Updated 2026 · Based on median market data for Green Bay, WI
Green Bay is the smallest city in North America with a major professional sports franchise, and the Green Bay Packers are not just a team — they are the only publicly-owned, community-held franchise in the NFL, and have been since 1923. Lambeau Field, with its seventy-eight thousand seats, would be a meaningful chunk of any city's economic footprint, but in a metro of three hundred thousand it is structural. Game days generate roughly thirty million dollars of regional economic activity per home weekend. Pre-season, regular season, and playoff weekends combined run eight to ten weekends per year of full-saturation hotel-and-rental demand. The Packers organization itself employs over five hundred. The Titletown District redevelopment west of Lambeau has brought a hotel, restaurants, residential, and a public plaza that has reshaped the immediate surroundings. But Green Bay is also a paper-industry town, a shipping town, and a Fox River Valley anchor city with its own non-Packers economy. Median home prices around $330,000, rents at $1,100, cap rate at 1.10%, one-percent ratio at 0.33%, GRM of 25, and price-to-income of 6.573705179282869 reflect a market that has been quietly affordable for a long time while sitting on top of an unusually deep employment base.
Procter & Gamble's Green Bay operation produces Charmin and Bounty — the toilet paper and paper towel categories that anchored consumer demand through the entire COVID-era hoarding cycle — at a massive plant employing close to three thousand. Georgia-Pacific operates the Day Street and Broadway mills with another two thousand employees. Schreiber Foods, the largest privately-held cheese company in the world, is headquartered in Green Bay with over a thousand local employees in addition to its global workforce. Schneider National, the trucking-and-logistics company that runs the iconic orange tractor-trailers, is headquartered here with roughly two thousand local employees. Humana Health (formerly Wisconsin Physicians Service operations), American Foods Group, and a constellation of paper-converting, packaging, and food-processing operations together form an industrial base that is meaningfully larger than what a metro this size would normally support. The paper industry as a whole is in long-run secular decline — the rise of digital substitution and e-commerce-driven packaging shifts has reshaped the category over twenty years — but the Charmin-Bounty consumer tissue category remains structurally stable because nobody has yet figured out a digital substitute for toilet paper. Underwrite paper-industry employment as flat-to-slowly-declining over the next twenty years, not as growing, but also not as collapsing. The Schneider trucking and Schreiber cheese franchises are more clearly growing and have been adding white-collar jobs in the metro for a decade.
Astor Park is the historic affluent neighborhood east of the Fox River, with turn-of-the-century mansions, the Astor Hotel, and a tenant profile that is overwhelmingly owner-occupied with limited rental opportunity. When rentals do appear here they go to senior professionals, surgeons, and Packers organization personnel. Allouez to the south is the older established suburb, with 1940s-1960s housing stock, walkable to the river, and a stable middle-class-to-affluent owner base. De Pere, technically a separate city to the south, is the upscale suburb of Green Bay — St. Norbert College, walkable downtown, restaurants, and the cleanest single-family rental opportunities in the metro. Howard to the northwest and Suamico further north are the newer-build subdivision suburbs targeting families, with strong school districts (notably Howard-Suamico) and steady appreciation. On the west side near Lambeau, the immediate neighborhoods around the stadium have mixed older housing stock — modest single-families that have become game-day STR candidates. The downtown core, particularly along the Fox River and the redeveloped CityDeck, has a small but growing condo and apartment market targeting younger professionals at Schreiber, Schneider, and Bellin Health. Tenant quality varies meaningfully by neighborhood and rent-per-square-foot follows the school district lines more than the city limits.
A two-bedroom house within walking distance of Lambeau Field — particularly in the Stadium District west of Oneida Street — can rent for $440 to $1,320 per game weekend during the season. Big games against the Bears, Vikings, and Cowboys can hit triple those numbers. Playoff weekends can be transformative for revenue. The trap is the math. Eight or nine home weekends per year plus maybe one preseason and one playoff gets you twelve weekends maximum, and the rest of the year you are competing with a normal Green Bay rental market that has cap rates of 1.10% and rents of $1,100. Underwriting a property primarily as game-day STR means assuming you can capture full year-round occupancy at premium rates, which the data does not support outside of football weekends. The smarter play is using game-day rentals as a yield overlay on top of a primary long-term lease — tenant moves out for the weekend, you split the premium with them, everybody wins. Several Green Bay management companies have built their entire operating model around exactly this hybrid lease structure. The pure game-day STR house — sitting empty Monday through Friday all winter — does not pencil unless you bought the property in 1995. Newer entrants need to integrate the Packers calendar into a year-round operating plan, not stake the entire deal on it.
Bellin Health, headquartered in Green Bay, runs the flagship hospital downtown and an integrated regional clinic network employing over four thousand. Aurora BayCare Medical Center (now Advocate Aurora-Atrium merged into Atrium Health) operates the major hospital on the east side with another two thousand-plus employees. HSHS St. Vincent Hospital adds a third major medical campus. Together the Green Bay metro has hospital employment north of seven thousand, with a steady pipeline of residents, nurses, traveling clinicians, and allied health professionals who function as the most reliable rental cohort in the market. They concentrate in Allouez near Bellin, on the east side near Aurora BayCare, and in De Pere where many physicians and senior staff own. Bellin's recent expansion into ambulatory specialty care and the Aurora-Atrium merger have created additional white-collar tenant flow. The medical-tenant rent premium is real — quality units within a mile of one of the hospital campuses lease faster and at modestly higher rates than similar units further out. If your investment thesis is operational stability and tenant credit quality, anchor your map to the Bellin-or-Aurora catchment.
Schneider National is one of the largest trucking companies in North America with revenues north of five billion dollars, and its headquarters in Green Bay employs roughly two thousand including the executive team, IT, finance, dispatch, and the major intermodal operations. This is a genuine corporate headquarters with the white-collar wage profile that goes with it. The broader Green Bay logistics cluster includes the Port of Green Bay (the only Lake Michigan port in northeast Wisconsin), Schneider Logistics, Paper Transport Inc., and dozens of smaller trucking and freight-forwarding operations. The Port handles roughly two million tons of cargo annually — primarily coal, salt, limestone, petroleum products, and cement — and while it is small by Great Lakes standards, it adds a stable industrial layer to the metro. Bay Industries and the various Fox River Valley packaging and converting operations round out an industrial cluster that is unusually deep for a metro of this size. The investor implication is that Green Bay has a more diversified employer base than its NFL-team-and-paper-mill reputation suggests, and the white-collar Schneider tenant pool in particular is one of the more under-appreciated cohorts in the regional rental market.
St. Norbert College in De Pere is a small, well-regarded private Catholic liberal-arts college with about two thousand students. UW-Green Bay enrolls about ninety-five hundred including the satellite campuses and runs a strong nursing program and a growing professional-studies undergraduate base. Northeast Wisconsin Technical College (NWTC) operates a major campus serving thousands of trade and technical students. Together the metro has roughly fifteen thousand college students, which is meaningful but does not dominate the rental market the way the University of Wisconsin does in Madison or Marquette does in Milwaukee. Most St. Norbert students live on campus or in De Pere. UW-Green Bay's commuter-heavy enrollment means student rental concentration is lower than at a residential flagship. NWTC students often live with families or in working-class neighborhoods scattered throughout the metro. The result is a college-student layer that is real but not market-defining. Investors who specialize in student housing have a meaningful sub-market in De Pere around St. Norbert and in the immediate ring around UW-Green Bay's main campus on Nicolet Drive, but the bulk of the Green Bay rental market is not student-driven. This is a relief compared to operating in a true college-town market — fewer occupancy ordinance complications and lower per-unit turnover.
Green Bay winters are real. The metro averages roughly fifty inches of snow annually, with Lake Michigan lake-effect bands occasionally adding meaningfully more. Sub-zero stretches are routine in January and February. Heating costs for tenants run high — properties with old furnaces, leaky envelopes, or no attic insulation will see tenant complaints and turnover. Investors who upgrade to modern high-efficiency furnaces, double-pane windows, and proper insulation will see real ROI through tenant retention and through lower vacancy in the brutal months. Snow plowing, ice-dam mitigation, and frozen-pipe prevention are not optional — they are line items. Budget twelve hundred to eighteen hundred annually for snow services on a single-family. The unique Lambeau Field game-day pattern means parts of the season are played in genuinely dangerous winter conditions — the famous Ice Bowl was minus-fifteen Fahrenheit — and the game-day STR market reflects this. Tenants traveling to a December Packers game expect heated driveways, plowed walkways, and functional heating. The investor who operates with a serious Wisconsin winter playbook will outperform one who treats this as a generic Midwest market. Insurance also reflects the cold-weather risk profile — frozen pipe claims are common and some carriers exclude or limit pipe coverage if the property is unoccupied for more than thirty days.
The Fox River runs through downtown Green Bay and empties into the Bay of Green Bay just north of the city. The river has been the industrial spine of the metro for two hundred years and the legacy of paper-mill operations along its banks created the most serious EPA-supervised PCB cleanup in Great Lakes history. The Lower Fox River cleanup, ongoing since the early 2000s, has cost over a billion dollars and is largely complete in the main river channel but ongoing in some tributaries and floodplains. The investor takeaway is twofold. First, certain riverfront and former-mill-adjacent parcels carry residual environmental liability and require Phase I and Phase II environmental assessments before purchase. Second, the cleanup has transformed parts of the downtown waterfront — the CityDeck, the Resch Aquatic Center, the new apartment developments along the Fox — into genuinely desirable urban real estate where there used to be industrial backwater. Bay shore properties, particularly along the eastern shore north of the city in places like Suamico and Howard, command waterfront premiums but require flood-zone awareness and dock-and-shoreline maintenance. Lake Michigan tributary streams have meaningful spring flood risk in the lower elevations. Pull flood maps and environmental records before writing offers on anything within a quarter mile of the Fox or the bay shoreline.
Take a representative Allouez purchase — a three-bedroom 1950s ranch in solid B-plus condition bought for $330,000. Twenty-five percent down works to roughly $82,500 cash in plus closing. Rent comes in at $1,100 on a twelve-month lease to a Bellin Health employee household. Property tax at the Brown County effective rate of roughly 1.88% works to $6,204 annually — Wisconsin property taxes are meaningfully higher than Iowa or Minnesota, and Green Bay sits on the high end of Wisconsin metros. Insurance at twelve hundred to fifteen hundred annually. Property management at nine percent of rent is $99 monthly. Maintenance and capex reserves at nine percent to account for the winter envelope load on the structure. Vacancy at the metro citywide 5.50%. NOI lands around $3,630. Cap rate prints at 1.10%. Apply investor-mortgage rates around 7.25 percent on the seventy-five percent leveraged portion and cash-on-cash sits in the mid single digits — modestly positive. Layer on an eight-game-weekend game-day STR overlay during football season at three hundred to five hundred dollars per weekend net of cleaning, and you can boost annual gross by another two-to-four thousand. The total-return profile combines decent yield, modest 2.40% annual appreciation, and the Packers-overlay optionality. This is a steady cash-flow market with NFL-driven upside, not a wealth-building appreciation market.
Green Bay risks span beyond the obvious football-concentration concern. First, the brutal winters and the heating-and-pipe risk that goes with them — frozen-pipe insurance claims are common, snow-plowing costs are real, and properties with poor envelopes will see tenant turnover. Second, the paper-industry secular decline. While Charmin and Bounty tissue is structurally stable, the broader pulp, newsprint, and graphics paper categories are in long-run decline, and any consolidation event at the Green Bay mills would soften local employment meaningfully. Third, the Packers game-day STR concentration trap — eight to ten weekends does not anchor an annual operating model on its own, and investors who buy on that thesis disappoint themselves. Fourth, slow population growth — the metro grows at roughly 0.50% annually and rent growth has run consistent with population growth, not above it. Fifth, the Fox River environmental legacy on specific parcels — Phase I and Phase II environmental assessments are not optional on river-adjacent or former-industrial property. Sixth, Wisconsin's property tax burden — the state is genuinely one of the higher-tax states in the country and Brown County does not break that trend, with effective rates of roughly 1.88% eating into yield in a way that low-tax-state investors do not always anticipate. Seventh, the small-market labor pool. The metro is small enough that recruitment costs for major employers run higher than in a Milwaukee or Madison, and a major employer choosing not to expand here is a real risk over a ten-year hold.
Green Bay is a stable, mid-yield, slow-growth market with an unusually deep employer base for a metro of three hundred thousand and a once-a-year cultural and economic event in the Packers football season that does not appear in any other small-city investment thesis. At a cap rate of 1.10%, one-percent ratio of 0.33%, and price-to-income of 6.573705179282869, the yield numbers are competitive with most Midwest cities and meaningfully cleaner than Madison or Milwaukee. What you are buying is the combination of paper-industry employment durability, Bellin-and-Aurora hospital stability, Schneider corporate-headquarters white-collar tenant flow, and the Packers-and-Lambeau cultural moat that defends the metro against the demographic decline that has hit other Wisconsin small cities. The locals' playbook — own one Allouez or De Pere middle-class single-family for stable yield, own one Howard or Suamico newer-build for family-renter demand, consider one Stadium District property for the game-day STR overlay layered on a normal long-term lease — has worked here through paper-industry cycles and through five Super Bowl appearances. Green Bay rewards operators who understand winter, understand Wisconsin property taxes, and understand that football season is a yield overlay rather than an investment thesis.
Green Bay vs Wisconsin state average and national average across key investment metrics. Green Bay's cap rate is below both benchmarks — deal sourcing is critical here.