Laughlin gets attention as a hot spot for older gamblers
LAUGHLIN isn’t exactly known as a wild tourist town. With a string of casinos along the Colorado River some 100 miles southeast of Las Vegas, it’s popular with retirees who drive in and offers low-priced rooms, buffets and plenty of sunshine and open desert.
“No nightlife club crowd, clearly,” Clark County Commissioner Steve Sisolak, whose district includes Laughlin, told me in 2014.
But compared with Las Vegas, Laughlin’s visitors are more likely to gamble and spend more time and money trying to win big. And casino owners have noticed.
Laughlin has seen a burst of hotel sales in the past year or so, thanks primarily to PT’S Pub owner Golden Entertainment. Led by Chairman and CEO Blake Sartini,
Las Vegas-based Golden acquired the Aquarius in 2017 as part of its $850 million purchase of the Stratosphere and two other hotels, and announced this summer that it was buying the Edgewater and the Colorado Belle for as much as $190 million. That deal is expected to close in the first quarter next year.
Reno-based Eldorado Resorts also announced this spring that it was acquiring billionaire Carl Icahn’s Tropicana Entertainment, whose casinos included the Tropicana Laughlin. The $1.85 billion deal recently closed.
Overall, as Jefferies analyst David Katz wrote in a research note this summer, Laughlin is “stable” and “undervalued.”
Laughlin’s tourism market is a fraction of Las Vegas,’ but its visitor totals aren’t dipping as much as Las Vegas’ this year, and its gambling revenue is rising faster than the Strip’s.
Packed with megaresorts, Las Vegas offers God-knows-how-many more shows, restaurants, shopping and other activities than its smaller rival. This year through August, some 28.2 million people visited Las
SEGALL
dall, a spokesman for the association.
REIT indexes have underperformed the S&P 500 this year through the end of September, according to the association.
REITS
Real estate investments trusts, or REITS, function much like a mutual fund except they typically hold a diversified portfolio of incomegenerating properties rather than dividend-paying stocks.
REITS must pay at least 90 percent of their income to shareholders in the form of dividends. The REITS do not pay taxes on the distributed income, which makes them attractive to investors, especially retirees, seeking a steady stream of income.
The Parking REIT announced in March that it was halting dividend payments. As the company has not been profitable since launching in 2015, the dividends it paid in previous years came through other sources like loans or capital.
REITS sometimes focus on a particular segment like commercial real estate, residential housing or warehouses. The Parking REIT claims to be the only one focused on parking lots and garages.
The Parking REIT says the parking industry is an attractive investment because demand will grow, it is resilient during recessions and requires little to no maintenance
expense.
However, there is some concern that the rise of ride-sharing companies like Uber and Lyft will reduce car ownership and cut the need for parking. Walker Consultants forecasts U.S. parking demand to begin to decline in 2030 even as the nation’s population continues to grow.
3rd Listing
The Parking REIT will be the third company Shustek has listed on Nasdaq.
The businessmen listed his hard money mortgage funds Vestin Mortgage Realty I and Vestin Mortgage Realty II on Nasdaq in
2006 after investors demanded their money back.
The shares of those funds have each lost more than 80 percent of their value, or more than $200 million, since then. They haven’t paid a dividend since 2008.
Shustek sold his stake in MVP Realty Advisors, the manager of
The Parking REIT, to Vestin I and
II in 2013. Vestin I and II have subsequently loaned MVP and its affiliates $23.5 million to help grow The Parking REIT.
The Vestin funds have written the value of those loans down because they say it is uncertain if The Parking REIT will be successful enough to generate fees for MVP to repay the debt, according to SEC filings.
Contact Todd Prince at 702-3830386 or tprince@reviewjournal.com. Follow @toddprincetv on Twitter.