When Steve Wynn bought the 155-acre Dunes property in the early ‘90s, he paid roughly $90 million, which worked out to a little less than $600,000 an acre. That, of course, included the Dunes hotel-casino, but Wynn obviously placed no value in the buildings, which he promptly imploded and scraped off the face of the Earth.
Then, when he bought the 200-acre Desert Inn property, he paid $270 million, roughly $1.35 million an acre.
Both prices look like the deals of the century compared to the latest price paid for a parcel of Strip property: $5.2 million, not for an acre, not for a half-acre, but for a tenth of an acre – which, of course, works out to $52 million an acre. The purchaser was Clark County, which bought the tiny lot at the corner of Las Vegas Blvd. and Sands Avenue across from Treasure Island to be used for a pedestrian overpass.
