Crown Resorts’ James Packer Secures Land For Las Vegas CasinoAustralian Billionaire To Finally Make Debut On Vegas Strip |
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Australian billionaire James Packer is looking to build a casino-hotel on the Las Vegas Strip.
Packer, owner of Australia’s Crown Resorts, has paid $260 million for a controlling stake in land that once hosted the New Frontier Hotel & Casino. The site is located across from Wynn Las Vegas.
“You can’t be in the gaming industry and not have a special reverence for Las Vegas—that’s where it all began,” Packer said in a statement. “As we have built Crown Resorts into a thriving international company with successful casino ventures in Australia, Macau, and London, we’ve always kept our eye on Las Vegas. And while we fell short in past attempts to enter that market, we now have the ideal opportunity.”
Ground is expected to be broken during 2015, and the project is expected to be completed in 2018.
Packer lost nearly $2 billion on casino investments in the U.S. thanks to the 2008 crisis.
He reportedly was recently vying for an opportunity to purchase the Cosmopolitan Las Vegas from Germany’s Deutsche Bank, but the casino was sold to a real estate firm for $1.73 billion.
Packer has partnered with a former president at Wynn Las Vegas for the project.
The Las Vegas Strip is rebounding nicely from the Great Recession. In addition to Packer, a casino from Malaysia-based Genting, on the site of the unfinished Echelon project, is in the pipeline. A renovated casino on the site of the former Sahara Hotel & Casino also opens this year.
Even though it’s just a 4.2 mile piece of road, the Las Vegas Strip accounted for roughly $6.5 billion of the state’s overall gaming revenue in 2013. This year, Strip revenues are continuing the upward trend, and it will likely see its fifth-straight year-over-year gain.
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