After the coronavirus outbreak turned daily life upside down and turned the Strip into a ghost town with closed casinos and boarded-up buildings, Las Vegas developer Brett Torino said he had talks about buying land for another project in the eerie quiet resort corridor added.
About a year later, Torino has now acquired a small piece of land in the CityCenter for a huge sum on which a retail complex is to be built. And with the introduction of vaccines and the return of daily life to normal, the once-shattered tourism industry in southern Nevada has quickly come back to life.
“You can see this recovery happening very quickly in this market,” said Torino.
Turin and the New York developer Flag Luxury Group signed a contract on April 26 to acquire 2 hectares on the southwest corner of Las Vegas Boulevard and Harmon Avenue next to the luxury shopping center Shops at Crystals for around 80 million US dollars .
The sale – by MGM Resorts International and its partner in the sprawling CityCenter complex, the state-owned holding company Dubai World – was completed on June 8th.
The site housed the now dismantled, structurally flawed Harmon hotel tower and is across from the intersection of Harmon Corner, a three-story retail complex that Torino and Flag Luxury developed about a decade ago.
Torino, owner of Torino Companies, said in an interview Tuesday that the new four-story project will cover approximately 200,000 square feet and that it is expected to open by September 2022.
Calling it Project63, he says he and Flag Luxury boss Paul Kanavos were both 63 years old when he named it, but noted it could change.
Torino, who began working in the Las Vegas real estate industry in the early 1970s, sat down with the Review Journal to discuss his latest plans for the Strip.
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Has MGM placed any restrictions on what you can do on the site?
We actually designed it hand in hand with everyone at MGM and their partner, the Dubai Group. CityCenter is a beautiful complex; They just wanted to be sure that what was on their doorstep complemented the rest of the facility. We bought it for this reason and we fully respected it for this reason.
What else was you interested in about the site?
I’ve been doing business on the strip for nearly 30 years now. Once you get to know the business down there, it’s fascinating. It is one of the most competitive real estate markets in the world. You are dealing with people who are razor sharp. When COVID hit – I’ve known (MGM President and CEO) Bill Hornbuckle for 40 years now – I asked Bill, is there any way I could do something on your website? He put me in touch with her partner at Dubai World and we started a discussion. I never thought MGM would sell it. I just thought it was part of the CityCenter complex and I thought they’d want to keep control of it.
Obviously, you didn’t get a discount on the offer; it was about $ 40 million an acre, which could be a record for a vacant lot on the Strip. Talk about the purchase price and what it reflects.
To be honest, there are no usable 2 acres on this site. The difference, however, is that you have the entire CityCenter underworld under this property. So, yeah, a lot of money, yeah, you don’t get usable 2 acres, but you have a fair amount of infrastructure on the ground floor – distribution facilities, garbage collection, parking lots, utilities. It’s part of a huge complex that we’re hooking into.
Stockbroker Michael Parks told me that in addition to renting out retail space on the premises, you can also sell advertising space outside the building, like you do on the large LED screen at Harmon Corner. Is that something you are planning on doing on this project?
The existing board at Harmon Corner is approximately 18,000 square feet. This board at Project63 will be between 5,000 and 6,000 square feet. The vision was that we will have two spectacular LED screens so that we can make optimal use of our national customers and advertise at the same time.
So you can sell space in both corners at the same time?
Absolutely.
Can you talk about the tenants you are looking for in Project63? Would it be luxury retailers like Crystals or cheaper shops?
It’s going to be a step up from Harmon Corner and likely a step down from Crystals. Harmon Corner is and has been very successful for the tenant base we have there. Project63 will be an upgrade, but we don’t want to compete with Crystals. We’re already over 50 percent pre-released at 63, but I can’t start getting into the names.
Long before the pandemic, brick and mortar retailers across the country had a tough time, including Las Vegas. Why does the strip look so different? Is it just because you have a lot of people every day?
That’s one aspect of it. Retailers want flag options on the Strip. You want that exposure; they are willing to pay for it. If you went to Crystals and looked at the luxury brands during COVID, there were lines of people waiting up to an hour and a half to shop in the stores. The average Las Vegas customer will come here and spend those retail dollars. It’s just nature. Las Vegas won’t go away. COVID has not changed that.
It certainly closed it down for a while.
Sure indeed. Absolutely. All of our tenants stayed open on the strip, but of course we had to help them and wanted to do anything for them. But they come back strong. In the worst of times, they were between a third and half of their usual sales. Now their sales are back to 2019 levels.
Have you ever taken a walk or ride down the Strip when everything was closed just to see what it looked like? What do you remember?
I hope we don’t see any more of these. It’s scary. In a very surreal sense, it’s very nice, but as a businessman, it’s not very nice. I rode my bike up and down the strip; it’s just a very scary event.
Contact Eli Segall at esegall@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0342. Follow @eli_segall on Twitter.
