Pontiac Silverdome to meet wrecking ball

Six months after hitting the market with a $29 million price tag, the Pontiac Silverdome is out of time.

The property's owner has shifted strategies and is now preparing to tear down the empty and battered 40-year-old stadium next year in the belief that the 127-acre site would be more marketable without the Silverdome than with it.

"It is going to come down," said Kristie King, a Southfield-based broker with CBRE, which is marketing the Silverdome property for its private owner, the Triple Investment Group. "We will probably start the demolition process in the spring."

About a dozen potential buyers have toured the Silverdome since June, but the prohibitively high costs to renovating the stadium proved a major obstacle to striking a deal. The Silverdome's inflatable roof, damaged in a 2013 winter storm, is now completely gone and its canvas shreds lie strewn across the ground and the stadium's 80,300 seats.

"Once the roof came down and the elements got to it, it just deteriorated too rapidly," said Robert Mihelich, first vice president with CBRE.

The goal of demolition is to make the land more attractive for future redevelopment, purchase or lease. A conceptual plan to be presented tonight to Pontiac City Council shows potential commercial, industrial, retail and residential development on the Silverdome property -- and no more Silverdome.

The plan's map depicts four light industrial buildings, a large corporate headquarters, a retail/entertainment complex, an extended-stay hotel, fast-casual restaurants and short-term corporate housing. One of the light industrial buildings would be built without a committed occupant in mind; the others could be constructed later based on demand.

"As we marketed (the site) over the past six months, the market told us what they want," Mihelich said.

Opened in 1975, the Silverdome has been used only sporadically since 2002, when the Detroit Lions NFL team moved to the new Ford Field in downtown Detroit.

Triple Investment Group, run by the family of Toronto developer Andreas Apostolopoulos, bought the Silverdome in 2009 at auction from the city of Pontiac for $583,000. The group also owns the Penobscot Building in downtown Detroit.

Triple Investment will be paying the bill for the Silverdome's demolition, Mihelich said, and the razing will likely take four to six months.

"We are preparing it to be a shovel-ready development project," he said. "It's one of the last large tracts of land left in the county on the highway."

Silverdome scrap and memorabilia ranging from scoreboards and seats to urinals and copper wiring were cleared out of the stadium last year in an auction that netted about $500,000. Small outdoor portions of the property's 127 acres are currently leased to a soccer league and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles.

The Silverdome site's conceptual redevelopment plan will be on display Friday at Oakland County’s One Stop Ready Community Showcase from 8 a.m. to 10 a.m. at the Oakland County Executive Office Building Conference Center, 2100 Pontiac Lake Road in Waterford.

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