LAS VEGAS—Gaming casino REIT VICI Properties said Monday afternoon it had closed its initial public offering of 69,575,000 shares of common stock, including 9,075,000 shares sold to the IPO's underwriters upon full exercise of their overallotment option. With gross proceeds of approximately $1.4 billion, it's the fourth largest IPO in REIT history and the largest in the hotel sector, according to CoStar Group. Shares of VICI's stock began trading on the New York Stock Exchange this past Thursday, and were trading above the IPO price as of mid-day Tuesday.
The IPO, which was launched on Jan. 22, was upsized last week to 60.5 million shares from the original 50 million; at $20 per share, it traded at the midpoint of its pricing range. Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and BofA Merrill Lynch acted as joint book-running managers and as representatives of the underwriters for the offering. Barclays, Citigroup and Deutsche Bank Securities served as bookrunners. Credit Suisse, UBS Investment Bank, Stifel, Citizens Capital Markets, Wells Fargo Securities, Nomura and Union Gaming acted as co-managers for the offering.
The IPO—which happened to knock MGM Growth Properties' (MGP) offering out of the top slot for hotel REIT IPOs—comes after VICI rejected an unsolicited merger bid from MGP last month. ““With our high quality, diversified real estate portfolio and best-in-class corporate governance, we are best positioned to successfully execute on our identifiable embedded growth from call-option and right of first refusal assets and our active pipeline of incremental accretive acquisitions,” VICI CEO Ed Pitoniak said in January. “Through this we believe we will create greater long-term value than by pursuing MGP's proposal.”
In December, VICI also raised $1 billion in a private equity offering, which it used to partly fund its $1.14-billion acquisition of Harrah's Las Vegas from Caesars Entertainment Operating Co., its former parent company. A paragraph in a VICI prospectus filed last week with the SEC hinted at more such acquisitions to come: “The sale-leaseback marketing the gaming space is of considerable size but has historically seen limited appetite to purchase large assets. We believe that the advent of large gaming REITs, like VICI, wi.l drive the additional bifurcation of gaming operations from their real estate and fuel gaming REIT industry growth.”
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