Tom Reeg: Yes. So Brandt, I’d say, I don’t have anything intelligent to say about month-to-month. There’s not a particular month that stood out for us. What we are seeing is, in markets that are not impacted by new competition, save for Atlantic City, you’re seeing demand kind of equal to last year to, let’s call it, plus or minus 2%, if you’re looking across the whole portfolio, something that averages to a little bit of growth across those assets from a revenue standpoint. Then you have assets that are competitively impacted like Tunica, like the Chicago market that are very different from a revenue and EBITDA perspective. They’re under pressure. And then you’ve got properties where we were the new supply, whether either to a new project like Charles or Virginia, or an expansion like Indiana and our revenue and EBITDA is going up.
And the net result of that is what you saw in the business for the quarter, that EBITDA grew and EBITDA margin was flat. And that’s really been the case for about a year now for us. Every quarter, we run into kind of, well, now it’s got to be right around the corner, and we’re just not seeing that. We saw the well-documented surge in unrated play with stimulus checks a couple of years ago, unrated play is where you see the volatility, but our database is strong enough that it’s able to withstand that decline in unrated play back from the pandemic or to the stimulus day. So we feel very good about where we sit in our regional business. And remember, this is — the logic behind pursuing Caesars as a target in M&A was, diversification is going to be a strength of the company.
And that’s what we’ve seen from a broad perspective, you saw as the pandemic ended, people didn’t want to get on a plane, and regionals carried Vegas, then regionals had the tough comp versus stimulus and Vegas carried regionals. Now you have both of them kind of bumping along as modest growers, and we have digital kicking in. And within regional, we’ve got diversification across our portfolio. And we hear what’s said by others. We heard one of our competitors in Reno say, Reno is off because there’s an international competitor. I don’t know who that is because we had our best quarter ever in Reno. So I would just tell you that the diversification that we thought was going to be a huge asset for the company continues to prove itself to us, and we hope, to you.
Brandt Montour: That’s super helpful. Thanks for that. And then over in digital, several weeks now into the NFL season, wondering if you were seeing anything from the competitive landscape that’s surprising at all, from promotional advertising perspective. And then if you could separate by related, if you could just update us on your overall confidence levels of hitting that digital EBITDA target in ’25? That would be great.
Tom Reeg: Yes. So the target has not changed. We continue to see a visible path to that end. And each quarter, we grow more confident. We’re not seeing anything promotionally that’s requiring us to respond. I’ll let others talk about their own promo strategies. We huddle each other once in a while and say, look at this, look at that. But — we’ve kind of got our head down executing on our business model and driving that $500 million of EBITDA, which again would be a about a 50% return on the cumulative EBITDA losses our shareholders allowed us to invest in the business today. So we feel very, very confident about where we are in this business.
Brandt Montour: Great. Thanks all.
Operator: Thank you. [Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from Barry Jonas with Truist Securities. You may proceed.
Barry Jonas: Hey, guys. I was wondering if you could talk about next steps, maybe any updated expectations for the New York land-based casino process. I believe one bidder is exiting that process. And while we’re at it, maybe any general thoughts on the potential for iGaming in New York as well.
Tom Reeg: Yes. So tongue and cheek, I’d say I don’t have grandkids yet, but I’m hoping it’s awarded before my first grandkid is 25 years old. It’s going slowly. They’ve just passed the second round of questions. The deadline for that, so then I’ll answer all the questions. Then you get into the community board process where you’ve got to — they’ll put out the RFP, you’ve got to be approved by your community Board. Those that are approved by their community boards will have an opportunity to submit the final application for the license. As I sit here today, I think the quickest that they could issue a license based on what needs to be accomplished between now and then, is the end of 2024. I would say, my personal expectation is it’s 2025 before a license is on.
Barry Jonas: Got it. And then just a follow-up on digital. I appreciate the comments on low hold in the quarter, reversing. I guess you’ve talked in the past about — maybe expectations for holds for bridging the gap with competitors. So just curious if any updated thoughts there and sort of the timing to narrow that gap?
Eric Hession: Yes, sure. I’ll jump in on this one. We continue to see the — an end point where we’re going to have hold in the 7.5% to 8% range. If you look at this quarter in particular, we did continue to have sequential hold improvement for the last four quarters, actually. It’s really just — we had an anomaly in Q3 of last year, where we held almost 200 basis points on the sports betting side higher than any other quarter in the two years. So it’s really just a reversal of that period. And that was primarily driven by the September last year football results, which then reversed this year. But we’re steadily improving on that path. It is important to note that if you look at last year’s, our blended hold was around 5.5%.
So if you increase it by 200 basis points, on the volumes that we’re producing, you’re talking, a couple of hundred million more of incremental GGR, which at those flow-through rates that we talked about, should be a big contributor towards the EBITDA. And as I mentioned, we’re heading steadily in that direction. So that’s one of those areas that it’s in the model to get to the $500 million, we have to execute on it, but it’s not particularly dependent on either the consumer changing behavior or are our competitors doing something differently. We just need to execute on that.
