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Raiders purchase 62-acre site for Las Vegas stadium

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Raiders purchase 62-acre site for Las Vegas stadium

The Oakland Raiders National Football League (NFL) team has completed the purchase of a 62-acre site for their future stadium in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Las Vegas Journal Review reports that the site, located just to the west of the Mandalay Bay resort, cost $77.5 million to acquire, roughly 25 percent cheaper than had been originally anticipated.

Site acquisition will allow the team—whose move to Las Vegas was approved in March by NFL team owners—to continue to pursue construction of their new $1.9 billion Manica Architecture-designed complex. The stadium design was repurposed and adapted to the Las Vegas climate from an earlier bid by the Raiders to move to Los Angeles. The 65,000-seat stadium will be located adjacent to Interstate-15 and will be connected to the city’s expanding monorail system once it is built out to Mandalay Bay in the coming years. In its current form the stadium’s design includes an active facade with sliding panels that can open and shut depending on the weather.

The real estate purchase also came with a shift in financials for the stadium proposal with billionaire Sheldon Adelson, one of the main backers of the relocation scheme, withdrawing his $650 million investment in the venture. Instead, the developers for the project have secured a $650 million loan from Bank of America that will be used to round-out the financial package for the project.

The Raiders’s move comes after emotionally-fraught negotiations with Oakland city leaders and institutions fell through. Officials there that sought to keep the team in the Bay Area by reworking the team’s existing stadium which is currently shared with the Oakland Athletics baseball team. The future of that plan—and the Oakland-Alemeda Stadium, the last major stadium shared by major league football and baseball franchises in the country—is still up in the air.

The Raiders will continue to play at in Oakland stadium through the 2019 season and are expected to move into their new stadium in Las Vegas for the 2020 NFL season.

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