Mark’s Las Vegas Blog - Your Source for Vegas Info

It was announced this week that Boyd Gaming would suspend work on the huge Echelon Place project on the Las Vegas strip for at least a year. In case you haven’t seen it it’s the massive construction project going up where the legendary Stardust used to be. It’s really not a big surprise, seeing how the local economy has been lately.

Things are a bit off lately, but not nearly as bad as the reports have made it out to be. But between the CityCenter, Encore, Fountanbleu, Cosmopolitan, and Echelon, something had to give. They’re calling it a suspension in production, to pick up again sometime in 2009. But I feel it’s gonna be a lot longer than that.

Look what happened with the Plaza project. They bought the land the New Frontier was on, for a record Las Vegas strip land price, over $33 million an acre. Couldn’t close it and tear it down fast enough. Then the financing fell through, plus the battle over the Plaza name. Things are at a standstill. So we’re gonna have a big empty lot for a long time where a casino that was owned outright and was a moneymaker (albeit a older one) once stood.

There’s also been several issues with financing of the Cosmopolitan and it’s still not known if it’s really gonna be finished. Add the other places I previously mentioned and that’s THOUSANDS of new hotel rooms coming online. And they’re high-end rooms, not Motel 6 stuff. Plus all the retail shops, shows, restaurants, and hotel staff needed to keep these joints running. We’re having trouble keeping the rooms we have now full.

I’m feeling that we’ll never see opening day at Echelon. We’ll be looking at the skeleton structure and empty cranes for a long time to come.  Dozens of projects have fallen through here before, nothing new about that. But none that were 1/4 built. Really makes you miss the Stardust even more now doesn’t it?

Filed under: Real Estate, Vegas