I was reading an article about Sheldon Adelson in the magazine Mother Jones. It was basically a hit piece blaming him for strictly following his own selfish, greedy motives in changing his position on internet gambling from “yes to an emphatic “no. In the reader comments there were statements that, unlike internet gambling, brick & mortar casinos make it possible for a gambler to offer his/her home as collateral to increase a credit limit. Can this be true? If so, I think this would be a very poor business practice for casinos to follow. It’s been a long time ago but I have used casino credit. As far as I was aware, a customer’s bank account(s) ratings based on the average account balance were the only thing used in approving casino credit and in determining the limit. Has that changed?
I suppose its possible that a casino could ask for a home lien as collateral for a line of credit, but I have never seen it. I have a big line at Venetian and they never asked for my home info when I applied
This is completely baseless speculation on my part, but I'd imagine that if some casinos offer it, they do so very discreetly for customers who approach them with the idea, and would never advertise such a service or admit to it publicly. Just a guess.
I don't thing you could directly use your home to increase your credit limit, but that reference to losing your home is probably stemming from a few years ago when Sheldon Adelson started his crusade against online poker coming to Nevada one thing he said was that with online gambling you could bet and lose your house, but you can't do that in a casino... Which is of course totally wrong: you can't upload your house to Poker Stars and even if you sold your house and had a couple of hundred thousand dollars in your pocket its actually not that easy getting all that money online and it would probably have to be done over an extended period of time or you would have to go through a process to increase your deposit limits which are in place to prevent somebody from doing something like this (using the default deposit limits it would almost 11 years to move $250K online to Poker Stars, as an example). Whereas you could mortgage or sell your house, drive or fly to Las Vegas and walk in to the Venetian, get a fancy pants room and be gambling all that money away pretty easily - they won't come and check up on you or stop you from blowing your whole roll until its gone.
I was just a kid, but family legend has it that one of my uncles driving from WI to CA, stopped in Vegas and gambled away his house. Urban/family legend, I don't know? This would have been back in the late 50s or early 60s.
I'm skeptical. Banks who are in the business of lending against collateral hate having to take possession of a home. Hard to imagine a casino would want to. Anyone that would put up their house for gambling money probably has some serious gambling problem. So just by virtue of what they want the money for, you should know they aren't a good credit risk. But then again casinos do seem to be pretty casual in terms of extending and raising credit lines.