When the Atlanta Dream changed hands in 2021, the whole franchise went for somewhere between $7 million and $10 million, and Renee Montgomery was part of the group that bought it. The team is now valued at $280 million.
Montgomery is the Dream’s co-owner and vice president, and she is the first former WNBA player to hold both of those jobs at a league team.
She knew the building from the inside. The Dream drafted her fourth overall in 2009 out of UConn. She played 364 games across four teams, won two championships and retired in 2021, the same year the sale went through. “I bought a home in Georgia nine years ago and I retired as a member of the Atlanta Dream,” she said.
What she bought into was a team somebody else had been willing to let go for under $10 million. The investment group she joined is led by real estate investor Larry Gottesdiener, and Suzanne Abair, president of Northland Investment Corp., is part of it. Montgomery’s own read on it is four words long. “It’s a tremendous investment,” she said.
Getting from one side of that purchase to the other was not a formality. “It’s been educational to say the least because coming from the locker room to the boardroom,” she said. What the group was looking at, by her account, was not a balance sheet. “We saw the potential,” she said. “We saw like the city is a character in itself.”
The valuation has since gone from under $10 million to $280 million. The Dream added Angel Reese in April. For Game 3 of the Finals the team sold out State Farm Arena, all 17,000 seats, and Montgomery described that as a decision about who gets to be in the room. “It was more so about allowing and having more people experience the finals and it was for the city of Atlanta,” she said.
The figure worth sitting with is not $280 million on its own. It is the gap between $280 million and the under $10 million somebody was prepared to accept five years ago, and the fact that one of the people who put money on the other side of that gap had just finished playing in the league.
