TORONTO — Las Vegas has always been known for attracting dreamers; right now, one of its biggest is Tony Dennis, a Torontonian who holds a key role in a sweeping $8-billion (U.S.) redevelopment of a vast swath of the city's famous Strip.
A self-described fourth-generation "hotel and real estate family brat," Mr. Dennis leads the residential division comprising four condominiums at CityCenter, a mixed-use complex in Las Vegas that is the largest privately financed development in North America to date.
Descended from a family of builders of houses, apartment and hotels, Mr. Dennis had long assumed he would join the family business.
"I was the generation where my dad said: 'Okay, there's no more nepotism,' " Mr. Dennis, 47, said of his father, David, who built and operated boutique hotels in Toronto including the Sutton Place.
As a result, Mr. Dennis cut his teeth as a hospitality industry consultant after attending Cornell University's School of Hotel Management rather than signing on with his dad.
It was a decision that paid off, as it was during that time Mr. Dennis became attracted to an idea that would shape his future career, the evolving notion of mixed developments that could incorporate uses such as hotel, residential and retail under one roof.
The key to this idea was to offer residents high-end, hotel-like service, something Mr. Dennis embraced during his time at Four Seasons Hotels Inc. He was eventually lured from a comfortable management position there in 2004 to take on what he saw as the cutting-edge CityCenter project for MGM Mirage.
"To tell you the truth, I was a snob about Las Vegas then, I thought it was all about gambling, which I don't even do," Mr. Dennis said in an interview yesterday in Toronto. "But this is simply a project you do not want to be left out of. I think it will help shape the future of Las Vegas as a great place to live."
The CityCenter project was conceived in 2004, when the markets were flush with cash and optimism and MGM Mirage was sitting on a 76-acre tract of land on the Strip that it had accumulated through mergers and acquisitions.
"To get the yield it was looking for, the company had to do something more complex than build a casino or sell the land to a competitor," Mr. Dennis said.
It was a "can-do" time in a "can-do" town, and the project became the creation of a miniature city, with hotels, condos, a casino, a convention centre, and a 500,000-square-foot retail and entertainment district called the Crystals.
Scroll forward to 2008, however, and the project is being built in a vastly different economic market marked by real estate developers scrambling to survive in the wake of the subprime mortgage crisis in the United States.
Hard-hit markets include Nevada and California, home to two-thirds of CityCenter's buyers. Early this year, another condominium hotel in Las Vegas, the Cosmopolitan, hit a brick wall after its owner defaulted on a $760-million bank loan after failing to refinance.
The story is playing out differently at CityCenter's four condominiums, Mr. Dennis said. In a sales process slated to take place over three years, 1,300, or half of the units, have sold since the high-end Mandarin Oriental hit the market in February, 2007. Move-in is slated for November, 2009.
Perhaps the biggest plus in CityCenter's favour is the participation of joint venture partner Dubai World, a cash-flush sovereign wealth fund that has invested nearly $3-billion for a 50-per-cent stake in the project and is also investing heavily in MGM's stock.
This relationship should also help broaden the project's appeal to foreign investors, with a sales centre slated to open in Dubai in May.
Currently, one-third of buyers are from Nevada, one-third are from Southern California and a third are international, Mr. Dennis said.
About 10 per cent of these sales are from the Middle East, a number Mr. Dennis said he would like to see increase to 20 per cent this year.
Canadians, primarily from the West, have purchased about $40-million worth of property at CityCenter, a figure Mr. Dennis said he expects to double this year.
MGM Mirage's large customer base and network of friends and family have also helped with sales, Mr. Dennis said. Participation of these buyers helped move a lot of the luxury units at the Mandarin, which start at about $1.5-million, and were 90 per cent sold out in 14 days.
The project's appeal to affluent customers, whose disposable income "is off the charts," is helping in the economic downturn, he said. Buyers of its condos, two of which have units starting at $1.5-million, don't appear to having trouble with financing, he added.
While the credit crisis isn't keeping Mr. Dennis up at night, he said he does fret about trying to see things through his high-end clients' eyes.
"While respecting their privacy, I want to meet them in their minds, if that makes any sense," he said.
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