Patriot's racetrack play is an Amazon-adjacency land trade

Greenwood ACRA paid $13 million in 2001 for 255 acres of the Atlantic City Race Course in Mays Landing, betting on an off-track betting facility that never got built, and when the track closed in 2015 the ground sat vacant until the exit came in two pieces. Amazon took 145 acres for a 1.2-million-square-foot warehouse, and Wayne-based Patriot Equities took 110 acres, a purchase the Philadelphia Business Journal reported, and is now planning a mixed-use redevelopment on land the market had stopped pricing.

Neither price was disclosed, which leaves Greenwood's basis as the clearest number in the deal: thirteen million dollars across the full 255 acres works out to roughly $51,000 an acre, a quarter-century-old cost attached to a site whose most productive use only became visible once Amazon arrived. Greenwood's original bet — an off-track betting parlor on land now zoned for housing — never paid off. The 110 acres Patriot owns are the residual of an Amazon land assembly, and their value now runs off the warehouse next door.

Erik Kolar, Patriot's chief executive, first considered buying the entire race course, he said, before learning Amazon had its own interest in the area. Splitting the property let the two parcels be planned in relation to each other as Amazon finalized its spacing needs, which suggests the warehouse's layout quietly fixed what Patriot could build around it.

What Patriot is planning on its 110 acres is a mix of commercial and residential, with the commercial component contingent on a rezoning the coverage does not describe. The residential piece is the one Kolar expects to work either way — housing beside a distribution center of that size can serve a workforce whether or not the commercial half is ever built — and with single-family homes ruled out, the residential program points toward density.

The race course's provenance complicates the plan in ways a cleared parcel would not: built in 1946 at the initiative of Olympic rower John B. Kelly, with Bob Hope and Frank Sinatra among the original owners, it operated for decades before usage waned and the gates closed. Patriot is weighing whether to keep parts of it — the infield pond could become the centerpiece of the residences, Kolar said, and the grandstands are also under consideration, though their future use is murkier.

No timeline for the redevelopment has been given, and Amazon's payment-in-lieu-of-taxes agreement with Hamilton Township for the warehouse set the project's tax terms ahead of construction. Both facts bear on the residual parcel, because Patriot's housing will eventually be priced against a facility whose fiscal treatment is already settled.

Patriot's project is one of two Atlantic City-area land plays working through the approval process. Kushner Companies won approval from the New Jersey Casino Reinvestment Development Authority in the winter for a 180-unit apartment development at Caspian Point, a long-vacant waterfront parcel near the Atlantic City Aquarium and Caspian Avenue Beach that drew objections from residents over traffic and congestion. Both deals run the same playbook: take ground the market ignored for years, attach it to a demand driver, and absorb the neighborhood politics that come with density.

Amazon has been among the more active buyers in the market, with 25 separate deal stories and a run of announcements in the final days of August, most of them about data centers and the land, water and power they consume. The Mays Landing warehouse is a plainer industrial asset, but it does the same work to the ground around it, turning a parcel with no revenue into one with an occupant, a payroll and a traffic count.

This publication has argued that the data center trade has become a county-level contest over land and power, and that national underwriting templates miss the local variables that decide which sites work; Mays Landing is a smaller instance of the same logic, with logistics in place of computing — a 1.2-million-square-foot warehouse pulls payroll and truck traffic into a township, and the acres around it re-rate. Amazon's Louisiana campuses put a $400 million public water system on the company's books alongside an $18 billion investment plan, infrastructure chasing the anchor and land values chasing the infrastructure.

The residential half of Patriot's plan follows an underwriting logic seen before: a 57-unit Capitol Hill building near Amazon's Seattle campus sold at roughly $316,000 a unit on the logic that small, efficient apartments in a supply-constrained submarket would hold rent. Mays Landing is not Capitol Hill, which is what makes the parallel useful — Patriot is underwriting demand from a single employer rather than from a submarket, a thinner reed, and it is the reed this site never had while Greenwood owned it.

The warehouse drives the demand, and the housing is a derivative of it, but with Patriot's basis undisclosed and its timeline unstated, the 110 acres has to be judged on its own logic: a residential-zoned parcel across from a 1.2-million-square-foot distribution center should be worth more than the same parcel without one. If Kolar is right, the residences fill with the payroll that works the distribution floor and a 1946 racetrack gets a second act; if he is wrong, he owns a pond, a set of grandstands, and a view of Amazon's parking lot.