Resorts World Las Vegas News - Page 15

The past 10 years covering gaming nationally and internationally have been nothing short of a theme park thrill ride that Disney’s greatest designers couldn’t conjure.

Unlike the Strip, the locals market has been slow to embrace the state’s economic recovery.

Statewide, Nevada gaming revenue fell 3.7 percent in August, ending five straight months of increases.

Mark Clayton, 49, left Lionel Sawyer & Collins, one of the state’s oldest law firms, for a position with Greenberg Traurig, an international law firm with three-dozen offices worldwide.

This month’s sale of the former New Frontier site is giving market speculators new hope that resort corridor land transactions could again become active.

James Packer is forming a company with ex-Wynn Las Vegas President Andrew Pascal and investment firm Oaktree Capital Management to construct a hotel-casino on the 35-acre site where the New Frontier once was.

The old Sahara’s location at a somewhat desolate intersection at Las Vegas Boulevard and Sahara Avenue was a disadvantage, said SBE Entertainment CEO Sam Nazarian.

Bloomberg News Service reported Thursday that Australian billionaire James Packer had acquired a portion of the loan covering the 34.5-acre site and would consider building a hotel-casino on the land.

Genting Group's proposal to build Resorts World Las Vegas was approved during the meeting by the Nevada Gaming Commission.

“The most important economic data points are all trending in the right direction,” says Station Casinos Chief Financial Officer Marc Falcone, who spent more than a decade as a Wall Street analyst. “The only place we’re not seeing it is in gaming revenue.”

Malaysia-based Genting Group is expected to begin construction sometime in 2014 on the $2 billion-to-$7 billion Resorts World Las Vegas, returning construction activity to the 87-acre Echelon site that has sat dormant for almost five years.

Many of us long for the days when hotel-casino names on the Strip were Stardust, Sahara, Frontier, International, Barbary Coast, Aladdin, Dunes and Imperial Palace. OK, maybe not so much Imperial Palace.

The company expects to complete a landscaping project to hide the unfinished Strip resort by the end of December.

Boyd Gaming Corporation's original concept for the CityCenter-like Echelon project - five hotels of various sizes, a large casino, 750,000 square feet of convention space, 30 restaurants, 300,000 square feet of retail and entertainment amenities, all covering 87 acres - is not going to happen.

The Clark County Zoning Commission on Wednesday granted Boyd Gaming Corp. a six-year extension of time on the north Strip Echelon project.

Before the economy tanked and the Strip's building boom went bust, the development of multibillion-dollar hotel-casino projects centered on Las Vegas. Now those resorts are being built elsewhere.

Analysts don't expect Las Vegas or other U.S.-based gaming markets to experience the growth projected for Macau or Singapore. But the industry is cautiously optimistic that 2012 could be a bridge to stronger results in 2013.

A number of major casino projects in Las Vegas, including the Fontainebleau, are sitting dormant after construction was halted due to costs.

Boyd Gaming said it doesn’t expect to restart construction of the $4.8 billion Echelon project for at least three to five years.

In the past six months, not one worker has died.