Vici Properties’ Ed Pitoniak Came, Saw and — Of Course — Conquered Vegas

For Vici Properties CEO Ed Pitoniak, it’s all about telling the story.

There’s little wonder why Pitoniak, head of the largest real estate investment trust in the U.S. focused on casinos, resorts, and other gaming and experiential real estate, actually began his career as a journalist. In 1979, a still wet-behind-the-ears Pitoniak — who grew up in Western Massachusetts — landed a job as an editorial assistant at Cosmopolitan in New York, before making his way to Ski Magazine. Pitoniak spent nine years at Ski, eventually becoming its editor in chief.

His storytelling instincts have served him well. When Vici spun off in the late 2010s from Caesars Entertainment as part of the latter’s bankruptcy, Pitoniak, 69, was tapped to lead the nascent firm due to decades of cumulative experience with hotel REITs and resort operators. Pitoniak, who had no experience in the gaming or casino realm before he took the job, told Commercial Observer that he recognized right away the sheer potential, and economic productivity, of gaming real estate.

There was just one problem. Although Vici wasn’t the first REIT to focus on casinos and gaming real estate, the niche sector didn’t typically attract much interest from institutional investors — not because they didn’t agree on the potential, but because the industry wasn’t widely understood, Pitnoiak said.

That’s when his editorial hunch kicked in.

“The craft of creating a compelling story is partly founded on thinking long and hard about what people don’t know, that they would benefit from knowing,” Pitoniak said. “Because when you tell people something they don’t know, you create the opportunity for surprise. … Every time we sit down with equity and credit investors, we have to overcome the fact they are surrounded by noise, and we have to create a signal that breaks through that noise.

“If you can get the attention of institutional investors, tell them a story they haven’t heard before, about an asset class they haven’t invested in before, you have the opportunity to … unleash this institutionalization energy, bring focus and capital into this category, and create a whole lot of value — especially for those who get in early,” he added.

Vici’s ability to harness that institutional energy, and increasingly greater amounts of capital, ultimately drove the REIT’s meteoric growth, Pitoniak said. In less than eight years, Vici’s portfolio has ballooned to nearly 100 properties across the U.S. and Canada — casinos, hotels, racetracks, golf courses, bowling alleys — with a combined value of more than $45 billion, according to its most recent quarterly earnings report last year. Its presence is inescapable on the Las Vegas Strip, with Caesars Palace, The Venetian, MGM Grand, Mandalay Bay, Harrah’s and more all under its wing.

Indeed, Pitoniak said that Vici is the fastest REIT in history to transition from IPO to joining the S&P 500 (SPX), a feat it accomplished in less than five years.

“It’s a breath of fresh air to be dealing with someone like Ed Pitoniak,” Jonathan Goldstein, co-founder and CEO of Cain International, told Commercial Observer. “He approaches business in a way very few other people in the industry do, which is with intelligence and focus on what he needs to achieve for his company, but with a level of empathy for the other party to ensure that both parties’ goals can be met. In other words, it’s not a gladiatorial contest: It’s a common, shared objective. And that means that he gets the best deal that he needs for Vici, but he has people who want to do repeat business with him and his team, because it’s an enjoyable experience to work and learn from them as you’re progressing.

“That is rare in our business.”

If you wind the clock back to 2017, however, Vici’s dominance in the sub-sector was far from certain. It was two years after Caesars Entertainment Operating Company, Vici’s predecessor and a subsidiary of Caesars Entertainment, had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy due to significant debt from its $31 billion leveraged buyout in 2008. Vici sprang up from the aftermath as owner of the conglomerate’s properties, with Casears as property manager.

Pitoniak was a natural choice to lead the REIT as its founding CEO. Along with his storytelling instincts, Pitoniak’s editorial background actually started him on the path that led to Vici.

While serving as editor in chief of Ski in the mid-1990s, Pitoniak caught the attention of ski resort operator Intrawest, due to a presentation he gave at the time advising resorts to become more family friendly. His proposal ultimately led to a job offer with Intrawest in 1996 at Whistler, in Canada’s British Columbia, as, appropriately, vice president of idea and product acceleration.

It was there that Pitoniak connected with Hugh Smythe, the former president of mountain resorts for Intrawest who is largely credited with the creation of the Whistler Blackcomb resort and is a member of the Canadian Ski Hall of Fame. Pitoniak ultimately spent eight years at Intrawest, later working for hospitality-focused REITs in Canada and a stint in the mid-2010s as vice chairman of investment management firm Realterm.

Pitoniak, who called Smythe “one of the most brilliant operators of a business I will ever know,” credits him with teaching him the fundamentals of hospitality management. A key lesson? How to balance a guest’s relationship with time and space.

“What really great hospitality placemakers and operators do is constantly challenge themselves on how rich the guest experience is of a given amount of time, and how rich their experiences are of a given increment of space,” Pitoniak said. “In the ski resort industry, Hugh was always challenging us on our analysis and understanding of how rich the guest experience was of a given time and space, whether it be on the mountain, whether it be in one of our dining facilities … and that served me very well as I then moved into the hotel real estate investment trust business.

“I was able to appreciate the fact that despite the stresses of operating a business 365 days a year, 24 hours a day, you always have to give your management an opportunity to get outside the absolute grind of the day to day, step back, and imagine how the experience could be better,” he added. “And, by the time we get to Vici, I have the opportunity to see firsthand that gaming operators are, I believe, the foremost operators on Earth when it comes to constant innovation around guest experience of time and space.”

Las Vegas’ infamous day clubs are evidence of that ingenuity. Pitoniak said that hotel operators saw under-utilized time during daylight hours in Vegas, particularly during the hot desert months, and under-experienced space in swimming pools. So they put them together for an experience that enriched both. Sphere, the innovative, $2.3 billion performance venue adjacent to The Venetian, is another more recent example. Vici, not coincidentally, owns the land underneath Sphere.

The quest for fresh experiences and opportunities is also leading Vici to investments outside of its typical wheelhouse. The REIT in recent years has announced investment partnerships with the likes of Blackstone, to fund development of the family-focused Great Wolf Lodge resorts, as well as with wellness-space provider Canyon Ranch, to fund additional destination resorts and wellness clubs under its umbrella.

It has also led Vici to One Beverly Hills, a landmark $5.2 billion mixed-use, luxury resort tower development in the Southern Californian enclave by Cain International, along with Eldridge Industries and Oko Group. Vici earlier this year provided a $300 million mezzanine loan for the project, which is already one of the largest privately funded developments in the country. The developers are also partnering with luxury resort brand Aman on One Beverly Hills.

While Vici currently doesn’t plan to own space there, Pitoniak said, the deal was an opportunity to ingratiate itself with Cain and Eldridge for future experiential real estate, particularly in the sports and entertainment space. The three companies have formed a “strategic partnership” to invest in such projects.

“Vici has grown up with a very solid base of assets within Vegas, and I know that Ed is keen to expand that within the experiential world, and that’s why he’s coming involved in One Beverly Hills,” Goldstein said. “We’re already talking on a number of fronts with each other on a number of different ventures, which meet both our objectives and his objectives. … They’ll come to fruition, we would hope, over the course of the next 12 months.”

“We see the potential for a lot of Venn diagram overlap,” Pitoniak added.

That overlap could manifest itself in the form of The St. James, a sprawling sports, entertainment and wellness facility Eldridge owns in Springfield, Va., near Washington, D.C., similar to Vici’s Chelsea Piers complex on Manhattan’s West Side. Eldridge is looking to grow a network of St. James locations across the country, Pitoniak said, a proposition that Vici is well positioned to support.

As for 2025, despite the unpredictability of the current economic landscape, Pitoniak said that Vici is in a good spot. While President Donald Trump’s tariffs could have a direct impact on consumer spending if prices ultimately rise, Vici’s status as a net-lease REIT means the company isn’t subject to the variable performance of its tenants. The gaming sector in particular also tends to be less “cyclically sensitive” than other discretionary consumer industries, Pitoniak said.

During the Great Recession, for example, same-store regional gaming was down less than 4 percent, peak to trough, he said. Occupancy on the Las Vegas Strip, meanwhile, never fell below 86 percent at its lowest point. 

That tentative optimism extends to the investment front as well. Indeed, the capital markets environment remains in flux throughout the first few months of this year — Pitoniak called the situation “very volatile” during an interview with the National Association of Real Estate Investment Trusts in December, before the Trump administration enacted its trade policy changes. But Pitoniak told Commercial Observer his company has held up “quite well” since then. Vici has outperformed the S&P 500 and the S&P REIT indices year-to-date, and managed to close a $1.3 billion refi of senior unsecured notes before Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs announcement on April 2. 

Not for nothing, financial magazine Barron’s last summer claimed that Vici’s net income margin of 69.9 percent was the highest of any S&P 500 company. Not too shabby for a firm with just 26 employees.

“I tell people I died and went to business model heaven,” Pitoniak said.

Nick Trombola can be reached at ntrombola@commercialobserver.com.

Update: This story has been updated with a clarification on Pitoniak’s role at Ski Magazine.