Ever since the former Tropicana was imploded on 9 October 2024, questions have abounded about the fate of Bally’s Las Vegas Strip development.
Yet new filings and commentary from last week’s ICE Barcelona event start to give a sense of what the project might look like and when it will take shape, despite a fair bit of remaining uncertainty.
Based on the filings and recent comments from Bally’s Chairman Soo Kim, it is likely that only non-gaming elements are live when the stadium opens.
“To be completely frank, we’re actually more focused on developing an RED, a retail-entertainment district, around the stadium to complement the traffic the stadium brings, even before we build our integrated resort and casino, but it’ll come in phases,” Kim said at the ICE Barcelona conference last week.
Bally’s submitted its most comprehensive construction timeline to date with Clark County in late December, per a Las Vegas Review-Journal report last week. The full, four-phase development would cost $1.19 billion and be complete by December 2030 if fully built out, the filings say.
Unlike most Strip projects, Bally’s Las Vegas is envisioned as more of a mixed-use complex emphasising retail, dining and entertainment instead of a traditional integrated resort. In its previous update from September, Bally’s said the project would include “more than 500,000 square feet of retail, dining and entertainment offerings” in addition to two hotel towers and a casino.
Of the 35 total acres on the site, Bally’s is developing 26, with the other nine dedicated to the MLB stadium under construction by the soon-to-be Las Vegas A’s. The lone rendering released shows the Bally’s development essentially circling the stadium.
The $2 billion stadium is slated to open in the spring of 2028, in time for that year’s MLB regular season.
Lack of clarity regarding Las Vegas, sale still possible
According to the Review-Journal, the construction permit timeline shows that Bally’s will build a theatre, mezzanine, parking garage and other shared resources first. Work on the hotel and casino portions are not expected to begin in earnest until 2028 at the earliest, based on the permit schedule.
In September, Kim told the Nevada Independent that Bally’s was “not going to build speculatively” in Las Vegas. He reiterated at ICE that the plan is to “build slowly”, but that lack of clarity could be troublesome in Las Vegas, especially on the Strip.
The last two major projects to open there, Resorts World Las Vegas and Fontainebleau, were both beset by construction delays and rising costs, and have struggled to find solid footing as a result.
Las Vegas’ long-running tourism declines might also factor into Bally’s nonchalance. The market has seen up-and-down gaming revenue in recent months but visitation has been down since late 2024. While Kim said last week he “would never be bearish on Vegas” because of its history of reinventing itself, he acknowledged that “there was always going to be a lull” after a stretch of record performance post-Covid.
Bally’s aims to be a “world-class gaming company”, Kim said, and Las Vegas would ideally be part of those plans. But with a back-loaded construction schedule, an early exit is made possible.
“You never say never. Obviously if someone were to come to us and come with a price we couldn’t say no to, we would consider it,” Kim said at ICE.
“To be frank, of all the projects we have in our portfolio, Vegas is the one with the widest standard deviation of outcomes. You could do really well in Vegas, or you could do really poorly.”
GLPI partnership losing steam?
Another key cog in Bally’s Las Vegas plans is its chief lending partner, Gaming and Leisure Properties (GLPI). In total, GLPI has more than $2 billion tied up in various Bally’s deals around the US. GLPI owns the Tropicana plot and leases it to Bally’s, although the two sides worked in tandem to facilitate the A’s stadium deal.
GLPI CEO Peter Carlino said in 2023 his firm would “have opportunities to further invest in the various aspects of the overall project to the extent we deem that doing so will generate an attractive risk adjusted return on our shareholders’ capital”.
Originally, GLPI allocated $175 million toward “shared improvements” at the site, but there has been little discussion of additional capital since then. During their most recent earnings call in October, GLPI officials were non-committal about extending more money to the Las Vegas project.
“It is unlikely that we will finance the entire project, but there are elements of that, profit-making elements, that I think we could participate in,” Carlino told analysts at the time.
Bally’s Las Vegas would be third $1 billion-plus project
Bally’s, as much as any operator in recent years, has become accustomed to navigating shoestring budgets. In addition to Las Vegas, the company has significant ongoing projects in Chicago, New York and Australia. Las Vegas’ projected cost of $1.19 billion means that all of its big US projects are over the 10-figure mark.
Chicago ($2 billion) will open by September 2027 and New York ($4 billion) is projected to open in 2030. New York specifically comes with more than $600 million in additional costs: $500 million for the licence and $115 million to the Trump Organization, which sold Bally’s the property, as a sale contingency from winning the licence. Bally’s most recent financial reports from Q3 last year showed $160 million in cash versus total debt of $3.7 billion, but that was multiple transactions ago.
The company’s merger with Intralot last year was an opportunity to bolster liquidity and pare down debt, and analysts have viewed that positively. At the time, Bally’s told iGB the deal netted “more than $1 billion” in cash and credit, but that was in reference to New York financing. In any case, Fitch Ratings removed Bally’s from “rating watch negative” in October and upgraded its rating to “stable” largely because of the Intralot deal.
“The Stable Rating Outlook recognises the stability of the company’s land-based casinos and adequate near-term liquidity,” authors wrote.
However, the report also said that if Bally’s pursued Las Vegas, New York or both, it “would need to rely on material funding from third parties”.