Inside Asian Gaming

inside asian gaming October 2015 22 Cover Story development cost), analysts predicted there wouldn’t be another of its kind for at least a decade. The site for Resorts World Las Vegas kind of says it all. The seller, Vegas-based Boyd Gaming, had owned and operated the Stardust there before blowing up the venerable resort to make way for a $4 billion extravaganza called Echelon that was scrapped when the recession hit, leaving parts of a windblown superstructure that—like the vacant land next door where the old Frontier was torn down for the abortive Plaza Las Vegas, and across the street where the shell of the Fontainebleau stands, 68 unfinished stories high—haunts the north end of the Strip with memories of that era of “irrational exuberance,” as it’s characterized now, that collapsed in 2008. James Packer’s Crown Resorts lost around $1 billion in the crash on investments in the Fontainebleau and a megaresort of its own that never got built. But Crown is back as part of a joint venture with Los Angeles-based investment group Oaktree Capital with plans to erect a luxury casino hotel at a cost of upwards of $1.9 billion, Alon Las Vegas, it’s called, at the Frontier site. On Sahara Avenue, along a less traveled area west of Las Vegas Boulevard, a local condominium developer is marketing EB-5 visas to Chinese investors interested in a piece of the Lucky Dragon, a boutique resort with 200 hotel rooms slated to open in 2016 as “an authentic Asian cultural and gaming experience” featuring a 19,000-square-foot casino offering baccarat, sic bo, pai gow and fan tan and promising feng shui-friendly VIP rooms. Las Vegas is considered economically depressed, which under the EB-5 program means investors willing to commit $500,000 or more to the city may qualify for legal residency. Industry veteran Andrew Klebanow, Macau peaked in 2013 at $45.2 billion in gaming revenue, 60% of it VIP. It was the high water mark for baccarat on the Strip. Revenue totaled $1.58 billion that year, a 16.6% increase over 2012. It would fall 6.4% in 2014.