Viva Luxe Vegas
Las Vegas, home to extravagant casinos, posh restaurants and tony boutiques, is flaunting a new form of opulence: luxury housing.
After churning out thousands of inexpensive homes that transformed the Las Vegas Valley into one of the fastest-growing regions in the nation, developers are raising the stakes in the Nevada desert.
At a luxury high-rise project near the Las Vegas Strip, buyers are paying as much as $2.8 million for plush condos that promise to deliver dramatic views of the Vegas skyline with all the amenities of an upscale hotel and casino, including room service.
Within the walls of a gated country club community, meanwhile, $1-million production homes are expected to rise along the edge of the Red Rock Canyon Conservation Area, whose mesmerizing mountains tower above the development.
And at a man-made lake on the valley’s outskirts, custom lots intended for elaborate Italian-style villas are being sold by invitation only for up to $10 million apiece.
One developer is even claiming he’ll re-create Beverly Hills in suburban Henderson with a community made up entirely of expensive homes.
“It’s clear the market for high-end homes is growing in Las Vegas,” said John Karevoll, an analyst for Acxiom/DataQuick, a real estate information service. “It’s forging into new territory.”
The number of homes that sold for $1 million or more in Clark County doubled between 1995 and 1998 to 58, according to Acxiom/DataQuick.
“Every year prices in Vegas push higher and higher,” said Tim Sullivan of the Meyers Group, a consultant to new-home builders. “Part of it is a function of rising land prices, but it’s also because people are moving up and entering different life stages.”
The casino building boom of the last decade and the thousands of service jobs it has created are well known for contributing to a population explosion in Vegas.
Perhaps not as obvious are the business owners, professionals and casino executives whose numbers have also expanded.
Their success has helped fuel the trend toward fancier homes, as has an increasing number of national and international buyers in search of second, third or even fourth homes.
And it’s no coincidence, observers add, that the latter group’s arrival coincides with the opening of increasingly luxurious casinos that house their favorite swanky restaurants and designer boutiques.
New Wealth Fuels
Upscale Projects
“People are getting wealthier,” said Keith Schwer, director of the Center of Business and Economic Research at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. “There’s a segment of the population which is up-scaling both within Las Vegas and the rest of the United States who want to keep a home in Vegas.”
Builders are responding in a variety of ways, not the least of which is to build homes so beautifully designed that they draw national praise.
Luxury home builder Chris Stuhmer hit the jackpot with his Palisades neighborhood, which earned him the Home of the Year award at last year’s Pacific Coast Builders’ Conference. Situated on the west side of the city, Palisades offers homes that feature spacious outdoor courtyards with fireplaces and subtle water fountains.
“Within the last couple of years, we had one or two homes in the custom production area go over the $1-million threshold,” said Stuhmer, who heads Christopher Homes. “But now we’re seeing many more.”
Plans have also been drawn up for a resort in northwest Las Vegas, with a luxury housing component, where visitors can get a nose job or have their teeth capped at a “medical arts complex.”
“People from L.A. will be able to go to Vegas to get their cosmetic surgery done, just as people from Vegas used to travel to L.A.,” said Jack Sommer, who is developing the Mountain Spa resort.
Even home-building giant Del Webb, a company that has traditionally catered to the active seniors crowd with its Sun City communities, has weighed in with its Anthem Country Club in Henderson, where homes cost as much as $600,000.
“This is a big departure for us,” said Del Webb spokeswoman Sarah Thornton.
Though homes in that price range are common in Southern California, they mark a true up-scaling in Las Vegas, a housing market known for giving buyers much more for their money.
“The same house we build in Las Vegas for $260,000 you’d easily pay $500,000 to $600,000 for in Southern California,” said Leah Bryant, president of Kaufman and Broad Home Corp.’s Las Vegas Division.
Whether the market has the depth to support so many new luxury projects remains to be seen.
Las Vegas developer Joe Blasco, who master-planned Spanish Trail--a project frequently credited with jump-starting Vegas’ luxury home market--said that despite his project’s success, he has no plans to follow it up with another private country club community.
“When we started back in 1984, we were the only game in town,” Blasco said. “Then they started building more country clubs and big houses and private communities. Now there’s just too much competition.”
One man with experience at beating the odds when it comes to the market for luxury goods and services in Las Vegas is Henry Gluck.
As chairman of Caesars World, Gluck defied skeptics in 1992 when he successfully pulled off the Forum Shops at Caesars--an elaborate indoor shopping mall that brought Spago, the Palm and Versace together under one roof.
“The Forum Shops gave people a sense that we had really arrived,” Gluck said in an interview at his Bel-Air home.
Sites Range From the
Suburbs to the Strip
Hoping to elevate luxury living to another level, Gluck, now co-chairman of Transcontinental Properties, has turned his attention to Lake Las Vegas, a $5-billion project Transcontinental is developing with Sid and Lee Bass of Fort Worth, Texas.
When completed, Lake Las Vegas will feature, among other amenities, a Hyatt Regency hotel, a European-style casino, a pair of Jack Nicklaus golf courses and custom home lots costing up to $10 million, all surrounding a 320-acre man-made lake.
Production housing starts at $450,000 and will include trilevel waterfront homes costing as much as $1.8 million. Though skeptics question the project’s location--about 17 miles from the Strip in Henderson--Gluck views the distance as an advantage.
“Lake Las Vegas will provide the excitement of Vegas without all the visual overkill of the Strip,” he said. “It’s a place where people can escape the lights. . . . If they’re neon, we’re candlelight.”
By contrast, other developers are attracting Southern California buyers by capitalizing on Vegas’ glitter.
The Florida-based developers of Turnberry Place--the high-rise luxury condo project to be built across the street from the Las Vegas Hilton and where prices run from $355,000 to $6 million--estimate that half of their 118 sales to date have been to Southern California buyers, many in search of second homes.
They say their project, which will eventually include 750 units in four buildings and a nearly $30-million private club, is attracting a new breed of buyer to Vegas: empty-nesters in their 50s who lead active lives and frequently travel.
“Most of the housing being developed in Vegas is out in the suburbs,” said Jeffrey Soffer, vice president of Turnberry Associates. “That’s not what people from Los Angeles, New York and Chicago are looking for.”
The developers of Park Towers, another luxury condo project expected to rise near Paradise and Flamingo roads at Hughes Center, are betting that not all Las Vegans want suburban living either. Locals have made up around 90% of sales at Park Tower, where condos are selling from $720,000 to $2.4 million.
Prices are even steeper at Versailles, a luxury condo project fashioned after the Grand Palace of Versailles, France, where asking prices top off at $7.8 million.
And then there are the private country club communities, a number of which are being built along the valley’s outskirts on elevated parcels of land, affording distant views of the Strip.
Red Rock Country Club, where semi-custom production homes with stylish courtyards and exteriors ranging from $300,000 to $1.5 million, also has breathtaking views of the mountains in the Red Rock Canyon Conservation Area.
And it was the mountains that drew Don and Terri Conley to Red Rock Country Club, along with their 7-year-old granddaughter, Amber Vallardo. The project is on the west side of town in the master-planned community of Summerlin.
“I said if they ever built against those mountains, that’s where we would want to be,” said Don Conley, who owned his own insurance agency in Portsmouth, Ohio, before retiring 10 years ago.
Pitching to the
More Prosperous
So far, most buyers have been local professionals, according to the project’s developer, William Bone, who heads Sunrise Colony Co.
“Our customers are everybody who owns a business in the Yellow Pages,” said Bone, whose project also includes a pair of Arnold Palmer golf courses. “If they work for the people who own the businesses, they probably aren’t our customers.”
Developer Richard C. MacDonald, meanwhile, plans to create what he calls another Beverly Hills in the Nevada desert with his MacDonald Ranch Country Club.
“We don’t have an affordable segment in this community,” MacDonald said. “It’s not popular, but it’s realistic if the homes are going to maintain their value as they have in Beverly Hills.”
