Jay A. Snowden
Analyst · Felicia Hendrix with Barclays
Thanks, Tim. I'll mention a few words about Q1 and what we experienced in Q1 and then tee up the remainder of the year before I hand it off to Saul. Q1, there were a number of offsetting factors that allowed us to come in right at our Q1 guidance number. The consumer environment remains very challenged and fragile, similar to what we experienced the second half of 2013, most notably at the lower-end worst segments of the database, below $100, where we continue to lose visitation and trips. Secondarily, we continue to contend with saturation shock in a number of our key markets, most notably Charles Town, Lawrenceburg and I will throw in the State of Illinois now that there are over 15,000 video gaming terminals at bars and restaurants throughout the state. And we experienced anomalous weather conditions in the first half of the quarter, unprecedented in some markets like Toledo, where we had record snowfall and actually had to close our facility for 75 hours between January and March. Now the good news, despite all of that, property level margins were largely unchanged on a year-over-year basis despite revenues 15% down on a year-over-year basis. We actually experienced margin improvement in 2 of our regions, the Southern Plains and the West. REIT adjusted, corporate overhead expenses were down 20% on a year-over-year basis, so the property leadership teams continue to do a great job managing in this challenging environment and so does the corporate team here in Wyomissing. We believe the 20% reduction year-over-year is sustainable for the remainder of the year. And the last piece of good news in the first quarter is that the average daily spend per customer in our database throughout the portfolio actually increased 5% on a year-over-year basis in the first quarter. So those are the offsetting factors, the good news and the low lights that allowed us to come in at our Q1 guidance. With all that said, the last 3 to 4 weeks, particularly in the month of April, visitation trends have been very concerning across our portfolio of properties, most pronounced, I would say, in Lawrenceburg and Charles Town, but we are seeing it in all of our mature markets. The newer markets are holding up fine, but some of the more mature markets are soft. These concerning trends are what are prompting us to lower our guidance for the remainder of the year. I would add that, of the lower guidance, that about 50% of that is 2 properties in particular, Lawrenceburg and Charles Town. Just to give you a quick snapshot of what we're seeing here in April. If you look at Easter weekend, Friday to Sunday, it was last weekend here in 2014, it was the end of March in 2013, we're seeing visitation trends and revenue trends down 20% on a year-over-year basis. So I'm hopeful that we look back at this reforecasted guidance and say that we were playing a bit alarmist or the prophets of doom. But at this point, based on the trends that we're seeing in the business, we felt it was the prudent thing to do. So with that, I'm going to hand it over to Saul to walk you through some additional details on the guidance.