As The Turnberrys Turn

Lately the fine folks at Turnberry Towers have been taking out quarter-page ads in the Review-Journal aiming at jumpstarting sales in the second high-rise condo building off Paradise Road just south of Sahara Avenue. They're doing tours from Wednesdays to Saturdays from 7:30-10:30 p.m. so people can fall in love with the night views. Yet I wondered if the ad in particular above could have some serious truth-in-advertising problems with it.

Go on, take a good look. You see what's missing? When I showed this to Miles, his first response was, "Encore." And I hadn't noticed that, but he's right. Which puts this photo of the fabulous views available at TT at about four years old.

But much more importantly, the never-to-be-finished behemoth known as the stalled Fontainebleau isn't there yet. That's important because with the F'bleau in the, uh, picture, whatever little remaining ability to see the Strip. In fact, here's the actual view that TT is now selling:


It's a minor issue, really, but it caught my eye. They're advertising "million-dollar views" when the views have changed since they were going for a million dollars and the imagery doesn't account for that.

That said, I did go off to check it out last night after a lovely dinner with fill-in co-host David McKee of the Stiffs & Georges blog and his girlfriend, Jennifer, the yummy, underrated Cafe Heidelberg. And while the advertisement might be a little off, even the blocked view is pretty and the prices are, undeniably ridiculous.

Turnberry Towers was the second act of Turnberry Associates, who built the successful Turnberry Place set of towers that sparked the ill-fated Strip high-rise building boom. The first tower was finished in 2007 and nearly sold out, but the second tower was done by late 2008 and the developer went bust the next year and the whole project ended up controlled by Prudential Financial.

Now they're having a fire sale. The fellow last night showed me the units and they're impressive, especially at these ridiculous prices.

This is the 6th floor 1-bedroom, which has 814 square feet. The same unit in the first tower sold for $575,000. This one can be yours for...


...$225,000. Likewise, a 32nd floor 1,405-square-foot 2-bedroom that sold in the first tower for $740,000 is now on the market in the second tower for $300,000.

Of course, I'm so over-leveraged with my own worthless investment properties that all I could do was marvel and privately sulk. Well, that and...


have some chicken on a stick. Sigh.

Vegas second-home market piece in NYT

I've got a big piece in the Escapes section of today's New York Times, a look at what's happened to the condo market on the Strip and where people are buying second homes these days. (Hint: Not on the Strip.)

I'm scheduled to be on KNPR at about 10:30 a.m. PT to discuss the piece and the matter. Listen live at knpr.org or catch the podcast version later.

Lake Las Vegas Goes Bust

Following on my LVW column's theme of questioning the idea of having anti-Vegas vacations in Vegas at such places as the Trump, there's news tonight that Lake Las Vegas Resort has declared for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

This actually isn't really so much a tourism story as a real estate one. They just haven't sold enough of the homes and, in this market, they likely won't for the near future. This press release linked here indicates that the region's owners took control in January after the prior owners defaulted on $540 million in loans last year. The new operators insist that this will "reinvigorate Lake Las Vegas as a premier master-planned community." Okey dokey.

I've always been baffled by the resorts out there and why anyone would come to Vegas for a lakefront vacation. Montelago Village, the shopping district, has been utterly empty whenever we've been down there. I had taken to referring to the Starbucks down there as the lowest-grossing Starbucks in North America and have been waiting to see if it'll be one of the 600 closed in the coffee giant's restructuring. We shall see...

News Flash: Vegas Real Estate Sucks

The Las Vegas Sun featured an excellent front-page piece today by Liz Benston on a lawsuit by 40 owners of MGM Mirage's Signature condo-hotel units complaining that their rental incomes aren't coming close to covering the huge monthly mortgage payments and condo fees.

It's a fascinating situation because as my dad and I grumble over paying the mortgage each month on our Panorama Towers unit with little evidence that we're close to selling it, we keep looking with envy at these other business models -- Signature, Trump, Cosmopolitan and many of the CityCenter options -- and thinking that at least those people stand a chance to defray their costs while waiting for the miserable real estate climate to recover.

It did seem like a good plan, except that folks in Benston's piece remind us that the casino's motives for filling hotel rooms can be quite different than a landlord or hotelier's. That is, the hotel will rent the rooms for below cost -- sometimes at $99 a night -- just to get the warm bodies into the building to spend money on the other casino amenities. Oh, and MGM Mirage gets about half the revenue from the rental, too.

The lawsuit, I suspect, has little merit. The contracts for all of these things are loaded with disclaimers and the MGM Mirage one, evidently, is no exception. Heck, Panorama Towers was a full year late in delivering our unit and then failed to fix the damaged things we spotted on our walk-thru for longer after our closing than they had promised. And yet there's no murmurs about suing, even though had we gotten our unit on time in the summer of 2006 when real estate was still a strong market, we probably would've done decently.

One of the odd bits in this piece are the owners who complain they were tricked when a salesman claimed that "the value of their units would likely increase as future towers were built and sold." That claim would seem to run contrary to common sense, no? More, newer units would leave older units in the dust, wouldn't they?

One thing the piece does not address is whether this outcome -- the lack of revenue for landlords and the stilted contracts favoring casinos and their owners -- will soften demand
for similar units over at CityCenter. It would seem that soft demand for condo-hotel over there could create a serious cash-flow issue for MGM Mirage. And, even worse, how would this impact the planned second Trump tower?

Incidentally, two loyal readers/listeners, Rob and Suzie from Florida, chatted on "The Strip" on the Dec. 27 episode about their stay at the Signature, rating it better than their experiences at Wynn and Bellagio. It's worth a listen, and their part begins just past the 1-hour mark in the show. As a tourist experience, if not an ownership experience, they really loved it.

Our Pie In The Sky

Note: Click on all pictures to enlarge

One day in December 2004, my friend Adam IMs me. He'd put his name on the list for a Panorama Tower unit and his name had come up. Did I want to go in on it with him and his father?

Panorama Towers is (for now) a pair of blue glass high-rise condos directly west of the Bellagio and CityCenter on the other side of Interstate 15. (Two more towers are planned.) This was the height of the housing boom, when everything seemed assured to turn to gold, and Panorama had the added credibility of having its first tower already peeking out of the ground. CityCenter had yet to be announced, a dozen other high-rise condo projects in Vegas had yet to collapse and all I knew was that the money I was socking away in my IRA, Roth IRA and SEP accounts each year was doing little for me in the markets.

Adam, then a Vegas-based journalist as well, seemed to know what he was doing. And he was rather surprised when I said, "Sure" with very little research. But then he ran into a problem; his dad, who controlled his savings, didn't want to do it. As the Adam dithered, the unit he was on the list for was sold to someone else.

While we were considering it, I drew my own dad into the mix. He did a thorough investigation and decided it was, in fact, a pretty great opportunity. And so, when the Panorama folks called Adam a week later to say that another unit was available, he passed along the opportunity to me and, along with my father and one of his friends, we bought in.

Thirty months later -- about eight months longer than we had expected -- our unit is done. (Above is the lobby.) And this morning, Miles and I did a thorough inspection of the gorgeous 22nd floor Strip-view 950-sq-ft unit to point out any imperfections that would need repair before we closed and actually received the keys. There were some minor things - a small dent here, a short piece of carpet there -- and all are easily fixable.



That said, it was something of a thrill to walk into what had until now been a theoretical space in a construction site we'd pass by now and then and wonder about. What was delivered was exactly what they promised -- a sensational location and a view that will only get better.

We continue to debate how to proceed, whether to sell it immediately and take our profits or to rent it. This morning, Miles and I even thought about possibly living there ourselves, a long-shot but not entirely out of the question. It is, though, a little small for us. And the neighborhood has a ways to go before it's particularly livable. But there is an In-N-Out about a half-mile down the street, so that and a 7-11 is really all Miles needs.

Anyhow, I thought I'd share these photos so that you all -- and my father and his friend, my business partners -- can see it.