Stephen A. Wynn
Analyst · Deutsche Bank
Nice to be investment-grade. Philadelphia and Boston, well, we're hard at it, as you know. 5 or 6 applicants in Philadelphia for that remaining license. There'll be shenanigans, I'm sure. Someone told me that the SugarHouse people wanted to say that the State of Pennsylvania doesn't have the right to issue a license that they took back previously. Sort of a ludicrous, preposterous thing. But those guys, if they think that we're going to win, they don't want to see us there until the last possible minute, and I don't blame them. If -- when you see some of these facilities, they're boxes of slot machines. They don't have really any tremendous magnetism to sort of cater to the locals. In Massachusetts, we got through our host agreement nicely, made a guaranteed payment to the people at Everett that helps them enormously, plus a lot of other improvements we're doing to make the area pretty and give it a good invitation to people to visit. And then, we had our host community required vote, and we've got 80 -- almost 87% of the people who were enthusiastically in support of us. We're waiting for the State of Massachusetts to finish its suitability investigations on the various applicants in Springfield and Boston. And then, of course, the folks at Suffolk Downs, for example, one of the applicants from Boston, they have to finish their host agreement and then have a vote in their communities, whatever those communities are. And so we have to wait on them to find out what's going to happen, which will probably be after the first of the year, and maybe sooner in Pennsylvania. But that's not a schedule we control. But we have designed facilities that we think will be profitable and give us a tremendous return on equity. We sit with a lot of cash, and in today's world, we can't make very much money on our cash. But when we deploy it in our own business, then it's another story. I think I may have said this in a previous call, but we see $900 million in Pennsylvania, with a $300 million or $400 million equity investment that we can make $150 million or $175 million on. We see Boston at $500 million or $550 million. We think we can make $300 million on that equity. And we think we can borrow a conservative amount of money at favorable rates to make up the balance of projects in the form of mortgage financing. So it's a way to pick up $400 million, $500 million with our new concept of Urban Wynn. Now this idea of Urban Wynn, which is being suggested to the authorities in Pennsylvania and Boston, it's worth repeating, if I didn't say it before. The era of the grand hotel is gone. The day of the Waldorf Astoria, the Plaza Hotel, the place that people go to stay and visit, that isn't happening anymore because of the cost of rooms, of construction and the Internet, hotels.com, kind of pressure on pricing. So what you get is stores on the ground floor and then some office floors, and then some hotel floors and then some condo floors. Mixed-use buildings that are places to stay, but they're not places to visit. When the government of Pennsylvania or Massachusetts decide, however, that they're going to put the casinos at the city, now we have a horse of an entirely different color. And where we have stood off from racinos and riverboats, it's not our thing. We build hotels that people like to come and stay to -- stay at. We specialize in high-class service and big rooms, fancy bathrooms and great restaurants and good food and all that jazz. You notice all that's non-casino talk. A slot machine, a blackjack table has 0 power. They're commodities. They're the same everywhere in the world, in a dumpy little box of slots or in a fancy place like a Highline Casino. It's the non-casino things that drive the business. So now, with these new laws in these states that allow metropolitan casinos like Boston, for example, Philadelphia, we can build a beautiful hotel with an atrium lobby, with restaurants that have indoor, outdoor experiences, shops, a wonderful spa, meeting rooms that have gardens outside and then down the hall, completely set -- and a room, that's 800-or-more square feet, with 175- or 80-square-foot bathroom, separate shower, separate tub, water closet with a bidet and john, 2 sinks, makeup area for the lady, integrated closets. We can do all that in big rooms that have sitting areas and large screen televisions that does not exist in New York, London or Boston or Philadelphia at the moment. But we can build what I call the grand hotel, and then, if you're a person that wants to gamble, go down the hall. Families can enjoy everything I just mentioned without ever seeing a slot machine or a blackjack table. But if you go down the hall, as if you were going to ballroom, in the convention area, you go through double doors, adults only and there is a casino with Starbucks and a deli and a food court and noodle kitchen and bars and a sports bar and all that other razzmatazz that makes a casino exciting. And they'll have separate access for parking that's covered and heated so the people can drive their car right to their favorite slot machine. That is an urban casino, and I think that we're going to see more cities open their doors and invite the kind of projects that Massachusetts and Philadelphia are encouraging. And I want to have 1 or 2 right away so that I can demonstrate the model for this kind of project just the way Mirage and Bellagio, sort of set the stage for destination resorts of a modern era in Las Vegas. So I'm interested in this, and Matt and Gamal and all the rest of us and Kim, we've been at it, working on this. Now we don't know whether we'll win or not, but we sure as heck will put our best foot forward.