Golden Entertainment, Inc. (NASDAQ:GDEN) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Blake Sartini: Yes, David, I think you’re spot on. From our perspective, we’ve spent the last couple of years setting ourselves up with a wholly-owned portfolio here in Nevada, particularly Southern Nevada. So obviously, Nevada certainly is a primary target for us, less meaning west of Colorado, let’s say, probably as a primary target, but mostly we’re focused on Nevada and where, as Charles described, we’re looking for things that would move the needle within our portfolio and where we can drive potentially some synergies from taking on assets that would be in that close proximity to where we’re at. So, we’ve proven ourselves in Southern Nevada. I think is the best gaming market in the country. We now have an established portfolio here. And as I said, I think that’s our primary target.

David Katz: And if I go back far enough, I do recall there were some strategies to enhance the STRAT. It’s one of the alternatives that potentially go back and look at some of those and expand what you have there, particularly in view of the fact that there’s another major property opening not too far away and whether that north end of the strip thesis starts to come to life again?

Blake Sartini: Yes. I’ll answer it this way. Our major renovations and disruptions at this point are finished at the STRAT. As Charles mentioned, Casino, hotel rooms, restaurants, bars, pool, that put us in a good position to compete given the growth north on the strip, which we’ve talked about since we’ve owned the property that, that inertia going north on the strip is going to benefit the STRAT, all within close walking distance to our property, we certainly believe over time. So the major — although we do have major kind of shelf-ready projects. We’re going to sit on the property at this point, a bit of a data point. Just in September with continued minor disruption and October with no disruption, the property performed very healthy.

October, for example, was the highest hotel revenue month that we’ve had and the highest EBITDA month we’ve ever had since we’ve owned the property. So, we’re going to continue to mine that property now that we’ve made that prudent investment. And any investment going forward and we do have some short-term investments would be more on the — what we call the drive by side, which would be maybe North Casino in a slot and restaurant, a bar renovation to take advantage of that traffic that will be generated through to Atomic Golf. Those are in the $2 million to $4 million kind of ranges. They’re not major type of investments in terms of capital. And you’ll see some of those over the course of the next year, but major disruption and major capital at this point is not on the radar.

David Katz: Okay. Thanks very much.

Operator: Next question comes from Chad Beynon with Macquarie. Please go ahead.

Chad Beynon: Good afternoon, Charles and Blake. Thanks for taking my question. I wanted to ask about that lowest end tier of the database or the unrated customer that we’ve been focusing on here. Did you see any degradation, I guess, in your Nevada casino operations or in the tavern business? Any change versus kind of what you’ve been seeing for the past couple of quarters? Thanks.

Charles Protell: No, no, not for us. So, if you look at our database for Q3 compared to last year, we’ve actually increased distinct players, increased distinct gaming days and increased actual slot and table revenue out of those players. So, we view the database is very, very healthy. And I think that there’s normally — as expected, there’s probably some atrophy of the retail revenue and the un-carded play. But that’s — we and others have been expecting that for a long time now and that’s just continuing the same trend that we’ve been seeing throughout the year. But the database itself for us is very healthy.