Elvis Presley Casino planned for Las Vegas

Viva Las Vegas.  This almost sounds too weird to be true, but it is.  An Elvis themed casino is being planned for a great piece of land on the Las Vegas Strip.  This is from NBC:

FX Real Estate and Entertainment has announced plans to build an Elvis Presley themed hotel and casino on the Las Vegas Strip.

The building will be located on an 18-acre lot beside the MGM grand and across from the Monte Carlo.

The site is currently home to several retail spaces owned by FX.

The complex will feature a 2,269 room hotel, a 93,000 square foot casino and a convention center with accompanying retail space.

The project is expected to cost roughly $3.1 billion dollars and could open as early as 2013.

Monte Carlo won’t get charged for fire

No charges will be filed in a spectacular three-alarm fire that forced thousands to evacuate and damaged the facade of the Monte Carlo hotel-casino on the Las Vegas Strip, Clark County’s fire chief said Wednesday.

Fire Chief Steve Smith said, “It wasn’t intentional, it was an isolated incident where there was a negative outcome.”

Seventeen people received minor injuries, while 6,000 guests and employees were forced to flee. The hotel remained closed for repairs until Feb. 15, costing some $100 million in damage and lost business, according to casino owner MGM Mirage Inc.

Vegas casinos go green

Its good to see something positive associated with the Las Vegas Strip. It looks like many of the new mega resorts are trying to go green;

A total of 15 major new building projects in Sin City – including MGM Mirage’s new 4,000-room CityCenter set to open in 2009 – are seeking the building council’s stringent Leadership in Environment and Energy Design (LEED) Certification.

“When you are building a large-scale hotel, the long-term benefits and savings that go along with building green are huge,” says Katz.

Add the tax breaks from the state of Nevada that could put as much as three times the extra cost of constructing environmentally friendly buildings back into developers’ pockets and the odds are stacked in favour of going green.

You should actually take a look at this whole article, its pretty neat.

http://www.thestar.com/Travel/article/356799

Crown Las Vegas could be dead

The Wall Street Journal reports:

One of the biggest projects planned for the Las Vegas Strip appears to be falling apart.

The site of what was supposed to be the tallest tower in Las Vegas, and among the tallest in the U.S. at 1,064 feet, is now for sale. Las Vegas developers and Wall Street securities analysts assume the proposed $5 billion project, which was scheduled to open in 2011, is dead.

Last year, Australian gambling company Crown Ltd. and Texas developer Christopher Milam teamed with private-equity firm York Capital Management LLC to build a casino complex and 5,000-room hotel on the Strip. Unable to come up with the increased equity demanded by lenders to begin construction, developers last week put the site up for sale with CB Richard Ellis Group Inc. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc.

Such a pity. I had such high hopes (pun intended of course) for this one.

Fontainebleau Las Vegas

This project is slated to open in late 2009. The plans look pretty neat and its owned by an ex Mandalay exec, Turnberry, and PBL.

Riviera Holdings Corp. Chief Financial Officer Mark Lefever need walk only a block north of the Riviera casino to his new job as CFO of the under-construction Fontainebleau Las Vegas, where he starts March 31.

At Fontainebleau, the Ocean City, N.J., native joins recently-appointed Chief Operating Officer Audrey Oswell, who worked with Lefever when Oswell ran the Resorts International hotel in Atlantic City.

Lefever has experience with both old and new properties, serving as CFO of the former Desert Inn before running the Trump 29 tribal casino in Coachella, Calif.

source: LV Sun

Cosmopolitan Resort Casino foreclosure

Tough credit markets hurt. This would not have been an issue less than one year ago. It has got a prime location next door to the Bellagio and CityCenter (which includes Veer, Harmon Hotel, Mandarin Oriental, and Vdara Hotel), and across the street from plante hollywood.

The developer of the Cosmopolitan Resort Casino, a $3.9 billion condo-hotel complex on the Las Vegas Strip, has been notified by its primary lender that it will begin foreclosure proceedings.

The move by Deutsche Bank AG, the lender on a $760 million senior loan, comes after the developer, Ian Bruce Eichner, wasn’t able to finalize a deal for new financing amid the credit crunch. Mr. Eichner in late February cut a tentative deal with two of his other lenders, Global Hyatt Corp. and New York hedge fund Marathon Asset Management, for a possible rescue of the twin-tower project. A default on the loan in January triggered automatic defaults on an additional $175 million in loans.

Courtesy of the WSJ.com