Good afternoon, and welcome to Red Rock Resorts' First Quarter 2024 Conference Call. [Operator Instructions]. Note, this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Stephen Cootey, Executive Vice President, Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer of Red Rock Resorts. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator, and good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us today for Red Rock Resorts First Quarter 2024 Earnings Conference Call. Joining me on the call today are Frank Lorenzo Fertitta, Scott Kreger in our executive management team. I'd like to remind everyone that our call today will include forward-looking statements under the safe harbor provisions of the United States federal securities laws. Developments and results may differ from those projected. During this call, we will also discuss non-GAAP financial measures. For definitions and complete reconciliation of these figures to GAAP, please refer to the financial tables in our earnings press release, Form 8-K and investor deck, which were filed this afternoon prior to the call. Also, please note this call is being recorded. Let's start off by stating that the first quarter represented another strong quarter for the company by any measure. In terms of net revenue and adjusted EBITDA, our Las Vegas operations had its best first quarter in our history. And in terms of adjusted EBITDA margin, our Las Vegas operations experienced near record adjusted EBITDA margin. In addition to showing strong financial results in the quarter, we continue to be pleased with the customer feedback and the financial performance of our Durango Casino Resort. While we are still in early days, the team at Durango continues to execute and improve the property's operational performance, while at the same time, driving incremental play from our existing customers and attracting new customers to our brand. In past earnings calls, we have stated that we believe Durango will be one of our highest margin properties over the medium to long term and will generate a return consistent with or in excess of our prior greenfield developments. With one full quarter under our belt, we are confident that…

[Operator Instructions]. The first question today comes from Joe Greff with JPMorgan.

Steve, I heard you on your comment about stability in the entire database, which is great. We thought maybe you have a proactive prepared comments about that in light of the comments from your peers and competitors. I was hoping maybe you can cut it a little bit differently and maybe if there's a way to sort of isolate is located for Red Rock cannibalization, but if you look at your higher-end properties versus that are more middle or lower price point properties, has that disparity widened within your portfolio? I mean, it's another way of, I guess, asking the low end versus the high end customer within the database, but maybe cut differently by property.

Well, generally, we kind of look at the customers as a Red Rock brand as they hop around from place to place, Joe. So let's start from there. But generally, what we're seeing is we like what we're seeing across the database from all players. So we're seeing stability. From a Durango perspective, we've seen growth in the Durango zone, both from a net to perspective as well as visitation, which is consistent with our strategy from a new sign-ups perspective. We've had our highest growth in new sign-ups since the fourth quarter of 2021, including almost 37,000 people signing up at Durango, so we're bringing new customers into the brand. I don't know do you want too.

Yes, Joe, this is Scott. Maybe I can provide a little more detail. And as Steve said, we like to look at it from a brand level versus a property level. But when we kind of look at each segment in the database, we're encouraged by what we're seeing across all of those segments, inclusive of all of the demos. So not only are we up in wind, visits and spend for visit across our segments, but we're also seeing positive growth in all demos. We saw our active database grow in the mid-teens percentage. And as Steve said, we saw a strong increase in new member sign-ups and -- sorry, Durango ended up being about 25% of that growth in the quarter.

And again, Joe, just to kind of articulate it, we're seeing that across all properties as well as Al demos to add to what Scott said.

And we're seeing continued strong growth in our out-of-can business as well.

But Lorenzo, I will point out that... On the low end of the business, it's actually up for the last 2 quarters in a row.

Yes.

And okay. And what do you think is driving that lines that sort of maybe [indiscernible] either- what maybe others are experiencing potentially or kind of what maybe people on this call listening to you guys probably believe the opposite? What do you think is driving it?

So I think a lot of it has to do with the location of our properties. I mean, if you guys go and look at where all the growth in Las Vegas is occurring, in Summerlin West and the Southwest part of the valley where Durango is I mean they're growing at 2x to 3x what the growth rate of the city gets. So we have a little bit of a wind at our back with new customers coming online literally every month.

Great. And then just a little follow-up to some of the comments you made before. You're not the only one with the sports book hold issues, but you said Super Bowl and NCAA weren't kind to you and you also referenced in general terms, Palestation, construction disruption as well as at Sunset Station. Are you to quantify maybe in the aggregate, what the EBITDA impact from those 3 items were in the quarter as we look at those as sort of onetime and not recurring in the future?

Yes. I mean sports -- it's sports for those particular events, it probably cost about $4.4 million for the quarter. In terms of disruption, as I mentioned in our script, that we expect some disruption to extend into Q2. So it's not a onetime event, but probably cost us, let's call it about $4 million all in.

The next question comes from Carlo Santarelli with Deutsche Bank.

I wanted to just more or less follow up on Joseph's questions. And I guess a different way of maybe asking is, if you took the subset of properties ex Red Rock, what's happening there in Durango and ex the 2 disrupted properties, Sunset and Palace Station. What is kind of the rest of the portfolio look like from a year-over-year perspective, whether if you could talk about that from a revenue EBITDA perspective, however you would approach it?

Yes, Carlo, this is Scott. I think probably the best way to categorize our feeling of our performance and where we're headed is that we see stability across all of our properties with a slight bit of upside. So we're seeing absent the disruption that that Steve spoke about a strong performance. We're pretty confident with where we're at right now.

Okay. Great. And then just one quick follow-up. Corporate expenses tend to be a little bit higher in the first quarter. Is kind of that $18 million to $20 million a quarter for the rest of the year, a decent place.

Yes. I think I'd add more to the higher side. And we're looking to consolidate our warehousing. So one of the ups in this quarter was the warehouse coming online.

The next question comes from Steve Wieczynski with Stifel.

So Steve, you obviously talked a lot here about how you're still seeing the Las Vegas Valley, and it still seems pretty healthy in terms of consumer spending trends and Durango is clearly off to a very solid start. We've also heard from your competitors about the -- there has been a slight change in the promotional environment across the valley. It seems like there might be some competitors out there that are trying to more disrupt the market? And just wondering what you guys would say on that front.

Yes. This is Scott. I think I'd take it in 2 categories. One, the dynamic growth in the Valley that you can see not only in our investor deck, but even as recently as today, Arcline viewed Journal about the growth of the Vale and the inbound new residents bolstering our performance and our look forward. I think when we talk about competition from our view, we're not seeing anything in the market that would change our strategy or we're not seeing anything in the market that we haven't seen over the last couple of years. We've said before that there are some one-off single operator properties within the local market that are competitively promotionary and have been, but we're not seeing anything out of the norm there.

Okay. And then, Steve, you mentioned that Durango is up to already up to -- on pace to exceed your internal return projections. So this is somewhat of a hypothetical question. But as you guys start to think about additional projects down the road based on what you've seen so far at Durango, do you start to increase your return projections based on some of the -- maybe the learnings coming out of Durango -- or is Durango such a one-off type asset that its return profile might be totally different than anything else you do across the valley. And I hope that question makes sense.

Yes. I'm not sure we believe Durango is a one-off. We love the area. And as Scott mentioned, I think Lorenzo talked about, the enterprise district is growing about 3x faster than the rest of the Valley. That actually includes some of our other development properties, namely Cactus and Insparada. So in general, like I don't think anyone is more bullish on Las Vegas than we are. I mean population continues to grow at a 2.3% clip. We're getting 38% of our residents from California in addition to population growth, you're actually seeing net income growing or discretionary income growing about 8% and expect it to continue that way through 2029. So we view all of our opportunities in special. We have 6 of them. I think the team right now is going through entitling and getting these properties ready. And right now, we're just enjoying the growth of Durango. The team is doing a fantastic job really ratcheting down and making the property more efficient. And at the end of the day, we're looking forward to that property being one of our highest margin properties in the system and then getting returns they're at or in excess of what we've experienced in the past. And as I alluded to on the call, I think we're seeing that happening much quicker than 3-year time line that we've previously given guidance to.

Yes. Stephen, go ahead. Saying kind of similar to what Steve said, but we remain confident that building out the portfolio of undeveloped land over the next 10 years, we're going to be able to kind of grow into that historical return on investment with what Steve is around 20-ish percent. 20% levered return on correct. We're not saying that's going to happen year 1, but by year 3, we get there. I think what Steve obviously has said in his comments is that we're well on our way, maybe ahead of schedule a little bit on Durango. But when you look at the overall portfolio, we're still confident we can get to that 20% return on these greenfield projects. And we're not in a position to say that we think we're going to get more at this point, but we think that 20% return is pretty solid. So...

The next question comes from David Katz with Jefferies.

Just to tap on to the end of that last discussion. I'm not sure that we got a ton of commentary about what's next. And I know that you have occasionally talked about looking at Durango, maybe Inspirada, maybe something else. Is there any update that you can share? Any thoughts you can share around what's next for Red Rock?

I mean I think first up is going to be North Rork, probably around the end of the third quarter, beginning of the fourth quarter of this year. And then as we've always said, we are actively working on plans for an expansion at Durango, which will be in a position to go forward if we decide to by the end of the year or the beginning of next year. And then we're working on plans at Inspirada to have that in a position to make a decision when we want to go forward. And that -- those plans should be ready, what the run in.

I mean, we're finishing up all the entitlement and all the plans that we have costing on the project by the end of the year, and we'll be able to kind of... At that point... Communicated to everybody kind of what our timing is and what our budgets are. In addition to that, we've seen that we've been able to generate great return on investment by reinvesting in our current existing portfolio through building high-limit areas for both tables and slots. We're really happy with the results there. We're definitely seeing the benefit of between Belly Ranch and Santa Fe as well as we talked about Red Rock in the past. So we're going to continue to focus on those as well. I think part of the issue that we have here is in these projects in a place to where we have tight budgets type plans so we can get these things going is really what we're focused on right now. And we should have information for you guys on what we said for timing and budgets in the near future. So...

Yes. And I think it would be interesting if anybody is out here in the next several months or whatever to take a look at the new race and sports book at Sunset, and we're going to open a yard house there. And it's really turned out. I think the customers are going to accept it and be really happy with time.

I appreciate that. And if I can just follow up, is one of the potential for mutations sort of both expansion and Insparada. And does that sort of change steve any of the kind of leverage commentary? Or are those sort of happening at different times?

I mean what we're saying it's an option, I think, David, we're very cognizant of the balance sheet. And as we said, leverage is peaking has peaked, and we're looking to delever the balance sheet for that next stage of growth.

The next question comes from Barry Jonas with Truist Securities.

Wondering, are you still actively looking to sell any of your undeveloped land banks here?

Yes. This is Scott. So I think we're in the same position as we mentioned in the last call, where we have 2 pieces of land that are actively being marketed. One would be the Wawa Westin, which is essentially 100 acres of contiguous land just off the strip. And then there's a portion of our Cactus development site, which is a total of 128. There's about 40 acres of that site that is noncritical to what we want to do there. And so we've got that actively marketed as well. And then we do have a small entitled parcel in Reno as well, which if the right offer came about, we'd be interested in selling as well.

Got it. Great. And then just as a follow-up, more clarification. I noticed in the deck, your convention and meeting space is 231,000 square feet. I think that's down like 8%, 9% from the last deck. So is that sort of 20,000 reduction or a function of construction or anything else?

We'll have to check. It shouldn't be down, Barry.

The next question comes from Dan Polizer with Wells Fargo.

I know you guys had a couple of one-offs in the quarter that impacted margins a little bit. But as we think about that Durango contribution over time, I think you said that should be the most efficient margin property. So as we think about the coming quarters and the ramp of it, when do you think we might see that impact start to flow through?

I think it will be incremental over the remainder of the year, but you don't get it all at once. I think one of the great things that we were able to accomplish, which is very difficult, is have a very smooth opening at Durango and focused basically exclusively on the customer experience. And as business starts to settle in to what normal business levels or going to be by day of the week and time of the day, we're going to continue to refine operations, but I would say it will probably take towards the end of the year, really get it where we feel that it's going to be going forward.

Yes. And with that said, I mean, this is literally our first full quarter of operations. Yes. I mean the project is highly profitable, generating very high margins pretty much in line with the rest of our properties already. So as Frank said, as we really start to understand business volumes and whatnot, we can start to tweak margin and confident we'll get there by the end of the year.

Got it. And then just for my follow-up. I don't know if maybe you could talk about the cadence over the course of the quarter. We obviously got the industry numbers, and so it seems like things softened a bit over the course of the quarter. I don't know if that was what you guys saw in terms of your own operations, but any kind of reconciliation there? And then any detail, if you can, on April, just if that's been a continuation of that stability that you guys have kind of called out?

Yes, Dan, I think I'll address it and allow the others to add in. But I don't want to get into month by month, but we saw a stability across the quarter, and we're seeing that going in through April. I would say that March, the only real weakness there, as we already articulated there, you saw some weakness in raised Sports, which I think was universal across the strip mainly due to those 2 large events in the Supa and the NCAA term but otherwise, stability throughout the quarter.

The next question comes from Chad Beynon with Macquarie.

Wondering if you could revisit the topic of getting bigger or getting into the tavern business as a medium or long-term goal. Has anything changed in terms of how you're thinking about that?

It's Scott. Nothing has changed. We still think it's a great place to invest in. And for all the reasons that we talked about in the past that it's a unique customer with a different profile than our core customer. So it skews younger and skews towards the sports better. So we like that kind of a customer. We have 7 units currently under contract. First one will come online in September. The second one will come online in December. And then we have 2 coming online in January and then the remainder of the units throughout 2025. So we're actively out there seeking to grow the number of units that we have in the market, and we think it's an opportunity for us to kind of expand into what we call the micro market within the Valley.

And just Lorenzo, from a health standpoint, I know everybody is focused on different segments of the market at that end of the business, what we call kind of a smaller property seems to be very healthy and very consistent and actually grow. So as a sign relative, it's a very local market, but that is going very well from an operating standpoint.

And then on the food and beverage side, I think that was a big standout in the quarter, just kind of the year-over-year growth, and I'm sure most of that or a lot of that growth came from Durango. Is this -- you made a comment about group bookings. Should this food and beverage revenue become more regular? Or is there still some significant seasonality around how we should think about that with different groups and weddings and those types of things? Just trying to figure out the magnitude of the growth that we saw and how that should look throughout the remainder of the year.

Yes, let me split it up into 2 segments, so that it's a little bit easier because they have a kind of a different behavior. When we talk about our retail food and beverage operations, I think you're going to continue to see strong performance across the properties we're bringing on great restaurant tours and great offerings across the valley. So we see that continuing. When we look at catering, which is a function of group room nights and social catering, while we saw strong numbers across the first quarter, we have been kind of signaling that we're about to lap ourselves with COVID rebookings and COVID cancellation fees on a year-on-year basis. So this quarter, the second quarter and a little bit into the third quarter, we'll kind of trail off those difficult comps. And then going forward, if I had to say anything that we have a little work to do, it's probably in the summer months, but then in the fourth quarter, it starts to pick back up for us.

The next question comes from Brandt Montour with Barclays.

So actually just one, but it's a bit of a 2-parter. I was curious, when you think about Phase 2 for Durango, which I probably remember correctly, is this something you planned alongside Phase 1. What have you learned months in, 6 months in here that may have made you want to tweak anything to Phase II? I know we don't know Phase II is yet, but maybe just qualitatively, has anything made you want to adjust those plans? And then the second part of that is specifically around the F&B and the lease model, which you have in Durango, I mean we see these F&B results and how strong the segment is for you. Is there a thought to maybe convert or do any more of that F&B on an owned basis to capture those EBITDA dollars? Or how are you thinking about that?

Yes. This is Lorenzo. I'll take a stab at that. As far as what we've learned after a few months of being open here, I think the biggest change potentially of what we thought prior to opening is that we need to solve for some additional parking before we get -- necessarily get into the Phase II, what we had originally planned, which is a good thing, by the way. we kind of use all of our historical metrics and what we had historically seen. The volumes at peak period of Durango primarily partly driven by the success of the food hall and so were other restaurant offerings, we just need more parking. So we're working on a sale for that because we don't want to completely rip up the parking lot and do an expansion at the same time. So we're trying to figure out timing on that. Relative to the success we have had on the food and beverage side, I think where we are is we want to just focus on what we think we do really well, which is run slot machines and table games and hotels and led expert to run restaurants, kind of run the restaurants. It's I think allows us to drive higher-margin business overall throughout the portfolio. And as we've learned from doing this for 35 years or however long it's been, restaurants are very difficult to run, and it's very challenging. And if we can find great operators to bring in and we're so focused, we'd much prefer to do that.

And Brad, just one kind of note. The F&B line item that you're seeing in the press release, that's our own and managed restaurants. The lease revenue that Lorenzo spoke to is going to fall in the other category.

[Operator Instructions]. The next question comes from Joe Stauff with CIG.

I wanted to ask just maybe a broader question just on the locals market and all the migration and most of the migration coming from California and so forth. You're spending a lot of capital to build and expand sort of a premium product in the market. I think most of us understand what Boyd is doing. I wonder if you can comment on other competitors in the market. And are they trying to match you? Or are they staying with more low-cost model in terms of their approach in the Las Vegas market -- Las Vegas locals market. And then, I wanted to ask, just specifically, you had a reference in one of your slides regarding Durango at $180 million plus. Does that imply that whether it be the parking lot and the expansion you're thinking about $100 million of capital invested at some point as you kind of greenlight those projects?

Yes, I think what you're talking about is the land side, and that was really just to show that the value creation that we get by purchasing rod dirt. And so -- as Frank and Lorenzo always said, well, we tend to get our greenfield return within 3 years. These assets don't stop at year 3, they continue to grow. So we just want to provide a metric to show that we plan to grow this asset beyond that 20% ROI.

We're basically trying to demonstrate the value of the gaming entitled Real Estate portfolio by developing projects.

But it doesn't include the garage. But Joe, it does kind of lead into -- that slide is probably a good segue into really your first question. I can't really comment on what other competitors are doing, but we know what we're doing. Franklin runs for 40-plus years is focused on delivering the best-in-class assets and most importantly, the best-in-class locations. We live in a very regulated market. The local market is protected by SB208 which restricts the amount of gaming and title land that can come off the strip. And fortunately, and I think to these guys credit over the past 40 years, they've bought up pretty much every piece of gaming and title land that comes available. And then no different -- and this is something that's built into our DNA, our Sky Cayan purchase and our Lose purchases. We continue to look for gaming title land that we view as potential developable resorts down in the future. So that's where it starts from us, and that's really where it ends. So locations, it's tough to repeat a location. There's only one -- once it's gone, it's gone. And right now, we feel we have the best of the 6 available.

Yes, that's part of the value in the platform, right, is having the best locations and trying to project out where growth is going to happen, where the city's dynamics from a demographic standpoint are going to change over time and trying to be ahead 10, 20 years so that we're positioned. And I think that as we started really thinking about this in the late '90s, that's starting to pay off here kind of 20, 25 years later. We're starting to see the benefit of that. And that's why we're able to develop something like Durango get outsized returns. And I think part of the reason for the deck that Steve had put together, as Frank mentioned, was just -- I think a lot of people think about our company say they have 500 acres of additional land, let's put a value per 300,000-acre $500,000 an acre. And what we're trying to demonstrate is that we are a development company. That's really what our core principles are, what we're capable of doing. And by taking a raw piece of dirt and converting that into an operating asset, we feel like that we're literally creating billions of dollars of value, for instance, in the case of a Durango. So trying to think about what the future of this company holds and what the embedded growth in the company is all with opportunities that we own and control. And we can bring online whenever we want. They're not going away. So we think that there's a lot of value there.

Durango is performing great right out of the box, but there's like 4,500 new housing units planned or under construction currently in that ZIP code. And that's kind of the built-in growth that's going to continue to make Durango better and better and better.

This concludes our question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Steve Cootey for any closing remarks.

Well, thank you, everyone, for joining the call today, and we look forward to talking to you about 90 days. Take care.

The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.