Retail development could fill former New Frontier site
It’s a 20-year-old question that investors have spent billions trying to answer: What, if anything, can get built on the former site of the New Frontier?
Experts speculate that a new retail center could work, maybe a bigger version of the Park, MGM Resorts International’s $100 million district between New York-new York and Monte Carlo, with condos and apartments. Or even some kind of attraction, one similar to Topgolf or the High Roller Observation Wheel (though that’s been tried and abandoned too).
Almost anything could end up at the site on the Las Vegas Strip north of Spring Mountain Road, experts say, except a casino.
The problem with a casino, they say, is that there is little appetite among investors to put up the billions needed to build a resort that would have to compete with gaming giants such as Wynn Resorts, Las Vegas Sands Corp., Caesars Entertainment and MGM Resorts International.
About a month ago, the latest concept for a property, the Alon project, all but officially died when Crown Resorts Limited, the owners of the site, put the land up for sale for $400 million.
Alon had been a partnership between Crown Resorts and a local team headed by casino veteran Andrew Pascal. The project’s failure demonstrates how difficult it is to get a new large-scale resort built on the Strip.
“The Alon group was as good a team as any to execute a hotel-casino resort on the Strip, and they could not find the financing necessary to push that project into fruition,” said Mike Mixer, executive managing director of the Las Vegas office of commercial real estate company, Colliers International.
The recent past, gaming analysts say, will tell you all you need to know about the appetite investors have for building new Strip resorts, especially on the north Strip.
“It’s difficult to finance a multibillion-dollar project on the Strip given what the last few projects have done, including Citycenter and the Cosmopolitan,” said Fitch Ratings gaming analyst Alex Bumazhny. “Even though those projects have become profitable, looking at just the return on investment, it’s been disappointing. And those projects are in prime locations.”
But problems with the site go back even further than Alon, which is only the latest concept to be announced with fanfare and excitement just to fizzle out over