A banner? You gotta have citycenter of course. Use one of the nice pictures from this page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_City_Center
Cosmopolitan is pretty nice as well to round out the hotels.
For condo towers, world view tower  and maybe Tommy Rocker Tower. (use the image on the website which looks straight up at it from street level)
Trump would be good too but I don't really like his golden look.
Might as well post some interesting construction related articles for today:
Brokers lose money and time after high-rise project plans vanish
Broker Beverly Lacey worked to sell luxury condos in Krystal Sands and Aqua Blue before the projects went bust. Trump International tower, seen here under construction, has a payment structure in place for brokers. Therefore, one broker calls the project the best in town.
Quote:
Beverly Lacey will show high-rise luxury condos to clients if that's what they want to see, but she feels obligated to warn them of the challenges and pitfalls exposed by Las Vegas projects that have fallen by the wayside.
Lacey, owner and broker of Vertical Vegas, said she was heavy into sales at Krystal Sands and Aqua Blue last year when developers canceled the projects. It cost her about $200,000 in commissions.
Advertisement
"Sometimes a dose of reality is a good thing," she said. "You've got to roll with the punches. Yeah, I ate it for a couple hundred thousand in commissions, but you have to move forward."
Lacey is among a handful of brokers who worked long hours catering to clients and building relationships with developers only to be left hanging over defunct projects such as Krystal Sands, Aqua Blue, Hard Rock Hotel, Ivana Las Vegas, and Icon.
Several lawsuits alleging breach of purchase contract have been filed on behalf of buyers as a result of the Las Vegas high-rise fallout.
Most brokers will never see payment. High-rise failures in Las Vegas reverberated to Wall Street, where financial institutions have become more leery about making construction loans. The failures have also put a crimp in brokers' bank accounts.
"In this market, you look for things that are going to happen," said Todd Grotstein, director of high-rise division for Prudential Americana. "One of the things you look for is if the developer is willing to pay commission to the brokers. If you look at the ones that did not go, consistently most of the ones that did not move forward never paid a dime in commissions."
That's why Grotstein thinks Trump International tower behind the Frontier hotel on the Strip is one of the best projects in town.
Trump has a payment structure in place for the standard 3 percent broker commission, starting with 1 percent paid within 30 days of executing a sales contract and taking a reservation deposit. Brokers get another 1 percent a year later when buyers enter a "hard contract" with 10 percent nonrefundable deposit. The final installment will be paid at the close of escrow.
Trump has paid nearly $9 million in commissions to brokers so far, said Jack Christie, director of the sales at the 64-story, 1,282-unit tower that's taking shape on the Strip. He said 90 percent of sales have come from outside brokers such as At Home Realty, Ezra International and Prudential Americana.
"We started to hear about unrest, about brokers not being paid," Christie said. "We amended our broker agreement so that if a buyer cancels and forfeits their deposit, we do not charge back the broker for fees already paid. That was very well received. To be honest, we keep the 10 percent deposit, pay the brokers 2 percent, keep 8 percent and turn around and sell it again."
Bruce Hiatt, owner and broker of Luxury Realty Group in Las Vegas, said he only sells condos that pay advance commissions early in the process; commissions are nonrecourse, meaning they don't have to be paid back if the project fails; the time period from reservation to signed contract by the developer is less than four months; and the first advance fee is paid within two months of signing the contract.
"Very few can play in that game," Hiatt said. "This way we don't waste our time and we earn at least part of the commission if the project doesn't go forward. It's time the high-rise developers realize the game rules have changed and luxury high-rise brokers are onto the game of the land flippers."
Hiatt said he felt misled by developers who used his time and services to pump up the value of their land to flip it. Such situations caused agents to "lose face" with their buyers, many of whom became disenchanted with Las Vegas after their negative experiences.
Lacey managed to salvage a few clients from Krystal Sands after Florida developer Freddie Schinz sold the 3-acre site to Turnberry Associates and walked away with $46.5 million profit. She put them in the Hard Rock expansion instead.
Developers now have to convert 60 percent to 75 percent of reservations to hard contracts to get construction financing, Hiatt said. He won't help them achieve that goal if they don't pay advance commissions.
"The two I applaud in Las Vegas are Trump and Sky Las Vegas," Hiatt said. "You truly have to investigate these projects to see if they're real. Each project has a different reason for us to recommend a caution notice to our clients."
A number of top-producing brokers got stung when Related Las Vegas canceled Icon in January, said Paul Murad, developer of the proposed Gateway Las Vegas high-rise in downtown Las Vegas.
Some of the brokers had purchased units and were anticipating appreciation gains. Others had clients who bought at Icon and they were counting on commissions and making purchases based on future earnings, Murad said.
"Realtors were confident that their payday would arrive because companies like Related seldom cancel publicly announced projects," he said. "The buzz Icon created was heard from Miami to San Diego and even from South America and Europe."
Once Icon's cancellation occurred, the Las Vegas Realtor community discouraged clients from buying in another Related project, Las Ramblas on Harmon Avenue. In response, Related increased commissions to 4 percent -- a first in the local high-rise condominium market. Other developers have followed suit, some offering commissions of 5 percent or 6 percent, Murad said.
Las Ramblas, backed by actor George Clooney, also failed and the land was recently acquired by Las Vegas-based Edge Resorts for $202 million.
|
Meet the new kings of the Strip
Quote:
BY IAN MYLCHREEST
BUSINESS PRESS
Real estate developers are looking for a few good operators -- casino operators, that is. Just in case you hadn't noticed, the big push for Strip development, and even some of the stuff that's been happening downtown, has created a huge business opportunity.
More and more hotel companies and developers are looking to be landlords and not casino moguls. This is nothing new but regulators will have to rethink the current policy.
Now real estate is king on the Strip. And more and more, it is men with the souls of real estate developers who are taking over. Skeptical? Look at some recent developments ...
Ian Mylchreest
The MGM Mirage buyout of Mandalay Bay was a classic real estate play. In the old days, casinos competed with exotic entertainment, cool atmosphere, loose slots and cheap food. That made sense when every 400 yards a tourist walked on the Strip brought him or her to a new property. If you start at the Four Seasons, you have to walk a few miles now before you even get anywhere that isn't an MGM Mirage resort.
Just like you want to buy the yellow and the green and the blue properties on the Monopoly board, MGM wanted to make it very hard to go anywhere on the south end of the Strip without landing on one of the company's squares.
But MGM is still playing by the old rules; it still thinks that the casino is a revenue center. But lots of the new players do not.
Analysts have long been saying it's not just about the casino anymore. Room rates, entertainment, golf, swimming pools, food and just about everything else were originally used as incentives to get people to play in the casino. The casino was the only profit center.
Then casino companies figured out that they should be making all the other stuff pay as well. With the right branding and marketing, it's worked.
What is different about the new players is that they're happy to cash in on the real estate value of the Strip and cash in on the brand loyalty of hotel customers but leave the casino business to somebody else.
We hardly noticed a few years ago when J.W. Marriott declined to get into slots and cards and left Millennium Gaming to create the Rampart Casino at its Summerlin resort. Well, that was just a company policy.
But then came the Westin Casuarina. Again, a strong hotel brand wanted a piece of the Las Vegas action. So it bought the old Maxim and renovated that sad-looking hotel. Now it can offer its loyalty customers a location near the Strip with the ultra-comfortable beds for which it wants to be famous. And it brought in a casino operator to run its relatively small gaming operation.
Now that model is rapidly expanding. In the past 12 months, we've seen Barrick Gaming disappear from the scene. In its wake emerged Tamares, a Liechtenstein-based corporation whose interest in downtown was apparently a real estate play. It owned the land under the casinos Barrick operated.
When that company left the scene almost as mysteriously as it had arrived, Tamares emerged as the owner of the properties. It decided to get an operator for the casinos rather than go through the licensing process, which might have raised questions about its investments in what it euphemistically describes as "technology development" and "manufacturing." One of its products is a self-propelling howitzer. Its investments are private and it preferred to keep them that way, so it would not expose itself to the licensing process.
Morgans Hotel Group has also decided to bring in a casino operator for the recently acquired Hard Rock. Its business is upscale, boutique hotels and it's sticking to it. Meanwhile, it will outsource the casino.
Last week, we saw the latest development in the stretching of this loophole that allows owners to deploy licensed casino operators. Real estate developer, Concord Wilshire Partners, has teamed with the publisher of "Maxim" to brand a new hotel with the name of the magazine. It's famous for short articles, frat-boy humor and models that look like they've walked off a shoot for Victoria's Secret.
But it's not the brand that's the problem; it's the developer.
Concorde Wilshire Chairman and CEO Steve Sirang was convicted of wire and bank fraud in 1987. That kind of felony would kill any chances of a gaming license. So again the solution is to hire an operating company.
But what about the rest of the deal? Maxim is being paid millions of dollars in fees and operating revenue for the use of its brand. That's the free market. If Concord thinks it's worth it, let it pay it.
Now, however, convicted felons can get a major piece of a Strip casino as a real estate play and it's legal to install a licensed operator. But the outlines of this deal show how easily the Gaming Commission's licensing regime can be circumvented by "branding" and "leasing" agreements.
Operators are necessarily captives of the landlord. What is to stop a collusive agreement between the two that would effectively siphon off gaming money as unusually high rent payments? A branding agreement can easily be used to do the same.
There is not the least suggestion that anyone has done this or is even planning it.
The system was not, however, supposed to work like this. In the old days, a casino license was a license to print money and it still pretty much is. A number of companies have decided, however, that it's not worth the time and trouble to actually go through the licensing process and all they need do is find a willing operator.
Both the Gaming Commission and the next Legislature will have to deal with this unanticipated consequence of rising Strip real estate prices. They should do it soon before operating agreements become the means by which the unlicensable skim money from casinos.
|
Check out JMA Arch's new updated site.
A new project is called Harmon Plaza:
http://www.jmaarch.com/hospitality.htm
Last edited by Reverie; Jun 15, 2006 at 2:26 AM.
|