What we learned about the new Falcons stadium this week:
1. PSL sales update: Michael Drake, senior VP and chief revenue officer of Falcons parent company AMB Sports & Entertainment, said at Thursday's media tour of Mercedes-Benz Stadium that the team has "seen a large uptick in sales" since last week's news that prices were being reduced on several thousand personal seat licenses in the upper-level corners.
Current sales figures aren’t available, but the AJC this week obtained the latest available figures from the Georgia World Congress Center Authority through an open-records request.
According to those figures, the Falcons had sold 29,835 seat licenses for $172.3 million through April 30. That included 4,497 club seats sold for $99.6 million and 25,338 non-club seats sold for $72.7 million. In April, 624 seat licenses were sold.
Those figures put the PSL sales at about 46 percent of the non-suite seats in the stadium.
2. Construction update: With a little less than a year remaining before Mercedes-Benz Stadium's scheduled completion date, Falcons executives expressed measured optimism about hitting the June 1, 2017, target.
“We’re pretty confident in our timetable,” Falcons president and CEO Rich McKay said. “June 1 is a good date for us. We’re working pretty confidently towards that date, and we feel very good about it. I would say that we’ve really picked up the pace on steel. You see the steel going up. We’re in a pretty good place.”
Forty percent of the structural steel has been installed for the fixed portion of the roof. The retractable part can’t be installed until the fixed portion is done.
The pre-cast concrete for the middle and upper seating bowls is in place. The lower bowl can’t be built until multiple cranes, temporary shoring towers and steel can be moved off the field level.
See full story from the stadium tour. And see photo gallery.
3. Cost update: McKay elaborated on the rising cost of Mercedes-Benz Stadium, now at $1.5 billion after about $200 million in change orders, as reported by the AJC last week.
“Those overruns were principally driven by the complexity of design, the amount of steel involved, the number of cranes involved to make sure that we get the stadium up on time,” McKay said.
4. And a few numbers from the stadium tour: The video boards will have a total of 50 million LED lights. … The stadium will have 25 escalators and 20 elevators, up from 12 and nine, respectively, in the Georgia Dome. … There will be more than 2,000 TVs in the building.
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