What a Casino "Project Cost" Actually Includes

Every casino opening produces a number, and the number is almost never defined. Forty-odd stories in this archive end with a credit block naming the owner, the architect, the contractor and the investment — and a handful of those credit lines are unusually honest about what the figure covers. Read together, they are the clearest available answer to a question nobody asks out loud: what is in a casino project cost?

The two stories that give the game away

Start with Resorts World New York, in Aqueduct Adventure. The credit line reads: $830 million total ($540 million hard construction cost). One building, two defensible numbers, $290 million apart.

Then Iowa, in Iowa Landmark, where the split is even sharper: $130 million all-in / $48 million construction. Here the construction cost is barely more than a third of the announced figure.

Those two lines are the whole lesson. Unless a report says which number it is quoting, a casino cost figure is not comparable with any other casino cost figure.

What sits in the gap

The difference between "hard construction" and "all-in" is made up of items that are real money and invisible in a photograph:

• Land, and the entitlement work to make it buildable.
• Design and consultant fees — the architect, the interior designer, the engineers, the lighting and landscape consultants. Where the credit block names four separate practices, as it does for Category Killer (Klai Juba Architects, interiors by Cleo Design and Westar Architectural Group, construction by Commercial Interiors and TN Ward), the fee stack is not small.
• FF&E and OS&E. Furniture, fixtures and equipment; operating supplies and equipment. On a hotel-and-casino these are enormous and are frequently procured outside the construction contract entirely.
• Gaming equipment and systems, which may be leased, participation-based or owned.
• Financing costs and contingency carried through a multi-year build.
• Pre-opening — hiring, training, licensing, the stocked kitchen and the marketing launch.

None of that appears in a contractor's number. All of it appears in an owner's.

Three more ways the figure is qualified

"Part of" a larger programme. The Glory of Rome records the investment as Part of $860 million expansion since 2008. That is a capital programme across several phases, not the cost of the work described in the story.

The asterisk. Beach Party prints $180 million*. An asterisk in a credit block is a signal that the number has conditions attached — usually a phase boundary or a disputed scope.

"Plus." Crowning Achievement gives $50 million-plus, which is an owner declining to publish a final account.

Cost per square foot is only usable when the area is defined

The same problem repeats on the denominator. Aqueduct Adventure lists 1,086,000 square feet (180,000-square-foot casino) — the gaming floor is one sixth of the building. Containing Culture & Costs is equally careful: 20,000 square feet; 18,000-square-foot gaming floor. Best of the Boardwalk reports 6.3 million square feet for a $2.4 billion resort, and Good Morning, Vietnam! gives its size as approximately 400 acres — a master plan, not a floor plate.

A dollar-per-square-foot comparison between the Warm Springs project and Resorts World is therefore meaningless unless both sides of the ratio are stated. The archive's habit of printing both the total area and the gaming area is exactly the discipline the rest of the industry's reporting lacks.

The range the archive actually covers

Set out in order, the credit blocks describe a market spanning four orders of magnitude, and it is worth seeing how far apart the ends are:

• A hotel suite remodel at $250,000 — Suite Deal.
• A 20,000-square-foot tribal casino at $11.2 million — Containing Culture & Costs.
• A conference centre addition at $126 million — Meeting on the Bay.
• A tribal resort at $820 million — Signature Style.
• An integrated resort at $5.7 billion — Iconic and Profitable.

The useful comparison is never between the ends. It is between projects whose credit lines describe the same thing — and that is a judgement you can only make when the credit line is printed, which is why it is worth printing.

How to read any casino cost figure in ninety seconds

1. Ask whether the number is hard construction or all-in. If the source does not say, assume all-in and stop comparing.
2. Check whether the scope is a phase, a programme or a building.
3. Check whether FF&E and gaming equipment are inside or outside.
4. Find the matching area figure, and check whether it is the gaming floor, the enclosed building or the site.

Related reading: who designs a casino, and what each credit means, and the full set of archive projects at Development & Business.