SunTrust Park is 50 percent built and the adjacent mixed-use development approximately 75 percent “leased or committed,” the CEO of Braves owner Liberty Media said today.
The Braves are scheduled to move into their new Cobb County stadium in April 2017.
Liberty Media CEO Greg Maffei, in a conference call with Wall Street analysts, said the Braves closed on $207 million in financing for the mixed-use development in December.
He also touched briefly on the state of the team.
“Looking at the operating performance and prospects for the team, we have dramatically strengthened the farm system,” Maffei said. “And it’s generally ranked No. 1 by most pundits.”
Maffei said a Liberty Media stockholders meeting has been scheduled for April 11 to vote on Liberty's plan — announced late last year — to issue three tracking stocks, including one tied to the Braves' economic performance separate from the rest of the Colorado-based conglomerate.
“We should complete the restructuring within a few days thereafter,” Liberty Media chief financial officer Chris Shean added.
The plan would make the Braves one of the few sports franchises in the world with its own publicly traded stock.
Maffei was asked on the call how investors should go about valuing the Braves and how Liberty Media did so when it acquired the team in 2007.
“These are, like, almost mystical questions, evaluating baseball teams,” Maffei said. “We certainly looked at some comps (comparisons) on where things had traded when we bought the team. And remembering that we paid something like just under $450 million, (it) looks like a pretty attractive transaction on the surface. But when you dig a little deeper, remembering we had something like $300 million in tax savings on how we executed the transaction, it looks a lot more attractive.”
Forbes magazine, in its annual valuation of Major League Baseball teams last year, estimated the Braves’ value at $1.15 billion.
Maffei noted that teams have tended to sell for between three and five times annual revenue. The Braves had revenue of $250 million in 2014, Liberty previously disclosed.
“Most people think this is one of the better run teams, one of the more financially tightly run teams,” Maffei said. “And there are quite a lot of other assets that baseball teams own, like proportionate shares of MLBAM (MLB Advanced Media).
“So there are a lot of ways to think about it, but we’ll see how it trades (on the stock market).”
Maffei also suggested the Braves have long-term financial upside when their local television deal expires in 2027.
“We have relatively unattractive (local TV) contracts we inherited when we bought the team that were very long-lived,” he said. “They have been made more attractive but are still not what I would consider a market rate, so we probably have more upside than most franchises.”
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