Women's Hockey Boom Could Fuel A Real Estate Power Play — But More Capital Needs To Hit The Ice

Girls hockey is so popular in the U.S. today that Hollywood has jumped on the bandwagon: The sport was a focal point of the 2024 Pixar hit Inside Out 2, a $1.7B box-office smash that became the highest-grossing animated film of all time, scoring an Oscar nomination for best animated feature to boot. 

Yet the sport’s longest legacy might not be on the silver screen, but on surging ice rink real estate — if capital can keep up.

Interest in girls and women's ice hockey, including the formation of the Professional Women’s Hockey League in 2023, is grabbing the attention of developers and investors.

Real dollars are beginning to glide into rink development, particularly as the popularity of the sport catches fire among young American girls, who are beginning to outpace their counterparts in Canada. But high construction and operating costs could keep would-be stakeholders away, and municipalities or professional teams may need to help fill the financing gap.

“There's so much room for growth,” said Jessie Thompson, senior manager of youth hockey development for the Washington Capitals. “And I think that's where the ice time can't keep up.”

The total number of youth hockey players grew to 389,820 in the 2023-24 season, and the number of female players hit an all-time high of 93,610 in 2023-24, according to USA Hockey.

That demand growth has led to an uptick in the construction of new indoor ice hockey rinks in North America, a sector expected to grow by about $500M over the next six years, according to Persistence Market Research. Rink development sat at $1.8B in 2024 and is predicted to grow to $2.3B by 2031, an almost 28% increase.

The size and scope of developments can vary significantly, but the developers and investors working on these deals are eager to fill the rink-sized holes they see in their markets.

The boom is more pronounced in certain areas. The total number of registered girls hockey players within the Potomac Valley Amateur Hockey Association in the Delaware-Maryland-Virginia region more than doubled from 821 in the 2003-04 season to 2,242 in 2023-24, a 173% change.

In Des Moines, Iowa, Abbell Associates CEO Liz Holland is working on redeveloping the Merle Hay Mall, which at its peak was 1.2M SF with four large anchor tenants. As part of the redevelopment, Holland is building a 3,500-seat multi-use arena with hockey as its base use. 

The arena will be the home of the Drake University Bulldogs hockey program as well as a couple of soccer teams. Other organizations have also expressed interest in ice time, and youth sports that could include girls leagues is a key demand driver. Holland also said she’s keeping her eye on potential PWHL expansion plans, hoping the arena in Des Moines could be a good spot for a new team.

“What we saw in Covid is that the demand for these youth sports experiences for kids now is really unstoppable, and particularly in a market where you don't have a professional-level sports team yet,” Holland said. 

“You certainly see it in the demand for ice time around the Des Moines market.”

Elsewhere in the Midwest, Nicholas & Associates is building a two-sheet, $34.5M facility in the Chicago suburb of Rosemont for youth leagues, including the Chicago Mission girls hockey teams, as well as adult leagues, figure skating and practice time for the Chicago Wolves. The facility is set to open in August.

Colin Van Hauter, director of facilities for Spectate Group, said the reasoning behind the move is simple: more rinks mean more ice time and more room for local programs to grow. 

The increased interest in hockey has created a shortage of prime-time ice slots, or availability from 4 p.m. to 10 p.m., when younger kids are off of school, Van Hauter said. That has been the motivating factor for new facility development across the U.S.

“Clearly, there's a demand for it,” Van Hauter said. “For us, it's really just keeping an eye on the metrics and making sure that as the sport continues to grow, that we're working right alongside the sport to continue to grow our operation too.” 

More developers might be eager to jump into the fray if not for the significant financial hurdles that accompany rink development. 

While the Rosemont facility carries a relatively lower $34.5M price tag, many new multisheet ice facilities cost between $90M to $120M to build, said Ryan Sheridan, a project manager at Hunden Partners who works on sports development projects. Sheridan is currently working on four multisheet facilities and said the uptick in construction costs in the wake of the pandemic has made the facilities “ridiculously expensive to build.” 

Some municipalities utilize existing hotel, sales or food and beverage taxes to raise money to help fund these facilities, Sheridan said. Typically, that additional tax revenue is used for the financing costs associated with the projects, and operating costs can come from different financing buckets. 

Still, for certain private partners, the return on investment isn't going to be as strong as other asset classes, so interest is limited, Sheridan said. That's why some NHL teams are contributing significant equity to the capital stack to make it viable to plow forward, he said. 

“These NHL organizations are putting more equity into these facilities and offering to be the operator of them because they might lose some money on the operations of the facility, but they're using this to grow their fan base and to grow the knowledge of the game,” Sheridan said. 

The St. Louis Blues opened the Centene Community Ice Center in Maryland Heights, Missouri, in September 2019, a practice facility with four sheets of ice that includes spaces for public skating and cost $84M to build. The Chicago Blackhawks are underway on a $65M expansion of its training facility, which is set to add two new ice rinks and open in 2026. 

Operating costs can be a significant expense, too, as owners must factor in costs like refrigeration and dehumidification equipment that aren't needed at other sporting facilities, Van Hauter said. This could also include backup systems that provide redundancies in the case of equipment failure.

All that equipment, and maintaining it, can be pricey. 

“The initial investment could be sticker shock to certain people for certain pieces of equipment, but I'm a firm believer that if you do spend that money upfront, that you're not going to have to spend it down the road,” Van Hauter said.  

NHL teams aren’t just putting money behind facility development. Some, like the Washington Capitals, are investing in programs to bring women and girls into the game.

Thompson said the team has worked to increase access to hockey for women and girls in the Washington, D.C., area through the All Caps All Her initiative. One of the major ways it does that is through ball hockey, which starts participants off the ice to eventually transition into ice hockey.

To date, the Capitals have refurbished or built 14 outdoor ball/inline hockey rinks across Virginia, Maryland, D.C. and West Virginia to further encourage participation in hockey. They have also partnered with USA Hockey for a DMV Girls Try Ice Hockey for Free event.

The 2024 version featuring 20 area rinks saw more than 500 girls participate in one day.

“[Growth has] been on a large scale, astronomical, and I think there's so many factors that go into that,” Thompson said. “From a more granular scale, specifically to our area, it's just been really incredible to see the interest in hockey from age 4 to age 64 for women and girls.”