For Las Vegas builders, things are
looking up
Skyline being transformed by wave of high-rise condo
towers
By Martin Wolk
Chief economics correspondent
With her five-bedroom penthouse suite 36 floors above
the Las Vegas Strip, vacation home in Newport Beach,
Calif., and listing in the Social Register, Frances
MacDonald is an unlikely candidate to be an urban
pioneer.
But she and her husband, Richard, who are both in their
80s, are in the vanguard of a new wave of wealthy Las
Vegas residents and visitors who are emboldening
builders to turn their sights to the sky in a city more
famous for sprawling into the desert.
The MacDonalds, developers themselves who rolled into
town in 1959 and proceeded to make a fortune by turning
thousands of desert acres into master-planned
communities, had lived for 15 years in one of the city’s
few existing high-rise apartment buildings when they saw
plans for a new development called Turnberry Place.
“I called them immediately and went to Florida to check
out the developer,” she said. “We were impressed.”
The couple sold their older penthouse apartment and
plunked down $2.1 million for a luxurious
6,500-square-foot suite MacDonald figures has more than
doubled in value just four years later. And she can’t
stop raving about amenities like "magnificent" 24-hour
security, bellmen to help with her luggage and a
private, members-only club with two dining rooms, a
piano lounge and weekly “mixers.”
“There is no comparison, really,” she said, referring to
her former apartment building.
Happy customers like MacDonald are one reason developers
are planning — or just dreaming out loud — about a wave
of luxury residential apartment towers fanning out from
the famed Strip, a trend that is likely to once again
reshape the skyline of a city well-known for its
frequent dramatic transformations.
“You are now seeing the next transformation or the next
re-creation of the Strip, and it’s going to be in this
verticality, this Manhattanization,” said John Ritter,
who develops master-planned communities around Las Vegas
as chief executive officer of Focus Property Group.
Up to 80 towers are in various stages of planning, and
while many will die on the drawing board, several have
been been completed, and others are under construction
or expected to be built in the next few years by some of
the nation’s biggest developers.
Among the projects:
Turnberry Place, a gated, guarded community with four
38-story towers featuring amenities like marble
Jacuzzis, premium appliances and a private club with two
dining rooms. Three towers have been completed, and all
777 units in the development have been sold at an
average price of $1.3 million, according to Bruce
Weiner, president of Florida-based Turnberry Associates,
which developed the project.
The Residences at MGM Grand, a set of three 40-story
hotel-condominium that is under construction near in
compound that includes the sprawling MGM Grand casino.
Without leaving the 116-acre “City of Entertainment,”
residents will have access to more than a dozen
restaurants, Cirque Du Soleil’s newest show “KÀ,” the
Studio 54 night club and an adults-only stage show
imported from Paris.
Trump International Hotel and Tower, the first Las
Vegas project in years from flamboyant East Coast
developer Donald Trump. Construction is scheduled to get
under way within two months on the 64-story hotel-condo,
according to a Trump spokesman. Buyers already have
reserved all 1,282 units planned for the $500 million
project, described by Trump as “super high-end.”
The trend to reach for the sky is an outgrowth of
rapid development that has seen population growth of
more than 5,000 people a month, a frenzied land grab for
some of the last big desert parcels open to development,
and average home prices that jumped an astounding 50
percent last year. And with land on the Strip going for
$12 million to $30 million an acre, developers have
little choice but to go for density if they expect to
make a profit on anything other than hotels or gambling.
The high rises also speak of a city that has matured and
now offers its 37 million annual visitors far more than
slot machines and blackjack tables — which they can
probably find a lot closer to home anyway.
The new projects appeal to visitors from southern
California who make Las Vegas their vacation home, as
well as “empty nesters” who want to be closer to the
bright lights and attractions of the city, said Marty
Burger, president of Related Las Vegas, which is
developing half-a-dozen major projects in the city.
“Where else can you go to a different restaurant every
night for 30 days or see a different show every night
for 30 days?” he said.
While the city’s increasingly vertical skyline may draw
comparisons with Manhattan, the high-rise condo towers
actually are following more of a south Florida model,
said Bruce Weiner, president of Turnberry Associates.
Weiner said Turnberry is hoping to duplicate what the
privately owned company did in south Florida beginning
in the late 1960s, when company founder Don Soffer
acquired 785 acres of swampland and proceeded to build
the mostly vertical city of Aventura, now one of the
state’s wealthiest communities.
Weiner said the market in Vegas wasn’t really viable
until the Strip moved upscale in the 1990s, beginning
with Steve Wynn’s Mirage and continuing with high-end
casino resorts like the Bellagio, Venetian and the
just-opened Wynn.
Still, when Turnberry announced plans for its first four
towers in 1998, many observers were skeptical, Weiner
said. Las Vegas had not seen a new residential tower in
25 years, and Turnberry’s initial sales office in a
double-wide trailer did nothing to dispel the doubts.
“People said, ‘Do you know how many people have been
into this town in a trailer?’” he recalled. “You had to
prove to the skeptic that you meant business.”
Now many of those skeptics have turned into believers,
leading to a new wave of development on the Strip.
Ritter, of Focus Group, figures that even if most of the
announced condominium towers are never built, developers
will invest $10 billion in the Strip over the next five
to seven years, on top of the $15 billion that has been
poured in since Wynn ushered in the latest boom by
opening the Mirage in 1989.
“It’s an unparalleled phenomenon,” he said. “Personally
I’ve never been a very big fan of the Strip. I’ve always
felt the Strip was a little bit trashy and tacky, but
that is really changing, and I think it will change
more.” |