Revel Auction Pushed to September 30th
The Revel Casino Hotel on Atlantic City’s ever-more-depressing Boardwalk will be sold to somebody. Just not this week. And according to a report from The Press of Atlantic City, the most prominent bidder is none too happy about it.
On September 10th, real estate developer Glenn Straub put in a bid for the Revel, which closed September 2nd. Whether or not it was his intention, his bid was a “stalking horse,” which essentially means that it set the baseline for all other bids to come. Often, stalking horses remain anonymous to the public, but in the case of the Revel, Straub is the only bidder whose name has been revealed. He told the Wall Street Journal that his offer was “an opportunity to turn things around.”
“That’s what they need right now—a new direction,” he said. “Give us our six months, and we’ll actually physically be open. In two years, we’ll be 100% open.”
Fast forward to this past Tuesday, when Straub’s attorney, Stuart Moskovitz, told The Press of Atlantic City that an attorney for Revel told him more “viable” bids had come in. Thus, representatives from each interested party would gather at the Revel’s attorneys’ offices the next day and engage in an auction. For his part, Straub had no problems with this. “We love competition,” he told The Press. “I’m in a very competitive sport. The sport of buying things.”
On Wednesday, the bidders were present in the New York office of the Revel’s attorneys and everything was ready to go. But the auction never took place. Moskovitz told The Press that even though the bidding process ended Tuesday, decision makers for the Revel held private meetings most of the day Wednesday to review bids. That, said Moskovitz in so many words, was not kosher at all. As a result, the parties interested in competing at the auction spent the day doing nothing and are now being asked to return next Tuesday to resume (read: start) the auction.
That set Glenn Straub off. In what sounds like a kid trying to act all cool when he doesn’t get his way, Straub said that he only bid on the Revel in the first place because he was bored and that he did not need “need that monstrosity of a building” to further his plans for Atlantic City.
And those plans. THOSE PLANS. It is like he went back through his childhood creative writing assignments and found his third grade report on how he envisioned the future. To quote The Press of Atlantic City, “…he wants to build a second tower at the property and colonize it with ‘geniuses’ working on pressing global problems, such as nuclear waste disposal. Wednesday’s discussion included talk of ‘high-speed catamarans’ to ferry people to and from Manhattan, ‘super jumbo jets’ to fly Arabian tourists into Atlantic City and a ski resort of elevator-equipped artificial mountains.”
Guy sounds like a benevolent Lex Luthor. Like Megamind after he stopped being evil. I mean, good lord. I recently had a brainstorm and ended up building a budget personal computer. Glenn Straub brainstorms and builds, well, whatever the hell he wants. I wish he was my uncle. (I won’t go so far as to say dad because I love my dad and wouldn’t want another, but uncle…that’s still close enough to me where I might be able to benefit from the relationship. Plus, I wouldn’t have to actually replace a current uncle. I can have multiple.) 
The Revel is the perfect representation of a lack of foresight. It opened on April 2nd, 2012 and cost $2.4 billion. It was clearly designed to compete with the Borgata in the glamour casino category and certainly looked the part. Unfortunately, Atlantic City was already going downhill, largely due to new casinos in neighboring states taking away the former east coast gambling mecca’s gambling tourists. Located on the north end of the Boardwalk, it was never able to gain any sort of traction and went through two bankruptcies before finally closing this month.
That end of the Boardwalk is looking particularly bleak, as the Revel’s next-door neighbor, Showboat, closed on August 31st, and the Trump Taj Mahal may end up closing in mid-November. In the middle of the Boardwalk, the Trump Plaza closed September 16th, and on the south end, the Atlantic Club shut its doors on January 12th. A dozen casinos entered 2014 and it looks like only seven may leave. If the Taj does exit stage left, the survivors will be the Borgata, Golden Nugget, Harrah’s, Bally’s, Resorts, Caesars, and the Tropicana.
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