenge exists for the Buffalo Bills NFL football team. They play in the relatively small market of Buffalo and could use a bit of help in terms of support from the big city of Toronto up the road.
Rogers Communications jumped on the opportunity to get the Buffalo Bills to play a few games in Toronto – for several million dollars, of course. But the games in Toronto have not been successful. Tickets have gone unsold. Instead of gratitude from the folks in Buffalo, there is resentment. Folks in Toronto are not buying into the idea of sharing the property of the Buffalo Bills.
There isn’t an emotional attachment to the Buffalo Bills from the people in Toronto. There is a perceived arrogance with the whole concept rolled out by Rogers. It looks too much like a money grab instead of a shared ownership with all parties. People don’t buy that kind of real estate and they don’t buy tickets for those kinds of games.
Rogers can’t figure out what’s wrong. I believe the answer to closing this deal is the same as closing a house. Rogers should approach this like a condominium, where you own your part but you have to share common ownership and interest.
The only way to do that is to truly share. Rogers owns the Blue Jays but they can’t keep that team all to themselves and expect others share to what they have with them. People in Buffalo would love to see a few Blue Jay games in their city. Sharing the Blue Jays would go a long way to building an emotional bond between these two cities. It would mean great success for both the Bills and the Blue Jays.
Buffalo has a major league-ready baseball stadium. It was built in 1988 (ironically one year before the SkyDome) in a bid to get a major league baseball team for Buffalo, but they were passed over for other locations.
For just a few games, the Buffalo Blue Jays would work. They would be sellouts and a huge success. For the Buffalo Bills, the Toronto Blue Jays and Rogers Communications, it would be like buying a home.
They can’t go wrong.
Heino Molls is publisher of REM. Email [email protected].
