Bally’s Atlantic City Hotel and Casino is switching hands from its current owners – Caesars Entertainment Corp. and VICI Properties – to Twin River Worldwide Holdings Inc. for a price tag of $25 million.
Caesars, which also owns Harrah’s Resort Atlantic City and Caesars Atlantic City, will part ways with the 1,214-bed seaside hotel. VICI will get $19 million from the sale, and Caesar’s will get $6 million.
“We look forward to the reopening of Bally’s Atlantic City as soon as appropriate once the public health emergency related to COVID-19 has passed,” Caesars Chief Executive Officer Tony Rodio said Friday in a statement.
VICI will own the land and real estate around Caesars Atlantic City, which includes the Wild Wild West casino.
The move will still need the nod of approval from the state’s gaming regulators and the Federal Trade Commission, and now sits in a somewhat complex territory as Caesars eyes a $17.3 billion merger with Eldorado Resorts, which owns Tropicana Atlantic City.
“The sale of Bally’s Atlantic City demonstrates our ongoing commitment to work collaboratively with our tenants to optimize our individual businesses, even during these unprecedented times,” VICI President John Payne said Friday.
The sale comes at a time that Atlantic City is virtually a ghost town with casinos remaining closed since March 16 in a bid to stop the spread of COVID-19. At the moment, the only activity in Atlantic City is the operation of a field hospital.
The resort town has seen thousands of lay-offs, while the its gambling and casino industries have seen steep revenue drops across the board.
But Caesars officials maintained that the timing of the two had nothing to do with each other.
“The sale of Bally’s Atlantic City is a strategic initiative that Caesars Entertainment had been pursuing long before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic,” Noel Stevenson, a spokesperson for Caesars, told NJ Advance Media.
