AScAyA, FrOm PAge 1:
Mountaintop Mansion developMent gets new life
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he revived sales efforts come as other builders push ahead with plans for luxury housing tracts. In Summerlin, for instance, Howard Hughes Corp. and Discovery Land Co. are planning a 555-acre high-end community, with sales of lots and homes starting next year.
But luxury-home sales are slowing valleywide, and real estate pros are split on whether buyers will step up at Ascaya.
Cameron DeAngelo, owner of All Vegas Valley Realty, toured the site last month and said the project, south of Horizon Ridge Parkway off Roma Hills Drive, would be the “most prestigious luxury community in the valley.”
She expects wealthy foreigners to buy lots as second or third homes, as there aren’t enough locals who can afford it up there. The developers are imposing design restrictions to ensure buyers put up desert-themed, contemporary homes, and they want to prevent builders from buying up lots to flood the place with cookie-cutter mansions, DeAngelo said.
Developers on Aug. 1 listed for sale 11 of Ascaya’s 313 lots, according to DeAngelo. They are about a half-acre and cost $800,000 to $1 million each.
“To have the vision that (Cheng) did and assemble the land, and over the years chisel out this community, is remarkable,” she said.
Robyn Yates, owner of Windermere Prestige Properties, said she’s happy to hear Ascaya was back in business. But with the economy fragile, she is surprised the developers want to sell now.
Las Vegas’ luxury housing market improved dramatically last year, with 341 previously owned homes selling for at least $1 million each, almost double from 2012, according to the Greater Las Vegas Association of Realtors. But business is down this year, with 187 used milliondollar homes sold through midAugust, a pace of 302 deals for 2014.
In the meantime, there are plenty of lots available where people can build their own mansions, according to Yates.
“It doesn’t seem like there’s strong demand right now,” she said
evelopers might sell eight or 10 lots at Ascaya, but not 300, said architect Bob Fielden, of RAFI Architecture in Henderson.
“I don’t think so. Not until things really turn around,” he said.
Ascaya has been in the works for decades and long been controversial. Neighbors complained that the blasting shook their homes and cracked windows and foundations. Today, locals point to the empty lots as a painful reminder of Las Vegas’ building bust, the excesses of the boom years and a disregard of the valley’s natural beauty, as local mountain ranges are largely untouched.
“I thought it was rape and pillage when it was going on, and I don’t know that my perspective has changed,” Fielden said.
Cheng, the 67-year-old chairman of NWS Holdings Ltd., oversees an empire of tolls roads, power plants, water-treatment plants and container terminals, with investments in Hong Kong, Macau and mainland China.
Through his company W.L. of Nevada, Cheng began buying land in the Henderson mountains by 1990. Henderson city officials granted his group a zoning change in 1995, allowing two units per acre on the roughly 630acre development, and other zoning changes in 2004. At that time, the developers planned to build 472 single-family lots at the project, then called Crystal Ridge.
Cheng’s group reportedly drilled, blasted and hauled away 15 million cubic yards of solid rock, cutting at least 140 feet deep.It opened a sales office around 2008, after the economy began slowing, with plans to have the first house built in 2009.
However, the group reportedly suspended sales efforts that year, and since then, the project has sat untouched.