Inside Asian Gaming

INSIDE ASIAN GAMING JAN 2019 28 AWS: Can you give us some sort of indication of what level of investment you’re expecting should you win a license to develop an IR in Hokkaido? NB: We don’t know exactly how much this would cost but we’re estimating somewhere in the range of US$1.5 billion to US$2 billion. We think there would be around 2,000 hotel rooms and 15,000 employees given the large number of employees needed for the hotel and all the other amenities that we would have. As you know, Japan’s IR rules provide that the casino can only represent 3% of the total space so our real estate expertise, our real estate development is very critical for what we are thinking in that respect because we’re going to have to build a lot of other real estate to qualify and that’s what we specialise in. We’ve built billions of dollars worth of very high end retail, hotels, convention facilities and things of that sort, plus we’ll have a lot of entertainment – restaurants, bars and so on, all of which will be vitally important. And we need to have some cultural aspects to fit into the environment. Tim Drehkoff: On the other elements that we’re playing around with, one is to try and involve as much as we can the natural beauty of that area and that site in particular, which is in the woods with rivers and rocks. We’re thinking bike trails, hiking trails, rock climbing excursions, bird watching – all sorts of things of that nature. We’re also trying to involve an equestrian center given the rich history the region has in horse breeding and horse racing. In addition to all of those cultural elements, we’re looking at an art exhibition or museum. Neil happens to be a world renowned collector of modern art and is on the board of the Art Institute of Chicago and The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. We can leverage that capacity tobringart exhibitions to the site aswell.We’re trying to be very broad, appealing to all demographics with a definite regional, local, cultural flavor to it. Rush Street founder and Chairman Neil Bluhm Rush Street’s COO, Tim Drehkoff IN FOCUS