Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from the line of Celeste Brown with Morgan Stanley.
Celeste Brown – Morgan Stanley
Just a quick housekeeping question, what will the corporate run rate be this year? It’s been a little lumpy, it was a little lumpy in 2007.
Daniel R. Lee
We’re trying hard to hold them in 08 to the annual level they were at in 07 and I think that means in the first quarter we’ll probably still be above last year but hopefully we can recover that later in the year. We had some legal expenses this past year that hopefully we don’t have in the year ahead and some stuff like that. We’re trying hard to hold the expenses to the level they had last year. There was a big increase from 06 to 07 as we staffed up in marketing operations and so on. For example, there’s an office building we leased that we’re outfitting the inside of and we haven’t gotten that done as fast as we had hoped and it’s not a big number of our own expenditures because there’s tenant improvements associated with the lease. In the meantime we’ve got people in temporary office space that we’ve had to lease so hopefully our rent expense this year is less than it was last year. And legal expenses hopefully are less and we hope to hold the payroll at approximately where it is today.
Celeste Brown – Morgan Stanley
And then what do you think the EBITDA L’Auberge would have been without all of the disruption and the comp issues in the fourth quarter?
Daniel R. Lee
It probably cost us a couple million bucks in the quarter prior to EBITDA.
Celeste Brown – Morgan Stanley
And then do you think you can make any EBITDA in 2008 with the issues going on in Reno?
Daniel R. Lee
We just changed the GM there. Our GM from New Orleans has been one of our better GMs moved up there replacing somebody who had been there 30 years. He’s gone through just in the last couple of weeks the payroll looking carefully at the amount of staffing we need to have and we’ve made some adjustments there. The guest rooms have gotten pretty beat up, we are going to refurbish the rooms this year. And the other thing is Reno is very summer seasonal so the goal there is always not to lose more in the winter than you make in the summer. I think we’ll not only have EBITDA for the year but I think we can do better than last year especially as we get the better rooms on line. That property used to make $20 million a year before they had all the unique casinos in California. I don’t think we get back to that but I think we can go from a big percentage improvement over 3.5% but that’s not going to move the needle for the company.
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