Tom Reeg
Chief Executive Officer at Caesars Entertainment
Thanks, Bret. I'm going to provide some more color on the quarter where we are now and some conversations that I've had with investors over the last 30 to 60 days. Starting in Las Vegas, $558 million of EBITDA free the real lease payment is up almost 10% over the prior record in Vegas, which was last year's third quarter also post merger. Vegas, coming into the quarter, the monthly cash revenue -- hotel revenue record in Vegas was $91 million. We exceeded that in April, May and June, and we're on pace in 2022 to generate over $1 billion in cash room revenue in Vegas for the first time. Group business has come back extremely strong.
We're seeing wash rates at or below historical levels as the pent-up demand for business travel start to happen itself in Vegas. That was about a $200 million EBITDA business in the prior Caesars pre-foreign convention center. We're pacing about 40% above that as we sit here today. So obviously, with the addition of FORUM, which was not in operation pre-pandemic, but extremely strong results for us. The strength in Vegas has continued into the third quarter. You should expect to see kind of normal seasonality in August when it's just a little cooler than the surface of the sun. You should see -- expect to see occupancy track back to the mid-90s from the high 90s, but we'd expect to be back in the high 90s September and beyond, and that's what our forward bookings show us.
So Sean McBurney and his team in Vegas have done an absolutely fantastic job. We've done all of this with Caesars Palace torn up for most of the year with our front entrance work. That finishes in September. So in this quarter, we should be pretty well done with everything you've seen at the front entrance of Caesars, which should eliminate construction disruption there. We've opened Vanderpump and Nobu and Paris. And I'll be out for the Martha Stewart restaurant opening in a couple of weeks in Paris. So that property is transforming as well. So we're extremely excited about that. If you move to regionals, you still have the drag in Atlantic City. Caesars, in particular, is under heavy construction as you might be hearing from numerous others.
In a number of industries, it's difficult to bring in your construction projects on time, given supply chain issues. So we were hopeful that all that would have been done prior to 4th of July, the bulk of it should be done by the end of August. So you're seeing -- you should see Atlantic City numbers start to firm up. New Orleans is starting to track back toward where it was before, but still is a laggard among the regionals. And then Lake Charles will open before the end of the year. Remember that's about a $15 million LTM EBITDA drag, should be something north of a $65 million LTM swing once it opens. So we're excited about that. We've got it on the Atlantic City projects coming online.
We've got Horseshoe, Indianapolis and is less than a year into it and Hoosier Park with a similar table expansion, should come online towards the end of the year. So we're excited about the dollars that we've got out there and the returns that we're going to get on them. In terms of brick-and-mortar, obviously, there's a lot of discussion about the broader economic picture. My first point would be we've done what we've done in two consecutive quarters of falling DP. The average recession since the depression, I think, is 10 months. So we're hoping that we're -- for the end of this current environment.
But the consumer continues to hold up quite well for us. We've seen unrated play that has softened offset by strength in rated play particularly at the higher end of our database. We've seen international come back to Vegas really in the last four weeks, so we're excited about that. And obviously, the stimulus checks were a boom in last year's second quarter and early in the third. But July for us was -- July of '21 was our best month ever, and we're neck and neck with that in '22. Particularly harder to talk about Digital. Obviously, that's been a topic of conversation for a number of quarters. If you'll recall, we headed into last -- we closed the William Hill deal 100 days before the opening kickoff of NFL season. And when you do a U.K. acquisition, there's no prepping before close. You start from a standing start on day one.
Eric Hession, Chris Holdren, their team did a great job of standing up the app, getting our brand out there and making us competitive out of the box. As I said on the last call, we got to about 15% nationwide handle share, again, both states that we're in, states that we're not in. And our unaided awareness got to a point where we were comfortable pulling back on advertising spend. So we have pulled a planned hundreds of millions of dollars that we were planning to spend. We don't think our competitors have followed us, they're still spending. And our share has been stable. And if you look at our losses in the second quarter, each month improved on the month before.
So May was a smaller loss than April. June was a smaller loss than May. Obviously, we finished second quarter -- sorry, we finished July, two days ago, so I'm talking about preliminary numbers, but Digital for July was nearly breakeven for the company. So I would expect as we get into football season, which is clearly our acquisition period in this business, you're going to see some modest losses return as we acquire new customers. But given that we damn near turned profitable in July, I'm extremely confident that we will be a profitable business at least by the fourth quarter of '23.
And I view that business as we have made that -- I told you it was $1 billion through last quarter. So you've got to add the $69 million of losses in this quarter. I told you in last quarter's call that I'd expect us to end up at about $1.5 billion of cumulative EBITDA losses. It doesn't look like we will get near that $1.5 billion, the way the business is performing now. And so we are -- we want to prove the concept. We've proved we could carve out a significant piece of the business. Now we want to prove we can make a profit, and then we'll talk about fighting for additional share on the other side of that.
But we are extraordinarily pleased with where Digital is in a short period of time and really excited about this football season where we come in with our legs under us rather than running as fast as we can to keep up. So the last piece I want to touch on is leverage, which is a popular topic these days. We have a long track record. We do an acquisition and then we delever. And Bret has told you, while we were standing up Digital with those $1 billion of EBITDA losses in the trailing 12 months, we paid down $2 billion of debt. We expect to continue to pay down debt. If you look at this quarter, even with the Digital loss, we're at about $1 billion of EBITDA. We've got -- we have some capital that's coming online, some returns that are coming online.
The Digital business continues to improve. So if you just use -- and to be clear, I'm not giving any guidance. I'm looking at this quarter. If you look at a $4 billion business, our net debt -- lease adjusted debt is a little under $22 billion. So we're under 5.5 times levered today. We're generating somewhere between $1.5 billion to $1.75 billion of free cash flow. Now a lot of that is going into growth capital for the time being. But if you think about a recession, of course, you've seen how we behave in a recession, you saw how we behave in a pandemic.
The growth capital would start to shut off. But if you look at prior recessions, you're looking at a business that should be mid- to high single-digit revenue declines at worst in Regional, less in Vegas with what's going on now. If you run that at a 50% flow-through, we're still doing about $1 billion of free cash flow a year. So we feel very good about where we are leverage-wise. As you know, we have an ongoing sales process for the Vegas strip asset that's governed by the VICI agreements and ends about another month to run.
So I'm not going to provide play by play there, but know that we are in very good shape, balance sheet-wise. We would like to collapse the CRC bucket for those of you who follow our debt into our parent company. You should expect that we'd be exploring that as soon as the markets open up, and we'll be kicking maturities out as well. So we don't -- for all the hand-wringing about leverage and balance sheet all of a sudden, we really don't stress about that at all. We feel very good about the position we're in and where we're headed going forward.
So those are my prepared remarks, let me flip it to the operator for questions.
