Atlantic City casinos won’t miss Trump Taj Mahal

atlantic-city-taj-mahal-good-riddance

atlantic-city-taj-mahal-good-riddanceAtlantic City casinos had a spooky revenue performance in October as the city bade goodbye to the Trump Taj Mahal.

Figures released Tuesday by the New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement (DGE) show that AC’s brick-and-mortar gaming revenue totaled $186.4m in October, down 2.7% from the same month last year. Add in the $16.7m contributed by the state’s online gambling operators and the year-on-year decline slips to 0.7%.

The Trump Taj Mahal officially shut its doors on October 10, reducing AC’s number of viable gaming venues to just seven. If you factor the Taj out of the equation, the market’s year-on-year brick-and-mortar decline becomes a 4.2% gain. So, basically, good riddance.

Leaving the Taj in the equations for the moment, October’s slots revenue fell 5.1% to $133.9m while table game win improved 3.8% to $52.4m. For the year-to-date, gaming revenue is down 0.5% to $2.04b, putting AC on pace to finish the year below 2015’s $2.5b, which would mark the tenth straight year of declines since the peak of $5.2b in 2006.

As ever, the Borgata claimed point of place atop the revenue chart, rising 5% year-on-year to $60.5m. The Borgata’s booty was well off its peaks of recent months but still more than twice its closest competitor Harrah’s, which gained 0.8% to $29.3m.

The rest of the chart shook out as follows: the Tropicana ($24.8m, +14%), Caesars ($23.5m, +3.8%), Bally’s ($16.54m, -2.9%), Golden Nugget ($16.53m, +10.6%) and Resorts ($14.3m, -3.5%). The Taj earned a whopping $848,671 in its final nine days of operation.

AC’s casino operators may have dodged a bullet when state voters rejected a ballot proposal to open two new casinos in the northern part of the state but the city government lost its long battle with Gov. Chris Christie over AC’s troubled finances.

Last week, AC’s perennial flirtation with bankruptcy finally spurred the state to reject the city’s proposed five-year turnaround plan and impose a takeover of AC’s finances. On Monday, the Department of Community Affairs appointed Jeffrey Chiesa, a former US senator and state attorney general, to make the “difficult decisions” necessary to fix the seaside community’s fiscal woes.