Average daily profit for DT casinos - $43,000

Vegas Chatter had an article on downtown gambling and included a link to some 2013 financial stats.

It states that on average (based on 16 DT casinos), revenue per day in the casino is $86,000 and daily expenses are $43,000. Those numbers are rounded by me. So they make a profit of $43,000 per day from the casino.

That is just the gaming side of the operation and does not include guest room, restaurant or bar revenue. Those numbers surprised me at first because I thought it was low. Now that I think about it, $86,000 per day in gambling revenue sounds about right. The $43,000 in expenses is made up mostly in comps given, payroll and state gaming taxes paid by the casino.

The other interesting thing in the report was that there are on average 579 rooms available downtown of which 471 are occupied per night (or double booked by comped gamblers). That I find really hard to believe. So there's just 100 rooms vacant downtown on average every night? Downtown is getting busy!

Anyhow, I like numbers so it may not be for everyone but the report can be found here: http://gaming.unlv.edu/reports/dlvcasino2013.pdf

Original Vegas Chatter article here: http://www.vegaschatter.com/story/2014/1/22/133226/362/vegas-travel/Where+Did+The+Vegas+Gambler+Go%3F+Downtown%2C+Baby

The other thing I wondered are what makes up the 16 Downtown casinos. I need some help here. I came up with this list but what am I missing?

MSS
Plaza
Golden Gate
La Bayou
Golden Nugget
The D
El Cortez
Gold Spike (open Jan-April)
Downtown Grand
Fremont
Binions
Mermaids
Las Vegas Club
California

And 2 more - anyone know who they are?

 

I am pretty sure the Stratosphere is considered at DT property since it is in the City of Las Vegas proper.

 

4 Queens and probably The STRAT like Oxygenator said.

 

Pretty interesting. I hope occupancy doesn't go up too much. I like my cheap downtown rooms lol.

 

It would be interesting to see how much of the gaming revenue comes from people staying Downtown versus 'commuters' coming in from the Strip (or even off-strip) hotels.

 

It would also be interesting to factor in the resort fees.....surely not all of that is taken up with amenities and some is left over as profit....j/k

 

I am sure they also reduced the previous room rates to level out the fee.

 

Good stuff! Thanks for posting Gambler!

 

My guess is this must be the average per casino hotel, no? Just a quick search, but it appears that most of the DT hotels have about 500-600 rooms each.

 

That just seems really low to me. How does DT compare to the Strip?
Or even to 5/10 years ago?

 

Those revenue statistics are profits, not gross money played, considering the "hold" on table games might be 1-5%(perhaps a little more with drunk poor players) that seems about right. Also by including the tiny places like mermaids,la bayou, and the spike(which is closed), and then merely dividing by 16 it really skews the results to the lowside.

Obviously there are thousands of rooms downtown, so if that room figure is an average of 16 places then there are still a couple thousand rooms available on any given night.

 

The only thing that confused me was the amount of hotel rooms, but if that's an average per hotel, it makes sense. Makes me feel better, If there were that much demand for downtown rooms, the deals would be gone quick.

Thanks for the breakdown of the article. Very interesting.

 

The other way to look at it, the hotels have an average occupancy of 80%. My takeaway from this is that Downtown properties are profitable and strip properties are losing money.

 

One thing to always check for in hotel occupancy numbers is what number they are using for "available rooms". Its an internally decided number and since its only used as a performance metric for investors etc. there is no standard they have to go by. A hotel manager with 900 rooms occupied in a 1000 room hotel can decide that 50 rooms were unavailable for whatever reasons so suddenly his occupancy rate goes up from 900/1000 = 90% to 900/950 = 95%. The available rooms number used in occupancy rates and RevPAR is always less than the actual rooms from every hotel I've looked at, probably for legitimate reasons most of the time but not necessarily.

 

Thanks to all who pointed that out. I completely forgot they were talking average available rooms per hotel. I was beginning to panic about getting rooms downtown.

How on earth did I forget the Four Queens? I stay there 99% of the time!! The Stratosphere makes sense as the other one.

They separate the stats between big and small casinos. Small strip casinos are those earning between 1 and 72 million in 2013, big casinos are those earning more than 72 million.

Big Strip Casinos profit per day on gaming only - $210,175
(Average revenue of $630,575 per day less expenses of $420,400 per day - based on 23 casinos)

Small Strip Casinos profit per day on gaming only - $21,775
(Average revenue of $62,736 per day less expenses of $40,961 per day - based on 20 casinos.)

Downtown Casinos profit per day on gaming only - $42,790
(Average revenue of $86,626 per day less expenses of $43,836 per day - based on 16 casinos)

The small strip casino numbers are a big surprise to me considering downtown casinos average $43,000 profit per day. Part of the difference is that strip casinos have higher expenses compared to revenue.

I couldn't find stats for 10 years ago. The oldest stats for DT that I found where from 2011 and they are similar to 2013:

Revenue of $83,245 less expenses of $42,623 for a daily profit of $40,622.

Big casinos http://gaming.unlv.edu/reports/bigstripcasino2013.pdf
Small casinos http://gaming.unlv.edu/reports/smallstripcasino2013.pdf
DT casinos 2011 http://gaming.unlv.edu/reports/dlvcasino2011.pdf

 

I think the Western is the other casino downtown. I would have forgotten about it but we saw it last week while we were looking for the container buildings.

 

No, it's not the Western. The sign is still there but it's been closed since January 2012. It was purchased by the Downtown Group in early 2013.

http://www.vegasinc.com/business/tourism/2013/mar/21/tony-hsiehs-group-buys-shuttered-downtown-casino-1/