It’s the sales pavilion for the residential components of MGM Mirage’s metaresort, Project CityCenter.
As you say, it’s located just north of New York-New York, directly across the Strip from Game Works. The back of the building faces the Strip, which is probably why you didn’t immediately see the entrance. You have to walk down the Rue de Monte Carlo side street, then turn into the parking lot (where security guards ensure that you’re going inside; there’s no parking play there for any of the nearby megaresorts). Your car is valet-parked. (One interesting note: All the residential properties at CityCenter will provide free valet parking. That’s entirely free, as in no tipping allowed. As long as you live there, you’ll never have to park your own car.)
Open daily 10 am to 7 pm, the temporary 30,000-square-foot sales pavilion cost $24 million to open, which gives you an idea of both the magnitude of the overall project ($7 billion total) and the spare-no-expense quality of the pavilion itself. It contains full exhibits for three of the four residential towers at CityCenter, which will debut in November 2009.
Inside the sales office, you’re offered water, juice, soda, coffee, etc. from the fully stocked coffee bar. You’re not permitted to walk through the pavilion on your own, so depending on how busy it is, you might have to wait a few minutes for a sales guide. First, you’re shown a five-minute video about the entire CityCenter project, then an enormous scale model of the metaresort. Your guide points out all the features.
You’re then taken through each of the residential-tower models. The Mandarin Oriental Hotel, the most expensive of the hotel-condos, will have a 400-room tower and 227 condos; units start at $1.5 million for a 600-square-foot studio and top out at $12 million for a 4,100-square-foot penthouse; the Residences at the Harmon will have roughly the same number of units. The Vdara will be a 1,543-unit condo-hotel, while the Veer Towers are a pair of 37-story condominiums with more than 2,000 condos and no hotel rooms.
The tour is a definite no-pressure sales approach. Afterwards, you can talk to a sales associate, but the guide is as easy-going as can be.
MGM Mirage is now selling the units at the Mandarin and Vdara. The Mandarin went on sale first; MGM Mirage has announced the first-month sales results for Mandarin.
* 200 units sold out of 227 (90%)
* $613,000,000 in sales from Mandarin residences
* $1,584 average-square-foot price
When the Vdara residences went on sale on Feb. 20, nearly 1,000 reservations had already been taken for the 1,543 total units. No sales figures have been announced yet for the Vdara.
Veer residences start go to contract on April 2 (most of the units are reserved).
The Harmon starts going to contract in June (no reservations taken yet for the 209 units).
