As you drive the Strip, stroll the sidewalks, or navigate the casinos, you can’t miss it: America’s wild gambling mecca is full of tourists again.
And while visitor traffic remains below pre-pandemic levels and the coronavirus outbreak is still a long way from being eradicated, casino investors are betting big that Las Vegas is back on track.
Of course, there are still many unknowns, even if the normally lucrative Las Vegas convention industry is back in full swing and the pandemic finally ends.
But Las Vegas has seen a multi-billion dollar breakout in resort sales this year, and developers have pushed plans for new hotels on and off the Strip.
Most recently, Florida developer Jeffrey Soffer announced on November 9th that he plans to open the 67-story Fontainebleau Las Vegas in the fourth quarter of 2023.
He started the North Strip project during the real estate rush in the mid-2000s, but the Fontainebleau went bankrupt after the economic crash and changed hands a few times before Soffer repurchased the unfinished skyscraper in February.
Station Casinos plans to break the ground for a $ 750 million resort in the southwest of the valley early next year, and developer Lorenzo Doumani has announced construction of a 720-room non-gaming hotel nearby in the first quarter of 2022 of the northern strip to begin.
In addition, the developers at Dream Las Vegas hope to break the ground with their 20-story hotel-casino near the southern edge of the Strip next year.
On the buyout side, Las Vegas Sands Corp. announced in March that it would rent The Venetian, Palazzo and the former Sands Expo and Convention Center for 6.25 billion billion and would lease them back.
In August, Caesars Entertainment spin-off Vici Properties announced the acquisition of more than $ 17 billion worth of another $ 17 billion casino landlord, MGM Resorts spin-off MGM Growth Properties, giving Vici real estate ownership of many of its largest hotels Casinos on the strip.
Additionally, New York financial giant Blackstone announced in September that it would sell The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas for $ 5.65 billion, nearly $ 4 billion more than its 2014 purchase price.
As part of the sale, MGM Resorts will acquire the operating side of Cosmo for more than $ 1.6 billion.
Further offers could be in preparation. MGM CEO Bill Hornbuckle recently said the company is in the “early stages” of selling the operations side of The Mirage, and Caesar’s entertainment boss Tom Reeg said the company is planning to sell one of its strip properties.
Of course, all this goings-on and action by no means guarantee that the Las Vegas tourism industry will soon fully recover from the severe economic consequences of the pandemic or that it will never face problems.
Still, the economy is in much better shape now than it was in the scary and chaotic Spring of 2020, when Nevada’s casinos were state-mandated and Las Vegas’ unemployment rate skyrocketed to over 30 percent.
At about this time, I took a bike ride – a leisurely one with little traffic – up and down Las Vegas Boulevard, taking a close look at the barricaded resort entrances, quiet sidewalks, and boarded-up retail buildings.
It was a once unthinkable landscape – and if someone said back then that companies would soon be spending a fortune buying and building casinos in Las Vegas, that would have been pretty unthinkable, too.
The review journal is owned by Dr. Miriam Adelson, the majority shareholder of Las Vegas Sands Corp.
Contact Eli Segall at esegall@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0342. Follow @eli_segall on Twitter.
