The 12s have long been celebrated in the Pacific Northwest for their vocal support of the Seattle Seahawks. Could those fans also band together as a collective ownership force?
That’s the vision of Arrived, a Seattle-based tech startup that is typically associated with helping everyday investors gain a stake in rental homes.
After a week in which reports made a sale of the Seahawks seem especially imminent, and just days before the team competes in its fourth Super Bowl, Arrived launched a new initiative to gauge fan interest in participating in the next potential ownership group. Fans can use the website, which is not affiliated with the Seahawks or NFL, to share their hypothetical investment amount and learn more.
The company’s idea is buoyed by a 2024 move by NFL owners that allows private equity funds to buy stakes in teams. Arrived would act as such a fund.
“We built our [home] platform around a $100 minimum investment and making that very accessible. We’d love to do the same with this,” Arrived co-founder and CEO Ryan Frazier told GeekWire.
Arrived would put together a special purpose investment vehicle where it would collect fan investment through its platform and then serve as a single private equity investor in the Seahawks.
Frazier pictures bringing together 100,000 or more fans to help Arrived’s fund get closer to a stake of between 3% and 10% — especially considering rising franchise values and the expectation that the Seahawks could fetch as much as $8 billion.
“These teams’ valuations are so high, there’s so few people that can actually step up and acquire these teams,” Frazier said. “I really see this model working well where there’s a lead owner and then other minority investors that can help provide a more stable capital base.”
Frazier has been aware for years of the wishes of late Seahawks owner and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen when it comes to selling the team, as has been done with other Allen assets. But reports from ESPN and The Wall Street Journal last weekend claimed that a sale could happen sooner rather than later. Allen’s estate, chaired his sister Jody Allen, denied that a sale would be put in motion soon after Super Bowl LX.
“I think we definitely felt the sense of urgency this week with some of the news breaking about the imminent potential for sale,” Frazier said. “Seeing Jody Allen speaking to how she thinks about the importance of the team to the fans of the city, we felt like maybe this is something that she would be supportive of as well.”
Although a different model, the NFL’s Green Bay Packers are the only major professional sports team in the U.S. owned by the community rather than a single billionaire or corporate entity. Established as a publicly held, non-profit corporation in 1923, the team is currently owned by over 538,000 shareholders who collectively hold more than 5 million shares. The shares do not pay dividends, cannot be traded for profit, and provide no equity interest.
Private equity owners that take stakes in NFL franchises aren’t allowed to have voting power. NFL.com columnist Judy Battista noted in 2024 that “it is not going to be like flipping real estate.”
“We’d want the shares to be participating in appreciation alongside other shareholders,” Frazier said. “We see this as an equity stake and getting exposure to value growth.”
Three teams — the Bills, Dolphins and Chargers — have added private equity investors so far.
Frazier said it’s inevitable that the model will spread as team valuations continue to grow across sports leagues and there’s a greater need for minority investors. If the plan with the Seahawks doesn’t pan out, he can see Arrived trying it elsewhere.
Frazier, who came to Seattle from Arkansas in 2014, and Arrived co-founder Alejandro Chouza, who came from Mexico around 2010, both moved during a surge in success and popularity for the Seahawks. Like homegrown and transplant 12s across the city and region, they’ve become obsessive fans, and they want to know what it feels like to have even a fraction of a stake in owning the team.
“You see these people, we bleed in and out every day for these teams, because it’s so exciting,” Chouza said. “There would be nothing better, even if it’s 50 bucks, if I had a tiny sliver, and my son had a tiny sliver of a team — that’s priceless.”
Founded in 2019, Arrived (formerly Arrived Homes) lets people buy fractional shares of single-family rental homes and vacation rentals for as little as $100. It’s pitched as an alternative way to gain exposure to real estate without taking on a full mortgage or managing a property.
The company identifies and acquires rental properties, then handles financing, renovations, property management and tenant relationships. Investors can buy shares in individual homes or pooled funds through the Arrived website. They earn quarterly dividends from rent plus a share of any appreciation when the property is sold after a multi-year holding period.
Nearly 1 million registered investors have invested more than $375 million on the Arrived platform. The company says it has distributed more than $63 million and funded more than 550 properties across 65 markets in the U.S.
Arrived raised $27 million in new funding last November and $25 million in a Series A round in 2022. The company, which employs 51, declined to share its current valuation.
The startup’s leadership includes Frazier (formerly with Simply Measured and Sprout Social); Chouza, the COO (Oyo and Uber); and CTO Kenny Cason (Simply Measured).
Investors include Neo, Forerunner Ventures, Bezos Expeditions, Core, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, Match Group CEO Spencer Rascoff, and Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi.
Previously:
- When the Seattle Seahawks sell, will any tech execs step up for the 12s?
- Inside the ‘Stranger Things’ house that a Seattle real estate startup bought and turned into an Airbnb
