As some of the most expensive commercial real estate in the world it’s pretty common to see hundreds of millions of dollars flying around whenever someone wants to build a new hotel on the strip. What’s staggering is just how much those prices have varied over the years with the good times and the bad. Below we’ve compiled a look at just how finicky those prices have been over the course of 16 years in Vegas.
1998 – Two of the major land deals that happened this year were Phil Ruffin’s purchase of the New Frontier property for (25.5 Acres at $5.6M/Acre) and Steve Wynn’s purchase of a parcel of land (11.3 Acres at $10.1M/Acre).
2000 – This year Wynn would strike again with a much more reasonable purchase price when he bought the 220-Acre property that used to be the Desert Inn, paying “only” $1.2M per Acre.
2003 – The absolute highest price at the time paid for real estate on the Vegas Strip happened this year when retail developers bought a small parcel of land beside the Venetian to open a Walgreens. The price? An incredible $32.5M for the property that was only .64 Acres, working out to a per Acre price of $51M.
2004 – The first major transaction of 2004 was the purchase of the land that would become The Cosmopolitan (a $90M total deal with a price of $17.8M per Acre). The next deal of the year was for 3.6 Acres that was to become a condo development (which later went bust) at a price of $7.3M an Acre.
2005 – The Westward Ho is sold for $145.5M at a cost of $9.5M an Acre. Harrah’s buys the Imperial Palace for a total cost of $370M or $20.1M per Acre.
2006 – Harrah’s buys the Westward Ho land sold in 2005 for $279.9M or $18.4M per Acre, an $8.9M increase in the per Acre price from just a year before.
2007 – A ton of transactions happened in 2007 about a year before the recession hit the US and other parts of the world. Deals included MGM buying 25.8 Acres for $17.2M/Acre, SBE buying a 17.5 Acre parcel for $345M or $19.7M/Acre and a developer paying $180M for a 5.4 Acre parcel ($33.1M/Acre).
2010 – Two years after the recession had hit Vegas hard, a developer and a group of partners bought a 2.15 parcel of land on Harmon Avenue paying $25M or $11.6M per Acre.
2012 – The record breaking parcel of land that was acquired in 2003 for $51M an Acre to build a Walgreens is sold to Venetian/Palazzo for $71M, almost a $40M profit for the developer on the sale.
2013 – Genting Group purchases the land of the New Frontier for $350M or $4M/Acre. This same piece of land had sold for over $33M/Acre just 6 years earlier – talk about a bad return on investment.
Sources – Clark County Assessor, Las Vegas Sun