Amusement Park Values

[coaster57]

Being a fan of RCT, running an amusement park has seemed appealing to me (eventhough I am very aware it is completely unrealistic.) Despite it being nearly impossible, how much money would I need to build/buy an amusement park on the scale of Indiana Beach or Holidayworld? For a cheaper alternative, how much money would one need to put up to attract enough investments? Thanks for the answers because I know this post may seem a tad silly.

[jarmor]

Would you say getting those type parks in their current state since they both have been running for years and didn't start out with what they have now. I would first take a look at how much the rides cost in each park.

[canadianparkfan]

Just guessing. For rides, lets just say you wanted to start with a ride lineup the size of you're average carnival and build from there on, I would say you'd need maybe $100-150 million (all costs, not just rides). Not sure how accurate that is, like I said, just rough estimating based on how much I know rides cost and how much it'd probably cost per employee, then factoring in a few extra dollars for stuff like buying the land/insurance/permits to run park etc.

[Fooz]

IOA was $1,000,000,000, right? Not including the cost of the land.

[ejot]

There is an industry rule of thumb for this. You design a park with an anticipated number of first year guests in mind. Capacities and quantities of rides and other attractions in your proposed park dictate this (of course your population center must support it as well). Now multiply that number by 100 ... that's your ballpark for initial investment required, in USD.

 

So if you wanted to open a park at the scale of Indiana Beach or Holiday World, from "nothing", you might expect to need to invest something like $75million or $100million, respectively. Of course, with those particular examples, they were not developed in that fashion. "Rome wasn't built in a day" kinda thing. They started very small and grew.

 

In all actuality, different projects have different details, and rules of thumb are just rules of thumb. That said, it has been shown to be statistically accurate on the average. There is a lot of interesting info here. <

Source in post body.

[FSUFanChris]

Is Hard Rock Park the last big investment park to start from scratch in the US? That one cost $400,000,000 if I recall.

[ZeroGravity55]

^ Yes. I don't think any of these announced parks that are supposed to be built in Texas will ever come to life. Hard Rock Park had the right funding and the ride idea, they just chose the wrong location. Had they built it in Houston, the park may have had some legs to stand on.