Atlantic City casinos posted a modest brick-and-mortar gaming revenue gain in July, while two individual properties had personal best showings.
On Wednesday, New Jersey regulators issued their July gaming revenue report, which showed Atlantic City’s nine casinos enjoyed slots and table game revenue of just under $277.2m in July, a 1.8% improvement over July 2018’s result and $41m more than they earned in June 2019.
July’s improvement was entirely due to hot table games, which rose 7.5% to $83.8m, while slots were off 0.5% to $193.3m. Total slots & table revenue over the first seven months of 2019 is up nearly 11% to $1.54b, with tables up 13% to $440.8m and slots rising 10% to $1.1b.
July was the first month in which all nine casinos were open in the same month last year, as Hard Rock Atlantic City and Ocean Casino Resort swung open their doors in the final days of June 2018.
Hard Rock had its best month yet in July, rising 19.5% year-on-year to $38.7m, ranking second on the month’s overall revenue chart. Ocean Casino Resort was up 21.4% to $19.2m, a solid improvement, but nearly a million less than June 2019’s total.
While the perennially market-leading Borgata enjoyed a healthy 13.6% year-on-year rise to $80.77m – a new property and market record – the other six ‘veteran’ casinos all reported negative growth, continuing a trend that has persisted ever since the two upstart properties opened a year ago.
Some of the declines, such as Resorts Casino Hotel ($17.6m, -1.3%) and the Golden Nugget ($19.4m, -3.3%), were relatively modest, at least compared with the declines posted by Caesars ($24.9m, -15.2%), the Tropicana ($29m, -13.8%) and Bally’s ($17.7m, -13.6%).
None of the above stats include revenue generated by the casinos’ online gambling and sports betting operations. Based on July’s total gaming revenue, only four casinos (Bally’s, Caesars, Harrah’s and the Tropicana) were net decliners, and all of those four are currently distracted as their mutual owners (Caesars Entertainment and Eldorado Resorts) plot how to merge their respective operations.
