{"id":239,"date":"2009-08-14T20:57:00","date_gmt":"2009-08-15T00:57:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/blogs\/dmckee\/index.cfm\/2009\/8\/14\/Saving-money-Buy-the-Trop"},"modified":"2009-08-14T20:57:00","modified_gmt":"2009-08-15T00:57:00","slug":"saving-money-buy-the-trop","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/saving-money-buy-the-trop\/","title":{"rendered":"Saving money? Buy the Trop!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>If you&apos;re looking for a bargain on the Strip, what about buying the <strong>Tropicana Las Vegas<\/strong>? The <em>Las Vegas Review-Journal<\/em> found that <strong>Onex Corp<\/strong>. got $440 million worth of equity (or a 61% share) <a href=\"http:\/\/www.lvrj.com\/blogs\/business\/Onex_invested_137_million_in_Tropicana.html\">for a Filene&apos;s Basement price<\/a> of $137 million. That would make the &quot;street value&quot; of the whole Trop $228 million, or $6.7 million an acre &#8212; a fifth of what Wall Street valued it at the peak of the Aztar Corp. feeding frenzy. <strong>Columbia Sussex<\/strong> won, <strong>Pinnacle Entertainment<\/strong> lost &#8230; and Pinnacle wound up being the lucky one, as ColSux toppled under insupportable debt.<\/p>\n<p>The Trop&apos;s &quot;paper&quot; value would put it in the <strong>Treasure Island<\/strong> class, at $733 million. But you&apos;d need an electron microscope to find the Trop&apos;s recent EBITDA, so nobody&apos;s going to pay <strong>Phil Ruffin<\/strong>-sized dollars for the place now. New owner Onex is a private equity firm that dabbles in real estate and sundry other industries. However, unlike some recent bunglers in the casino industry, Onex had the smarts to hire <strong>Alex Yemenidjian<\/strong> to head up its casino efforts, first in Illinois and now on the Strip. Compared to those private equity <em>confreres<\/em> who bought into the industry at its apogee, Onex&apos;s Trop move looks downright brilliant.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If you&apos;re looking for a bargain on the Strip, what about buying the Tropicana Las Vegas? The Las Vegas Review-Journal found that Onex Corp. got $440 million worth of equity (or a 61% share) for a Filene&apos;s Basement price of &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/saving-money-buy-the-trop\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[48,15,28,14,58,11,119,30,9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=239"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=239"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=239"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=239"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}