Question of the Day - 19 March 2021

[Editor's Note: This answer is written by our own David McKee.)

Oh, yes. Or at least probably.

VICI Properties owns 28 casinos, the preponderance of which are Caesars/Horseshoe/Harrah’s-branded. Since Caesars Entertainment is headquartered just a stone’s throw from the Venetian/Palazzo, it’s more than likely that Caesars CEO Tom Reeg will be calling the shots for the soon-to-be-former Las Vegas Sands megaresorts. That could mean the advent of certain player-unfriendly moves that are beyond the scope of this answer, but it will also almost certainly impact the current Sands employees, whose jobs and benefits were protected zealously while Sheldon Adelson was alive and who might start want to updating their resumés.

“Far and away it’s a great deal for VICI, which is adding two more marquee Strip resorts to an already glittering portfolio, encompassing more than 7,000 top-end rooms and suites, 225,000 square feet of gaming space, some of the best dining and shopping in Las Vegas and 2.3 million square feet of prime meetings and exhibitions space, not to mention the MGS Sphere, an 18,000-seat entertainment showplace slated to open in 2023 at a cost of $1.7 billion,” reported James Rutherford in Global Gaming News.

VICI isn’t solely a creature of Caesars, but the alternatives could be worse. It owns two Penn National Gaming casinos (Margaritaville, in Shreveport, and Greektown, in Detroit), but Penn has been aggressively cutting costs of late and doesn’t plan to stop. VICI also owns the underlying real estate of two Century Casinos-branded properties in Missouri, but Century is basically a European operator and its U.S. presence consists of very small casinos. It’s not ready for prime time. The one slim reed of hope is that VICI, through its ownership of Hard Rock Cincinnati, could strike a deal with Hard Rock International to operate "Venelazzo." But we’re not waiting up nights for that to happen.

VICI, incidentally, was one of the prime movers in a dominant trend in contemporary gaming whereby casino companies go ‘"asset light," selling their physical properties to real estate investment trusts (like VICI). The gaming companies then either keep the operating company as part of the deal or buy it back. In the case of Venelazzo, Apollo Management got the operations side of the business, but Apollo isn't an operator, just a venture capital firm, although its assets include Great Canadian Gaming Corporation. And it has a preexisting relationship with Caesars. Which seems to make the folding of the Venetian, Palazzo, and Sands Expo Center into the Roman Empire all but inevitable.