No Bidders Show Up at Auction of Oakland Raiders Facility

A publicly owned former Oakland Raiders headquarters and training facility in Alameda hit the auction block last summer with a minimum bid of $35.8 million — and got no takers.

Now Alameda County and the City of Oakland, which own the 16-acre property at 1150-1220 Harbor Bay Parkway on Bay Farm Island, are pondering what to do, the San Jose Mercury News reported.

The joint landlords will only say they’re “discussing next steps.”

Before the auction, Oakland had planned to devote the proceeds from the 100,600-square-foot headquarters and 18,400-square-foot training facility to shore up its $360 million budget deficit.

The county aimed to funnel the proceeds into a surplus property development trust.

The East Bay property, used by the Raiders until they left for Las Vegas in early 2020, includes soccer fields and a large parking lot.

It had been used by a local soccer club, which got the boot ahead of the planned sale. It was also popular with European soccer clubs, which used it for training.

The county, according to state surplus land law, first offered the property to affordable housing developers in early 2021. The land, zoned for commercial manufacturing or light industrial, sits across the street from the Harbor Bay Business Park, a life science hub.

But the once-booming real estate market for life sciences has cooled. And potential bidders in the Bay Area aren’t interested in sports or industrial properties, according to the Mercury News.

They want housing.

“It would be a very difficult proposition to get your money back if you bought it and leased it out,” Spencer Hsu, a Bay Area real estate expert, told the Mercury News. “The fact is, if they can’t sell as commercial, they should really explore the opportunity to do so as residential.”

— Dana Bartholomew