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Stan Kroenke owns two beloved, powerhouse professional sports teams in Denver and has more than $21 billion to his name. Now, after a mammoth land deal in New Mexico, he holds the title of largest private landowner in the United States.
Kroenke, a Missouri native, owns the Denver Nuggets, Colorado Avalanche, Colorado Rapids and Colorado Mammoth through Kroenke Sports & Entertainment (KSE) and their television broadcaster, Altitude Sports. He’s also credited with bringing football back to Los Angeles by moving the Rams, another team he owns, from his native state. He also owns the Arsenal men’s and women’s soccer teams in England, while his son, Josh Kroenke, is the president of the Nuggets and the Avs.
Kroenke also owns a shit-ton of property. According to the New York Times, he now has almost 2.7 million acres of land in the U.S. and Canada in his portfolio. For comparison, Yellowstone National Park is only 2.2 million acres.
On Tuesday, January 13, the Times reported that Kroenke purchased 937,000 total acres of ranch land across New Mexico in “the largest single land purchase in the U.S. since 2011.” According to the Land Report magazine, the sale was made in December.
In 2025, KSE consolidated ownership around Ball Arena, the home of the Nuggets and Avs, after buying land from its longtime partner Revesco Properties. The area, known as the River Mile development, will be combined with KSE’s existing ownership of 55 acres near Ball Arena to extend a section of downtown along the South Platte River that some residents call “Kroenkeville.”
In September, planners moved forward with a proposed land bridge over Speer Boulevard called “Wynkoop Crossing.” Plans filed with the City of Denver revealed that KSE envisions a mix of hotels, apartments, shops and restaurants immediately outside of Ball Arena and hopes to draw in people from Union Station and even Coors Field.
Kroenke is still early in his Denver redevelopment plans, with some redevelopment around Ball Arena expected to finish in 2032, the organization announced in October. That first phase of redevelopment is expected to set up an entertainment district with hotels, bars and restaurants.
According to the Times, Kroenke’s biggest land deal was in 2016, when he purchased one of the largest contiguous ranches in Texas, the 535,000-acre Waggoner Ranch. He also owns a 124,000-acre ranch in Montana, purchased in 2012, and manages more than a million acres of the Winecup Gamble Ranch in Nevada, where he leases more than 550,000 acres to the federal government for grazing.
