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The Ocean Casino Resort in Atlantic City, New Jersey has new partial owners. Ocean Casino was formerly wholly owned by the Luxor Capital Group LP, a New York Hedge Fund.
A deal was recently made Luxor Capital and the Ilitch family, who already have ownership of a major commercial casino in Detroit, Michigan.
Based on the terms of the deal, half of the fund’s ownership will be purchased by the Ilitch family for an undisclosed amount. The family has already submitted an application to the New Jersey gambling regulator for interim approval to own part of the casino complex. The deal will be finalized with the NJ Division of Gaming Enforcement give its approval.
The Ocean Casino Resort has had an interesting past. It opened its doors back in 2012 as the Revel Casino Hotel.
NJ Spotlight News
The original owners invested $2.4 billion into building the facility but were never able to make a profit from it. The casino had to close its doors in 2014 and went on sale for bankruptcy reasons in 2015. Florida businessman Glenn Straub bought the casino resort and planned to reopen it shortly.
However, those plans never came to fruition and he ended up selling the property to Colorado businessman Bruce Deifik for $200 million in 2018. The same fate continued for the casino hotel as, despite a major $200 million investment, it still kept losing money. This is where Luxor stepped in and took control of the facility in 2019 as they were one of the main investors in the property. Luxor applied for approval to run the property and also went ahead and renamed it to Ocean Casino Resort.
Luxor finally got approval in May 2020. Their original plan was to own and run the gambling complex for at least the next 25 years in order to get back their investment and make a profit. The casino resort ended up losing $2.5 million in 2019 but things turned around in 2020 despite the pandemic as Ocean Casino brought in $12 million in 2020.
Ilitch To Run Casino Operations
The deal with the Ilitch family is mainly to bring in more capital for development and to get a partner who can take control of casino operations.
The Ilitch organization said they were optimistic about the future success of Ocean Casino resort and hope to build on what the team has already achieved. The Ilitch family owns the MotorCity Casino Hotel which is one of Michigan’s three commercial casinos.
