Boyd Gaming to buy Valley Forge Casino Resort in Pennsylvania

Fresh off the heels of a $575 million acquisition of four Pinnacle Entertainment assets, Boyd Gaming Corp. has announced it will buy a smaller competitor in Pennsylvania to expand its regional presence.

Boyd will acquire Valley Forge Casino Resort in King of Prussia for $281 million, the Las Vegas-based company said in a statement on Wednesday. The deal is expected to close in the third quarter of next year and represent Boyd’s first casino in Pennsylvania.

Valley Forge, located just 20 miles from downtown Philadelphia and two miles from the nation’s largest mall, features a 40,000-square-foot casino with 600 slot machines, 50 table games and nearly 500 hotel rooms. The property also holds 100,000 square feet of meeting space.

“With this acquisition, we will expand into the second-largest gaming state in the country, establishing a presence in a densely populated, high-traffic area,’’ Boyd Chief Executive Officer Keith Smith said in a statement.

Accounting for synergies and slot floor expansion, Boyd said it will be paying seven times Valley Forge’s earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization.

Boyd earlier this week announced it would buy four Pinnacle casinos in Indiana, Ohio and Missouri. The purchase of Valley Forge now gives Boyd access to four big regional gaming markets — Philadelphia, St. Louis, Kansas City and Cincinnati — running from the East Coast to the Midwest with a combined total population of 10 million people.

U.S. gaming companies are scooping up their smaller regional competitors amid improving industry fundamentals, cheap borrowing costs and a scarcity of new licenses. There have been about 20 U.S. gaming transactions over the past three years totaling nearly $10 billion, according to Union Gaming data.

Contact Todd Prince at tprince@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0386. Follow @toddprincetv on Twitter.