Vici Properties Betting on Vegas After Suite of Casino Deals in Q4 2025
By Mark Hallum February 26, 2026 11:36 am
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Vici Properties spent the last three months of 2025 rolling the dice on major casino lease deals throughout the U.S.
In November, it acquired seven casino properties from Golden Entertainment for $1.16 billion through a newly formed entity that will be owned and operated by Blake Sartini, Golden’s current chairman and chief executive officer, according to Vici’s fourth-quarter earnings report released Thursday.
The acquisition of seven out of eight Nevada gaming facilities owned by Golden will rake in an annual $87 million for Vici, and Golden shareholders were given 24.3 million shares of newly issued Vici stocks in exchange for all outstanding shares of Golden stocks.
Moreover, Vici will assume and retire the $426 million in debt currently on Golden’s books, mostly using cash on hand, the real estate investment trust (REIT) reported Thursday.
“At Vici, we’ve talked about investing in the local Las Vegas market for years, and Golden has allowed us the opportunity to do so,” Vici Chief Operating Officer John Payne said during an earnings call. “We acknowledge that the Las Vegas Strip had a relatively softer 2025 compared to prior years, but as we discussed over the last few quarters, we view 2025 as more of a normalization than a pullback.”
For the entire year, Vici recorded funds from operations (FFO) of $642.5 million, a 6.8 percent increase on a year-over-year basis.
Total revenue grew 3.8 percent year-over-year to $1 billion, while net income slipped by 1.6 percent year-over-year to $604.8 million, according to the REIT.
Vici currently carries about $17.1 billion in debt and $3.2 billion in total liquidity.
In October, it also entered an agreement to sell the operations of MGM Northfield Park in Northfield, Ohio, to an affiliate of Clairvest Group. In addition, Vici signed a combined master lease to Penn Entertainment for Hollywood Casino at Greektown in Detroit and the Margaritaville Resort Casino in Bossier City, La.
The expected proceeds from leasing the operations of these casinos was not disclosed.
The firm is also in preliminary discussions with Caesars Entertainment for a master lease, which Vici executives declined to comment on when asked by investors during the Thursday conference call. However, the executives emphasized that when the REIT was founded in 2017, its portfolio had 100 percent exposure to Caesars and today has only about 30 percent.
Mark Hallum can be reached at mhallum@commercialobserver.com.
