Red Rock Resorts - Q1 2024

Transcript

Operator (participant)

Good afternoon, and welcome to Red Rock Resorts First Quarter 2024 Conference Call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Stephen Cootey, Executive Vice President, Chief Financial Officer, and Treasurer of Red Rock Resorts. Please go ahead.

Stephen Cootey (EVP, CFO and Treasurer)

Thank you, operator, and good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us today for Red Rock Resorts First Quarter 2024 Earnings Conference Call. Joining me on the call today are Frank and Lorenzo Fertitta, Scott Kreeger, and our executive management team. I'd like to remind everyone that our call today will include forward-looking statements under the safe harbor provisions of the United States federal securities laws. Developments and results may differ from those projected. During this call, we will also discuss non-GAAP financial measures. For definitions and complete reconciliation of these figures to GAAP, please refer to the financial tables in our earnings press release, Form 8-K and Investor Deck, which were filed this afternoon prior to the call. Also, please note, this call is being recorded. Let's start off by stating that the first quarter represented another strong quarter for the company by any measure.

In terms of net revenue and adjusted EBITDA, our Las Vegas operations had its best first quarter in our history, and in terms of adjusted EBITDA margin, our Las Vegas operations experienced near record adjusted EBITDA margin. In addition to showing strong financial results in the quarter, we continue to be pleased with the customer feedback and the financial performance of our Durango Casino Resort. While we are still in early days, the team at Durango continues to execute and improve the property's operational performance, while at the same time driving incremental play from our existing customers and attracting new customers to our brand. In past earnings calls, we have stated that we believe Durango will be one of our highest-margin properties over the medium to long term and will generate a return consistent with or in excess of our prior greenfield developments.

With one full quarter under our belt, we are confident that Durango is well on its way to achieving both its margin target and its return goal even faster than originally planned. That said, and as stated in past earnings calls, we expect to experience and we have experienced cannibalization, primarily at our Red Rock property, due to the Durango opening, but this has been largely in line with our expectations. Consistent with our past performance history, we expect to backfill this revenue, given the strong long-term demographic growth profile of the Las Vegas Valley and the proximity of our properties to those high-growth areas within the valley. With regard to the rest of the portfolio, we continue to execute on our core strategy of reinvesting in our existing properties to deliver fresh and relevant amenities to our guests, all while remaining focused on best-in-class customer service.

Despite this disruption, we experienced at Palace Station disruption from the roadwork that significantly impacted the ingress and egress of the property and the significant disruption we experienced at Sunset Station from a major renovation upgrade in the race and sportsbook and casino. The team delivered another strong quarter across all business lines, with this quarter marking the 15th consecutive quarter that the Las Vegas operations delivered adjusted EBITDA margins in excess of 45%. Now, let's take a look at our first quarter. With respect to our Las Vegas operations, our first quarter net revenue was $485.6 million, up 12.9% from the prior year's first quarter. Our adjusted EBITDA was $229.8 million, up 7.3% from the prior year's first quarter.

Our adjusted EBITDA margin was 47.3%, a decrease of 247 basis points from the prior year's first quarter. On a consolidated basis, our first quarter net revenue was $488.9 million, up 12.7% from the prior year's first quarter. Our adjusted EBITDA was $209.1 million, up 7.7% from the prior year's first quarter. Our adjusted EBITDA margin was 42.8% for the quarter, a decrease of 200 basis points from the prior year's first quarter. In the quarter, we recorded, we converted 64% of our adjusted EBITDA to operating free cash flow, generating $128.6 million or $1.22 per share.

This significant level of free cash flow was either reinvested in our long-term growth strategy, including our Durango project, or reinvested in our existing properties, or returned to our stakeholders via debt paydown and dividends. As we begin 2024, we remain operationally disciplined and focused on our core local guests, as well as continue to grow our regional and national segments. When comparing our results to last year's first quarter, we continue to see upside from the strong visitation and play in our local, regional, and national segments. This strength, coupled with strong spend per visit across the majority of our carded play, allowed us to enjoy near record first-quarter revenue and profitability across our gaming segments, despite both the Super Bowl and the NCAA Tournament not being so kind to us in the quarter.

Turning to the non-gaming segments, both hotel and food and beverage continued to grow year-over-year and deliver record revenue and profitability in the first quarter. Our hotel division experienced its highest quarterly revenue and profit in our history, driven by our team's success on continuing to drive higher occupancy and ADR across our hotel portfolio. Not to be outdone, our food and beverage division also experienced its highest-ever quarterly revenue and profit, driven by higher average check and cover counts across our food and beverage outlets, as well as continued growth in our catering business within the quarter. With regard to our group sales business, we continued to grow this segment within the quarter, driven by growth in both room nights and ADR, as we continue to work to grow our pipeline in 2024 and beyond.

While both our Group Sales and Catering revenues grew in the first quarter, as we mentioned on a prior call, we expect tougher comparables in both these business lines for the remainder of 2024, driven mainly by COVID sales that were postponed and booked into 2023. As we look ahead, we are seeing stability in the locals market and across our entire database, and remain confident in our business prospects moving forward, though we will continue to face disruption in our Palace Station and Sunset Station properties for the majority of the second quarter. On the expense and labor side, we remain operationally disciplined and continue to look for ways to become more efficient, while continuing to provide best-in-class customer service to our guests and remaining the employer of choice in the Las Vegas Valley.

Within the quarter, the company continued to manage our expenses, generate record financial performance, near-record margins, reinvest in our properties, and return capital to our shareholders. Our results demonstrate the resilience of our business model, the sustainability of our operating margins, and the ability of our management team to execute on our long-term growth strategy, while taking a balanced approach to returning capital to our shareholders. Now let's cover a few balance sheet and capital items. The company's cash and cash equivalents at the end of the first quarter was $129.7 million, and the total principal amount of debt outstanding was $3.5 billion, resulting in net debt of $3.4 billion. At the end of the first quarter, the company's net debt to EBITDA ratio was 4.4x.

As we stated on previous earnings calls, our leverage has peaked and is now beginning to ramp down as we look to delever to our long-term net leverage target of 3x. During the quarter, the company completed two refinancing transactions. The first transaction involved a $500 million offering of Senior Notes due in 2032 at an interest rate of 6.625% per annum. The proceeds of this offering were used to pay down a portion of our Revolving Credit Facility, as well as our Term Loan A credit facility.

The second transaction involved an amendment to our senior secured credit facilities, pursuant to which various lenders will provide a revolving credit facility of $1.1 billion, maturing in 2029, bearing interest at 1.5% over SOFR, and a Term Loan B credit facility at $1.57 billion, maturing in 2031, bearing interest at 2.25% over SOFR. The average proceeds of this amendment were used to refinance our revolving credit facility and term loans outstanding under our existing credit agreement. These refinancings increased our financial flexibility by strengthening our balance sheet, extending our debt maturities, and modestly decreasing our interest expense. In May, our board authorized an extension to our existing share repurchase program to December 31st, 2025. The program has $313 million remaining available for future purchases.

As a reminder, since we began purchasing shares, either through our share repurchase program or the 2021 tender, we have purchased approximately 14.2 million Class A shares at an average price of $45.29 per share, reducing our share count to approximately 105.6 million shares. Capital spend in the first quarter was $98.1 million, which includes approximately $77.3 million in investment capital, inclusive of Durango project retainage, as well as $20.8 million in maintenance capital. For the full year 2024, not including the spend to close out our Durango project, we still expect capital spend to be between $140 million and $180 million, spread between maintenance and investment capital.

During the quarter, we remained committed to strategically investing and offering new amenities to our guests at our existing locations in order to drive incremental visitation and spend to our properties. During the quarter, we successfully opened a new high-limit slot room and Blue Ribbon Sushi Bar & Grill at our Green Valley Ranch property, and opened a Federal Donuts & Chicken restaurant, as well as remodeled the Sandbar Grille, which is our pool bar and outside eatery at our Red Rock property. We are pleased with the guest response and the early results from these new amenities. We expect to continue to invest in our existing properties throughout 2024, including adding additional restaurant offerings at our Green Valley Ranch and Palace Station properties, as well as an upgraded race and sportsbook and a partial casino remodel, plus a new Yard House restaurant at our Sunset Station property.

Like, like our other recently introduced amenities, we expect these to be solid investments over the medium to long term, and are looking forward to moving beyond the challenges created by construction disruption at these properties as we introduce these new amenities to our customers later this year. Turning now to North Fork. As we mentioned on our February call, our management agreement with the tribe was approved by the chairman of the National Indian Gaming Commission in early January, with clearing the last hurdles to the development of this project, which will be located on the tribe's 305-acre parcel of trust land. The site is located north of Fresno, California, and offers convenient ingress and egress and excellent visibility from Highway 99. The design is near complete.

We have retained a general contractor, and we expect to break ground on the project in the third quarter this year. We are very excited to moving forward with this project, and we'll continue to provide updates on our quarterly earnings calls. Lastly, the company's board of directors has declared a cash dividend of $0.25 per Class A Common Share, payable on June 28th to Class A shareholders of record as of June 14th. The company is off to a strong start in 2024, and with the opening of Durango, we continue to validate our long-term growth strategy and demonstrate the power of our own development pipeline and real estate bank, which now consists of over 441 acres of developable land, positioned in highly favorable areas across the Las Vegas Valley.

This pipeline, coupled with our current best-in-class assets and locations, gives us an unparalleled growth story that will allow us to double the size of our portfolio and capitalize on the very favorable long-term demographic trends and the high barriers to entry that characterize the Las Vegas locals market. We'd like to recognize and extend our thanks to all of our team members for their hard work. Our success starts with them, and they continue to be the primary reason why our guests return time after time. We'd also like to thank them for recently voting us a top casino employer in the Las Vegas Valley for the fourth consecutive year. We'd also like to make a special shout-out to our Sunset Station team members for placing their trust in us. Finally, we thank our guests for their loyal support in each of the last six decades.

Operator, this concludes our prepared remarks today, and we are now ready to take questions.

Operator (participant)

We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star, then one on your touchtone phone. If you are using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. If at any time your question has been addressed and you would like to withdraw your question, please press star, then two. At this time, we will pause momentarily to assemble our roster. The first question today comes from Joe Greff with J.P. Morgan. Please go ahead.

Joe Greff (Managing Director)

Good afternoon, guys. Steve, heard you on your comment about stability in the entire database, which is great. We thought maybe you'd have a proactive, prepared comment about that in light of other comments from your peers and competitors. I was hoping maybe you can cut it a little bit differently and maybe if there's a way to sort of isolate it for Red Rock cannibalization. But if you look at your higher-end properties, you know, versus that are, you know, more middle or lower price point properties, has that disparity widened within your portfolio? I mean, it's another way of, I guess, asking the low end versus the high-end customer within the database, but maybe cut differently by property.

Stephen Cootey (EVP, CFO and Treasurer)

Well, generally, we kind of look at the customers as a Red Rock brand, as they hop around from place to place, Joe. So let's start from there. But generally, what we're seeing is, you know, we like what we're seeing across the database from all players. So we're seeing stability. From a Durango perspective, we've seen growth in, you know, in the Durango zone, both from a net Theo perspective as well as visitation, which is consistent with our strategy. From a new, you know, a new signups perspective, we've had our highest, you know, growth of new signups since the fourth quarter of 2021, including over 37,000 people signing up at Durango. So we're bringing new customers into the brand. I don't know if you want.

Scott Kreeger (President)

Yeah, Joe, this is Scott. Maybe I can provide a little more detail. And as Steve said, we like to look at it from a brand level versus a property level. But when we kind of look at each segment in the database, we're encouraged by what we're seeing across all of those segments, inclusive of all of the demos. So not only are we up in win visits and spend per visit across our segments, but we're also seeing positive growth in all demos. We saw our active database grow in the mid-teens %, and as Steve said, we saw a strong increase in new member signups, and Oleon, or sorry, Durango, ended up being about 25% of that growth in the quarter.

Stephen Cootey (EVP, CFO and Treasurer)

And again, Joe, just to kind of articulate, we're seeing that across all properties as well as all demos, to add to what Scott said.

Scott Kreeger (President)

We're seeing continued strong growth in our out-of-town business as well.

Lorenzo Fertitta (Vice Chairman)

This is Lorenzo. I will point out that on the low end of the business, it's actually up for the last two quarters in a row.

Scott Kreeger (President)

Yeah.

Joe Greff (Managing Director)

And what do you think is driving that, Lorenzo? Because that's sort of maybe counter to either what maybe others are experiencing potentially or kind of what maybe people on this call listening to you guys probably believe the opposite. What do you think is driving it?

Lorenzo Fertitta (Vice Chairman)

I think a lot of it has to do with the location of our properties. I mean, if you guys go and look at where all the growth in Las Vegas is occurring, in Summerlin West and in the Southwest part of the valley where Durango is, I mean, they're growing at two to three times what the growth rate of the city is. So we have a little bit of a wind at our back with new customers coming online literally, you know, every month.

Joe Greff (Managing Director)

Great. And then, just a follow-up to some of the comments you made before. You're not the only one with the sportsbook hold issues, but you said Super Bowl and the NCAAs weren't kind to you. And you also referenced in general terms Palace Station construction disruption as well as at Sunset Station. Are you able to quantify maybe in the aggregate what the EBITDA impact from those three items were in the quarter, as we look at those as sort of one time and not recurring in the future?

Stephen Cootey (EVP, CFO and Treasurer)

Yeah, I mean, sports is, it's sports for those particular events, it probably cost about $4.4 million for the quarter. In terms of disruption, as I mentioned in our script, you know, that we expect some disruption to extend into Q2, so it's not a, you know, one-time event, but probably cost us, let's call it, about $4 million all in.

Joe Greff (Managing Director)

Thank you.

Operator (participant)

The next question comes from Carlo Santarelli with Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead.

Carlo Santarelli (Managing Director of Gaming & Lodging Equity Research)

Hey, guys. Thank you. I wanted to just more or less follow up on, on Joseph's questions, and I, I guess a different way of, of maybe asking is, if, if you took the, the subset of properties ex-Red Rock, what's happening there and, and Durango and, and ex, the two disrupted properties, Sunset and Palace Station, what is, what is kind of the, the rest of the portfolio look like from a, a year-over-year perspective? Whether if you could talk about that from a revenue EBITDA perspective, however you, you would approach it.

Scott Kreeger (President)

Yeah, Carlo, this is Scott. I think probably the best way to categorize our feeling of our performance and where we're headed is that we see stability across all of our properties, with a slight bit of upside. So we're seeing, absent the disruption that Steve spoke about, strong performance. We're pretty confident with where we're at right now.

Carlo Santarelli (Managing Director of Gaming & Lodging Equity Research)

Okay, great. Then just one quick follow-up. Corporate expenses tend to be a little bit higher in the first quarter. Is kind of that, you know, $18 million-$20 million a quarter the rest of the year a decent place?

Stephen Cootey (EVP, CFO and Treasurer)

Yeah, I think I would. It's more to the higher side, and we're looking to consolidate our warehousing. So, you know, one of the ups in this quarter was the warehouse coming online.

Carlo Santarelli (Managing Director of Gaming & Lodging Equity Research)

Got it. All right. Thank you. Thank you both.

Operator (participant)

The next question comes from Steven Wieczynski with Stifel. Please go ahead.

Steven Wieczynski (Managing Director)

Yeah, hey, guys. Good afternoon. So, Steve, you know, you obviously talked a lot here about how you're still seeing the Las Vegas Valley, and it still seems pretty healthy in terms of consumer spending trends, and Durango is clearly off to a very solid start. You know, we've also heard from your competitors about the, you know, that there has been a slight change in the promotional environment across the valley. You know, it seems like there might be some competitors out there that are, you know, that are trying to more disrupt the market. And just wondering what you guys would say on that front.

Scott Kreeger (President)

Yeah, this is Scott. I think I'd take it in two categories. One, the dynamic growth in the valley that you can see not only in our Investor Deck, but even as recently as today, an article in the Las Vegas Review-Journal about the growth of the valley and the inbound new residents bolstering our performance and our outlook. I think when we talk about competition from our view, we're not seeing anything in the market that would change our strategy, or we're not seeing anything in the market that we haven't seen over the last couple of years. We've said before that there are some one-off, single-operator properties within the local market that are competitively promotional, and have been, but we're not seeing anything out of the norm there.

Steven Wieczynski (Managing Director)

Okay. Thanks for that, Scott. And then, Steve, you mentioned that Durango is up to a, you know, already up to, you know, on pace to exceed your, your internal return projections. So this is somewhat of a hypothetical question, but you know, as, as you guys start to think about additional projects down the road, based on what you've seen so far at Durango, you know, do you start to increase your return projections based on some of the, you know, maybe the learnings coming out of Durango? Or, you know, is Durango such a, you know, one-off type asset that, that its return profile might be totally different than anything else you do across the valley? And I, I hope that question makes sense.

Stephen Cootey (EVP, CFO and Treasurer)

Yeah, we believe Durango is a one-off. We love the area, and as Scott mentioned, I think Lorenzo talked about, the Enterprise District is growing about three times faster than the rest of the valley. That actually includes some of our other development properties, namely Cactus and Inspirada. So in general, like, I don't think anyone's more bullish on Las Vegas than we are. I mean, population continues to grow at a 2.3% clip. We're getting, you know, 38% of our residents from California. In addition to population growth, you're actually seeing net income grow, or discretionary income growing about 8% and expected to continue that way through 2029. So we view all of our opportunities as special. We have six of them.

I think the team right now is going through entitling and getting these properties ready. And right now, we're just enjoying the growth of Durango. The team is doing a fantastic job really ratcheting down and making the property more efficient. And in the end, at the end of the day, we're looking forward to that property being one of our highest margin properties in the system, and then getting returns, you know, either at or in excess of what we've experienced in the past. And as I alluded to on the call, I think, you know, we're seeing that happening much quicker than the three-year timeline that we've previously given guidance to.

Steven Wieczynski (Managing Director)

Oh, good.

Lorenzo Fertitta (Vice Chairman)

Yes, this is Lorenzo. Saying kind of similar what Steve said, but we remain confident that, you know, building out the portfolio of undeveloped land over the next 10 years, we're going to be able to kind of grow into that historical return on investment, which what Steve is around 20-ish%

Stephen Cootey (EVP, CFO and Treasurer)

Yeah, or 20%.

Lorenzo Fertitta (Vice Chairman)

Unlevered return on investment.

Stephen Cootey (EVP, CFO and Treasurer)

That's correct.

Lorenzo Fertitta (Vice Chairman)

You know, we're not saying that's gonna happen year one, but by, you know, year three, you know, we get there. And I think what Steve obviously has said in his comments is that we're well on our way, maybe ahead of schedule, a little bit on Durango. But when you look at the overall portfolio, we're still confident we can get to that 20% return on these greenfield projects. And we're not in a position to say that we think we're gonna get more at this point, but we think that, you know, 20% return is pretty solid, so.

Steven Wieczynski (Managing Director)

Okay, great. Thanks, guys. Appreciate the color.

Operator (participant)

The next question comes from David Katz with Jefferies. Please go ahead.

David Katz (Managing Director)

Hi. Afternoon. Thanks for taking my question. Just to tack on to the end of that last discussion, I'm not sure that we got a ton of commentary about what's next, and I know that you've occasionally talked about looking at, you know, Durango, maybe Inspirada, maybe something else. Is there any update that you can, you know, share, any thoughts you can share around what's next for Red Rock?

Scott Kreeger (President)

Yeah, I mean, well, I think first up is gonna be North Fork, probably around the end of the third quarter, beginning of the fourth quarter of this year. And then, as we've always said, we are actively working on plans for an expansion at Durango, which will be in a position to go forward if we decide to, by the end of the year or the beginning of next year. And then we're working on plans at Inspirada to have that in a position to make a decision when we wanna go forward, and that, those plans should be ready, what, Lorenzo, in?

Lorenzo Fertitta (Vice Chairman)

I mean, we're finishing up all the entitlement and all the plans, and we should have costing on the project by the end of the year.

Scott Kreeger (President)

Yep.

Lorenzo Fertitta (Vice Chairman)

We'll be able to kinda, at that point-

Scott Kreeger (President)

Evaluate more.

Lorenzo Fertitta (Vice Chairman)

communicate to you, to everybody, kind of what our timing is and what our budgets are. In addition to that, we've seen that we've been able to generate great return on investment by reinvesting in our current existing portfolio through building high-limit areas for both tables and slots. We're really happy with the results there. We're definitely seeing a benefit at Green Valley Ranch and Santa Fe, as well as we've talked about Red Rock in the past. So we're gonna continue to focus on those as well. I think part of the issue that we have here is just getting these projects in a place to where we have tight budgets, tight plans, so we can get these things going, is really what we're focused on right now.

We should have information for you guys on what we said before, timing and budgets, in the near future, so.

Scott Kreeger (President)

Yeah, and I think it'd be interesting, if anybody's out here, in the next several months or whatever, to take a look at the new race and sports book at Sunset, and we're gonna open a Yard House there, and it, it's really turned out extremely nice. I think the customers are gonna accept it and be really happy with what we've done there.

David Katz (Managing Director)

I appreciate that, and if I can just follow up. Is one of the potential permutations, you know, sort of both expansion and Inspirada? And, you know, does that sort of change, you know, Steve, any of the kind of leverage commentary or, you know, are those sort of happening at different times?

Stephen Cootey (EVP, CFO and Treasurer)

I mean, while we're saying it's an option, I think, David, we're very cognizant of the balance sheet. And, you know, as we said, you know, leverage is peaking, has peaked, and we're looking to delever the balance sheet to pay for that next stage of growth.

David Katz (Managing Director)

Okay. Thank you.

Operator (participant)

The next question comes from Barry Jonas with Truist Securities. Please go ahead.

Barry Jonas (Managing Director)

Hey, guys, wondering, are you still actively looking to sell any of your undeveloped land banks this year? Thanks.

Scott Kreeger (President)

Yeah, this is Scott. So I think, we're in the same position as we mentioned in the last call, where we have, two, pieces of land that are actively being marketed. One would be the Wild Wild West land, which is essentially 100 acres of contiguous land just off the Strip. And then, there's a portion of our Cactus development site, which is a total of 128 acres. There's about 40 acres of that site that is non-critical to what we wanna do there, and so we've got that actively marketed as well. And then, we do have a small entitled parcel in Reno as well, which, if the right offer came about, we'd be interested in selling as well.

Barry Jonas (Managing Director)

Got it. Great. And then just, just as a follow-up, more a clarification: I noticed in the deck, your convention and meeting space is 231,000 sq ft. I think that's down, like, 8%-9% from the last deck. So is that sort of 20,000 reduction a function of construction or anything else?

Stephen Cootey (EVP, CFO and Treasurer)

No. We'll have to check. It's it shouldn't be down, Barry.

Barry Jonas (Managing Director)

Okay, thanks.

Operator (participant)

The next question comes from Dan Politzer with Wells Fargo. Please go ahead.

Dan Politzer (Director and Equity Research Analyst of Gaming, Lodging, and Leisure)

Hey, good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for taking my question. I know you guys had a couple one-offs in the quarter that impacted margins a little bit, but as we think about that Durango contribution over time, I think you've said that should be the most efficient margin property. So as we think about the coming quarters and the ramp of it, when do you think we might see that, you know, impact start to flow through?

Scott Kreeger (President)

I think it'll be incremental over the remainder of the year, but you don't get it all at once. I think one of the great things that we were able to accomplish, which is very difficult, is have a very smooth opening at Durango and focus, you know, basically exclusively on the customer experience. And as business starts to settle in to what normal business levels or going to be by day of the week and time of the day, we're gonna continue to refine operations. But I would say it'll probably take, you know, towards the end of the year to really get it where we feel that it's going to be going forward.

Lorenzo Fertitta (Vice Chairman)

Yeah, and with that said, I mean, just so... this is our, literally our first full quarter of operation.

Scott Kreeger (President)

Yeah.

Lorenzo Fertitta (Vice Chairman)

The project is highly profitable, generating very high margins, pretty much in line with the rest of our properties already. So as Frank said, as we really start to understand business volumes and whatnot, we can start to tweak margin and confident we'll get there by the end of the year.

Dan Politzer (Director and Equity Research Analyst of Gaming, Lodging, and Leisure)

Got it. And then just for my follow-up, I don't know if maybe you could talk about the cadence over the course of the quarter. We obviously got the industry numbers, and so it seems, you know, like things softened a bit over the course of the quarter. I don't know if that was what you guys saw in terms of your own operations, but any kind of, you know, reconciliation there, and then, you know, any detail, if you can, on April, just if that's been a continuation or of that stability that you guys have kind of called out?

Stephen Cootey (EVP, CFO and Treasurer)

Yeah, Dan, I think I'll address it and I'll allow the others to add in. But don't want to get into month by month, but what we saw is stability across the quarter, and we're seeing that going in through April. I would say that March, the only real weakness there, as we already articulated there, you saw some weakness in race and sports, which I think was universal across the Strip, mainly due to those two large events, the Super Bowl and the NCAA Tournament. Otherwise, stability throughout the quarter.

Dan Politzer (Director and Equity Research Analyst of Gaming, Lodging, and Leisure)

Thanks so much.

Operator (participant)

The next question comes from Chad Beynon with Macquarie. Please go ahead.

Chad Beynon (Managing Director and Analyst)

Good afternoon. Thanks for taking my question. Wondering if you could revisit the topic of getting bigger or getting into the tavern business as a medium or long-term goal. Has anything changed in terms of how you're thinking about that? Thanks.

Scott Kreeger (President)

Hey, Chad, it's Scott. Nothing has changed. We still think it's a great place to invest in, and for all the reasons that we talked about in the past, that it's a unique customer with a different profile than our core customer. So it skews younger and skews towards the sports betters, so we like that kind of a customer. We have seven units currently under contract. First one will come online in September, the second one will come online in December, and then we have two coming online in January, and then the remainder of the units throughout 2025.

We're actively out there seeking to grow the number of units that we have in the market, and we think it's an opportunity for us to kind of expand into what we call the micro market within the valley.

Lorenzo Fertitta (Vice Chairman)

This is Lorenzo. From a health standpoint, I know everybody's focused on different segments of the market. That end of the business, what we call kind of a smaller property, seems to be very healthy and very consistent and actually growing. So, as a sidebar, it's a very local market, but that is going very well from an operating standpoint.

Chad Beynon (Managing Director and Analyst)

Thank you. Then on the food and beverage side, I think that was a big standout in the quarter, just kind of the year-over-year growth, and I'm sure most of that or a lot of that growth came from Durango. You made a comment about group bookings. Should this food and beverage revenue become more regular, or is there still some significant seasonality around how we should think about that with different, you know, groups and weddings and those types of things? Just trying to figure out the magnitude of the growth that we saw and how that should look throughout the remainder of the year. Thank you.

Scott Kreeger (President)

Yeah, let me split it up into two segments so that it's a little bit easier because they have a kind of a different behavior. When we talk about our retail food and beverage operations, I think you're going to continue to see strong performance across the properties. We're bringing on great restaurateurs and great offerings across the valley. So we see that continuing. When we look at catering, which is a function of group group nights and social catering, you know, while we saw strong numbers across the first quarter, we have been kind of signaling that we're about to lap ourselves with COVID rebookings and COVID cancellation fees on a year-on-year basis. So this quarter, the second quarter, and a little bit into the third quarter, we'll kind of trail off those difficult comps.

And then going forward, if I had to say anything that we have a little work to do, it's probably in the summer months, but then in the fourth quarter, it starts to pick back up for us.

Chad Beynon (Managing Director and Analyst)

Thanks for the additional color. Appreciate it.

Operator (participant)

The next question comes from Brandt Montour with Barclays. Please go ahead.

Brandt Montour (Director and Equity Research Analyst of Gaming, Lodging, and Leisure)

Hey, good evening, everybody. Thanks for taking my questions. So actually, just one, but it's a bit of a two-parter. I was curious, when you think about phase two for Durango, which, if I remember correctly, is something you planned alongside phase one, you know, what have you learned five months in, six months in here, that may have made you want to tweak anything to phase two? I know we don't know phase two yet, but maybe just qualitatively, as has anything made you want to adjust those plans? And then the second part of that is specifically around the F&B and the lease model, which you have in Durango. I mean, we see these F&B results and how strong the segment is for you.

Is there a thought to maybe convert or do any more of that F&B on an owned basis, to capture those EBITDA dollars, or how are you thinking about that?

Lorenzo Fertitta (Vice Chairman)

Yeah, this is Lorenzo. I'll take a stab at that. As far as what we've learned after a few months of being open here, I think the biggest change, potentially, of what we thought prior to opening, is that we need to solve for some additional parking before we necessarily get into, you know, the phase two, what we had originally planned, which is a good thing, by the way. You know, we kind of used all of our historical metrics and what we had historically seen. The volumes of peak period at Durango, primarily, partly driven by the success of the food hall and some of our other restaurant offerings. We just, we just need more parking, so we're working on a solve for that.

Because we don't want to completely rip up the parking lot and do an expansion at the same time, so we're trying to figure out timing on that. Relative to, you know, the success we have had on the food and beverage side, I think where we are is we want to just focus on what we think we do really well, which is run slot machines and table games and hotels, and let experts who run restaurants kind of run the restaurants. It, I think, allows us to drive higher-margin business overall throughout the portfolio. And, you know, as we've learned from doing this for 35 years or however long it's been, restaurants are very difficult to run.

It's very challenging, and if we can find great operators to bring in that sole focus, we'd much prefer to do that.

Scott Kreeger (President)

Brandt, just one kind of note, the F&B line item that you're seeing in the press release, that's our owned and managed restaurants. The lease revenue that Lorenzo spoke to is going to fall in the other category.

Brandt Montour (Director and Equity Research Analyst of Gaming, Lodging, and Leisure)

Makes sense. Thanks for all the comments.

Operator (participant)

As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press star, then one to be joined into the question queue. The next question comes from Joe Stauff with SIG. Please go ahead.

Joe Stauff (Senior Equity Research Analyst)

Thank you. Good morning or good afternoon. I wanted to ask, you know, just maybe a broader question just on the locals market and, you know, all the migration and most of the migration coming from California and so forth. You know, you're spending a lot of capital to build and expand sort of the premium product in the market. I think most of us understand what Boyd is doing. I wonder if you can comment on other competitors in the market, and are they trying to match you, or are they staying with more low-cost model in terms of their approach, in the Las Vegas market, Las Vegas locals market? And then I wanted to ask, you know, just specifically, you had, you know, a reference in one of your slides, regarding Durango at $180 million+.

Does that imply that, you know, whether it be the parking lot and the expansion, you're thinking about $100 million of capital invested, you know, at some point, you know, as you kind of green light those projects? Thank you.

Stephen Cootey (EVP, CFO and Treasurer)

Yeah, I think what you're talking about is the land slide, and that was really just to show the value creation that we get by purchasing, you know, raw dirt. And so, as Frank and Lorenzo always said, while we tend to get our green field return within three years, these assets don't stop at year three, they continue to grow. So we just wanted to provide a metric to show that we plan to grow this asset beyond that 20% ROI.

Scott Kreeger (President)

You're basically trying to demonstrate the value of the gaming-entitled real estate portfolio by developing projects.

Stephen Cootey (EVP, CFO and Treasurer)

But it doesn't include the garage. But, Joe, it does kind of lead into the... That slide is probably a good segue into, into really your first question. I can't really comment on what other competitors are doing, but we, we know what we're doing. Frank and Lorenzo, for, you know, for 40+ years, is focused on delivering the best-in-class assets and most importantly, the best-in-class locations. You know, we live in a, a very regulated market. The locals market is protected by SB 208, which, you know, restricts the amount of gaming-entitled land that can come off the Strip. Fortunately, and I think to these guys' credit, over the past 40 years, they've bought up pretty much every piece of gaming-entitled land that comes available.

And then, and this is something that's built into our DNA, our Skye Canyon purchase and our Losee purchases. We continue to look for gaming-entitled land that we view as potential developable, you know, resort down in the, in the future. So that's where it starts from us, and that's really where it ends. So locations, it's tough to repeat a location. There's only one. You know, once it's gone, it's gone. And right now, we feel we, you know, we have the best, you know, the best of the six available.

Scott Kreeger (President)

Yeah, that's part of the, the value in the platform, right? Is having the best locations and trying to project out where growth is going to happen, where the city's dynamics from a demographic standpoint are gonna change over time, trying to be ahead 10, 20 years so that, you know, we're, we're positioned. And I think that, you know, as we started really thinking about this in the late 1990s, that's starting to pay off here, you know, kind of 20, 25 years later. We're starting to see the benefit of that, and that's why we're able to develop something like Durango, get outsized, outsized returns.

I think part of the reason for the debt that Stephen put together, as Frank mentioned, was just, you know, I think a lot of people think about our company and say, "Oh, they have 500 acres of additional land. Let's put a value per acre on it.

300,000 acres.

You know, $300,000 an acre, $500,000 an acre. What we're trying to demonstrate is that we are a development company. That's really what our core principles are and what we're capable of doing. By taking a raw piece of dirt and converting that into an operating asset, we feel like that we're literally creating billions of dollars of value, for instance, in the case of a Durango. So trying to think about, you know, what the future of this company holds and what the embedded growth in the company is, all with opportunities that we own and control, and we can bring them online whenever we want. They're not going away. So we think that there's a lot of value there.

Joe Stauff (Senior Equity Research Analyst)

Thanks a lot-

Lorenzo Fertitta (Vice Chairman)

Yeah, Durango's performing great right out of the box, but there's, like, 4,500 new housing units planned or under construction currently in, in that zip code, you know? And that's kind of the built-in growth that's gonna continue to make Durango better and better and better.

Operator (participant)

This concludes our question and answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Stephen Cootey for any closing remarks.

Stephen Cootey (EVP, CFO and Treasurer)

Well, thank you, everyone, for joining the call today, and we look forward to talking to you in about 90 days. Take care.

Operator (participant)

The conference is now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.