Two Way Hard Three | Las Vegas Casino & Design Blog

The shareholders of Station Casinos voted overwhelmingly to approve the plan to take the company private.

http://www.lvrj.com/business/9146336.html

The $5.4 billion offer is from a new entity that combines Colony Capital and the Fertitta's, the company's founding family.

It will move to regulators next, I would expect inside the next nine months.



Comments

Read archived comments (2 so far)
August 14, 2007 10:46 PM Posted by Mark D

It will still take a few more months to get it completely finalized with regulatory approval and all that technical stuff. Once that's done you can expect some really big projects from them. They're going to finally be able to do the two big projects along the west side of I-15 without wall street breathing down their back. They've already spent $12 million on design for the property south of Palace Station, not counting what their partner has spent. The speculation is that they might include an arena there for the Ultimate Fighting Championship league that the Fertittas own. And of course, Project W at Trop and I-I5 has had many planning revisions over the years as they've waited for the company to get big enough to tackle a project that size. Basically both sites will be mixed-use and similar in scale to CityCenter. I also heard that their Durango/215 site will be upscale market like Red Rock and GVR and not a standard Station brand. There's also a large site south of South Point, on LVB, but haven't heard any plans for that yet. Not sure why they haven't ever tried to do anything on the Strip proper, that's the only segment of the market they're missing, and it's the most lucrative segment.

Harrah's is next to go private, and that's a more complicated deal. The current issue of Gaming Today is trying to start rumors again about the Rio possibly being sold to Maloof, or even the Marnell family buying it back again, and they say Harrah's has identified the Rio as a non-core asset. Anyway, something in their portfolio has to go because the new Harrah's owners won't be able to grow much with the extraordinary debt load they've accumulated with this leveraged buyout.

August 15, 2007 6:05 PM Posted by mike_ch

I don't think STN builds on the strip because their core strategy is player loyalty, and it's hard to establish loyalty when you're next door to somebody. They've never had to compete immediately next to anyone except the Maloof-era Fiesta Rancho next to Texas Station, and they eventually bought that out. Being next door to EVERYBODY really makes it hard.

If City Hall had a clue they'd be begging Station to build a property downtown instead of continuing to give life support to that Neonopolis garbage. There's still plenty of parcels, but that's a nice piece of land they fought hard for and wasted. Fact is, what downtown needs is a casino with a players card that's good around town. Don't believe me? It worked for the Stratosphere, as their players card is linked to both the Arizona Charlies. Once they abandoned their dream of being a tourist destination unto their own and became a fusion of locals joint (with monthly mailed-out coupons and stuff) and decent tourist digs upstairs, they started making money.

None of the cards downtown work around town. Boyd owns the remaining Coast Casinos but they continue to keep Club Coast separate from the Players Gold card they use for the Fremont/Cal/MSS trio downtown and they used to maintain an individual card for the Stardust as well. If Boyd doesn't get the clue, Station would, but they haven't wanted to take the risk. Maybe they'd be easier to persuade now.