SLS to get new owner; Boyd outlines strategy

Having failed to reinvent the north end of the Las Vegas Strip as the new place to party heartily, the owners of $415 million SLS Las Vegas are giving up and selling it to a relatively minor player: Meruelo Group. The latter is best known as owner of the Grand Sierra (former MGM Grand) in Reno. Considering the SLS was a flop with locals and relied too much on hipsters, perhaps managerial expertise gleaned in smaller markets will be what the doctor ordered. This will also, we hope, put an end to all the pretension and hype associated with SLS. “The north is the new south” indeed! Get some players first and then we’ll talk. Sitting in less-than-splendid isolation on Sahara Avenue, SLS could seemingly never conceive of a means for customers to take the long walk (or Uber ride) up past a particularly gloomy stretch of the Strip.

Interestingly, Lucky Dragon Casino is also on Sahara and off-Strip, too, but is doing very well by all accounts. Lucky Dragon, however, knew what it wanted to be, who it wanted to go after and how to do it. SLS was in a perpetual identity crisis, hoping for 50% locals play but never making more than a token effort to attract. Also, premising a casino resort on no fewer than three nightclubs might be an idea that would work further south (we say “might”) but combine that with a small, nothing-special casino and Sam Nazarian‘s “vision” was just so much cocaine dust. A purchase price has not been announced but we suspect ownership Stockbridge Capital Group took a big haircut, especially as they had been subsidizing SLS, at least in the early going. Meruelo Group has a big job ahead of it, but it can’t do worse than its predecessors. Oh, and could it remove “the happy blob” statue from out front? There’s public art and then there’s crap.

* Island View Casino Resort in Biloxi is gambling $75 million on a new, smoke-free gambling hall. Beach Casino, on the south side of U.S. 90, is part of the larger Island View complex, which spans the highway. Rick Carter, the owner, is promising an “off the charts casino,” with sweeping ocean views — breaking another sacred tenet of the casino industry: never allow natural light to penetrate the casino floor. (Casinos, like vampires, are presumed to abhor the rays of the sun.)

Carter survived the sinking of Copa Casino in Hurricane Katrina and came back stronger, buying Grand Gulfport from then-Harrrah’s Entertainment. The Beach Casino will be targeted to Millennials in as-yet-unspecified ways. With condos, a convenience store and a gas station, Island View will have a little bit of everything.

* Boyd Gaming execs met with JP Morgan analysts and explained a little bit about the synergies they expect to achieve by integrating Aliante Casino and the two Cannery Casino Resorts properties. In case you were wondering how Boyd was going to deal with the apparent redundancy of Sam’s Town and Eastside Cannery, step one is going to be using the same management team for both. Step two is to eliminate Eastside Cannery’s buffet. This is bad news for chow hounds because the Cannery buffet was always better than Sam’s Town’s — one of the bigger disappointments on the Las Vegas buffet scene.

Boyd management also offered the surprising opinion that they’re looking forward to Station Casinos‘ revamp of the Palms because they think it will drive additional business to Gold Coast as well. “For Aliante, management looks for growth in the North Las Vegas market to significantly outpace the rest of the LV Locals market, driven by new distribution centers/an expanding warehouse district, and ample tracts of land for residential construction,” wrote analyst Joseph Greff. There was little discussion of non-Vegas Boyd territories, save to say that the market response to a recent makeover of Delta Downs was “somewhat muted.” You can’t win ’em all.