Matthew Demchyk: We hate to quote a number because every situation is different. You can kind of back into what we did in Rockford and it’s a very healthy spread for that set of circumstances, that quality of cash flow, and we want to mimic things that have some similarity to that spread. But we can’t — look, we are the price discovery for some of the deals in our pipeline right now, and we can’t really negotiate openly on our calls around what the appropriate spread is.
Peter Carlino: We can tell you we’re confident, is more is better than less.
Matthew Demchyk: And we try for every basis point we possibly can get. And it has to check both boxes. It has to be initially earnings accretive and long-term value accretive.
Peter Carlino: And that having been said, we’re not always a low bidder. I mean, frankly, that’s not our goal. Our goal is to provide a complete answer to the needs of our clients. And sometimes, it’s pricing. But more often, it is an assembly of things that we can bring to the table that others can. And I think the Queen deal in Baton Rouge is illustrative of that.
Haendel St. Juste: Certainly, certainly. One minor follow-up. I appreciate the comments on the balance sheet earlier, but it wasn’t clear — kind of where you guys felt the right target leverage range was in the current environment. I think that the EBITDA today is 407, really good really low, but where should we see that migrate to? Or what do you — how are you thinking about the right target leverage range today?
Matthew Demchyk: We’ve, for a long time, pointed out 5 to 5.5 is the target range over time. And we’ve also said more recently that we’re very comfortable being near at around or below the lower end of that range given the environment. But remember that gives us capacity to be opportunistic. And you may, in certain situations, you just get closer to the bottom end of that range for the right opportunity in the right situation. We’ve got optionality. And I’d expect to see us toward the lower end of that range over an intermediate period of time.
Operator: Next question comes from the line of Daniel Guglielmo with Capital One Securities. Please go ahead.
Daniel Guglielmo: So on the operator side, it’s pretty clear that growth from an organic perspective in the brick-and-mortar is going to be a little tougher near term and management teams may need to spend a little more to get growth there. Have you been getting additional inbound calls around financing, that kind of stuff and more — maybe moving up the time line of any projects already in the pipeline probably relates to the hiring of Jim, too?
Peter Carlino: Steve, do you want to talk about that?
Steven Ladany: Yes, sure. No, I think you’re correct that — as the capital markets have become more difficult to navigate, most of the gaming operators are not normally issuers of equity and they’ve traditionally leaned on the high-yield market to access additional funds. So rewind 2 years, when people were going to build or contemplate a new hotel tower, they were going to fund it themselves at a cheaper cost of capital than I would have offered. Fast forward to today and the exact opposite is true. So we have had — I think there’s 2 things. One, the operators have a renewed interest in investing in their properties to try to drive growth because I think the external growth pipelines are a little more challenging right now. And secondly, I think they’re much more open and willing to have conversations with us around potential funding source especially in properties we already own with them. So yes, the velocity of those conversations has definitely picked up.
Daniel Guglielmo: And then just around the Bally’s relationship and thinking about the Lincoln option, do you all think that can still happen next year? Or is that going to be like the option went out to 2026. Is that going to be kind of later? I know there’s a lot of moving pieces that the Bally’s that — but just kind of thinking about it from like a modeling perspective, I’m not sure we can see it.
Steven Ladany: Yes. So I think, look, we pushed it out to ’26 in our negotiations, mainly because we don’t have clarity, right? They’re not our lenders that are holding up the ability for them to do it. So we didn’t really have clarity. We are cognizant of the maturity date on their revolver and therefore, we did look to move that timing out such that if that debt gets refinanced and that prohibition is removed, we feel comfortable and confident that we would have that an opportunity to complete the sale-leaseback transaction. So we don’t have any insight into the timing or any insight into updated conversations, which may or may not even be happening with their lenders.
Operator: Next question comes from the line of Chad Beynon with Macquarie. Please go ahead.
Chad Beynon: Just in terms of destination versus regional. Peter, I know you’ve talked about this a lot, regional, obviously, being more resilient during different times of the cycle, but hitting kind of a near-term ceiling right now, destination, i.e., Vegas, really capitalizing on the inflation pricing environment. but having more cyclicality. Has anything changed just in terms of how you’re thinking about the 20-, 30-year long-term lease opportunities and kind of the spreads between regional and destination?
Peter Carlino: That’s a fair question. I don’t think much has changed because it varies property to property. How secure is a property in a given market, I’m just picking one that jumps in my head, the Cordish property in Maryland, for example. That thing is a rock solid. The PENN property at Charles Town. You can look at a handful of regional properties that for unique reasons are going to be strong today and going to be strong tomorrow. We’re not in Las Vegas. If we saw more opportunity in Las Vegas, you probably see us, and we do poke around there as well. We’re not opposed to owning property on the strip or elsewhere in Nevada. And we do look at things there on a routine basis. But it just gets down to, can we add value — pretty much that’s Mantra.
