Gaming and Leisure Properties is the first real estate investment trust (REIT) in the country to focus on buying properties and renting them out to people who run casinos.
It was started as a separate company from Penn National Gaming in 2013 and quickly grew to have locations all over the country. Gaming and Leisure Properties doesn’t want to compete with VICI on the Las Vegas strip, so it invests in regional casinos, mostly in the Northeast.
The REIT now has 57 of the best places to play and stay in 17 states. These buildings have more than 15,600 hotel rooms and nearly 30 million square feet of floor space. GLPI owns or rents out a little less than 6,000 acres of land. This regional diversity helps the REIT stay stable if the economy in one area goes down.
Many tenants sign on for more than 40 years at a time, and GLPI uses triple-net leases to lower its financial impact. The real estate company has no plans to stop here. Instead, they are taking an aggressive approach to buying more buildings to rent out to gaming operators.
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As part of a $635 million deal, GLPI added two former Bally’s Corp locations to its portfolio in early January. Even though the REIT is focused on gaming assets right now, it is not afraid to buy real estate outside of the gaming industry in the future. What other fields GLPI moves into will become clear with time.
Gaming and Leisure Properties is like VICI in that it is one of the few REITs that has been going up in a bad year. During a strong fall quarter, sales went up 11%, which was a good bit more than what was expected.
GLPI has all the signs of a stock that will keep going up for many years. Passive income in the form of dividends of 5.5% is also good for shareholders.