Las Vegas: Commissioners greenlight Tilman Fertitta's proposed "high-end" casino-resort on the Strip

Clark County commissioners have given Houston mogul Tilman Fertitta the green light to develop a towering casino resort on the Las Vegas Strip. The commission approved the billionaire’s plans on Wednesday, which call for a 43-story, 2,420-room project in the casino corridor.

The upscale resort is set to be located at the southeast corner of Las Vegas Boulevard and Harmon Avenue. It will include restaurants, convention space, a spa, a wedding chapel, an auto showroom and a roughly 2,500-seat theater, in addition to suites and villas, VIP salons, and a bar and lounge for high-limit gamblers.

Project representative Rebecca Miltenberger, an attorney with Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, told commissioners Wednesday that the development would be a “high-end” casino resort. “We are very excited to bring this project to fruition over the next two years,” she said, as reported by Las Vegas Review-Journal.

Fertitta, owner and CEO of Fertitta Entertainment, purchased the roughly 6-acre site in June for $270 million in a deal that included the Tex Mex Tequila Bar & Grill building, souvenir shops, and a closed 1960s-era Travelodge motel. There have been no official reports yet on when the mogul plans to start demolishing existing buildings on the project site.

Resort plans call for high-end dining, a 37,000-square-foot spa and fitness center, plus about 91,000 square feet of convention facilities. David Katz, casino analyst at financial services firm Jefferies, told Review-Journal that this is a “big-ticket purchase” to enter the Strip, stating it would cost around $3 billion to build a competitive resort from the ground up.

While the Houston mogul has owned downtown Las Vegas’ Golden Nugget for years, the proposed Strip property would expand his projects to the heart of the gambling mecca. Fertitta’s corporate empire spans dozens of restaurant brands, the NBA’s Houston Rockets, multiple casinos and more.

The proposed resort property has been referred to as Center Strip so far, reports News 3. The company putting forward the project, POLV, LLC, lists Fertitta as its president. While a start date for construction has not been officially announced, an application with Clark County is tentatively listed for March 2023.

The project comes as Las Vegas Boulevard experiences a return of tourism and plenty of new sales and construction plans. Among them was MGM Resorts’ sale of the Aria and Vdara resorts to financial giant Blackstone for nearly $3.95 billion last year; and MGM’s acquisition of The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas operations from Blackstone for more than $1.6 billion.