If you have $4 million, it can be yours, considering that the parcel and building are pre-foreclosure right now. For those who haven’t driven past 355 East Warm Springs, the building in question is a long, white, five-story structure, with lunette windows. If that design screams hotel to you, you’d be right. It’s long been intended to be a Wingate by Wyndham-branded property, and was originally intended to open in spring 2011.
The saga begins with the transfer of the land by Wingate Airport South LLC for $1.1 million on Feb. 31, 2007, using a home-equity line of credit to secure financing. Ronald Robinson and Alisa Davis were the corporate officers. Another loan of $200,000 was taken out in February 2010, and it’s here that the project’s financial problems appear to have begun. First American Title Insurance Co. filed a notice of default that August, seeking to foreclose on the property. A further default was filed in Feb. 2011.
Lumbered with debts and liabilities totaling $9.5 million, the project filed for bankruptcy on Feb. 11, 2011. At that time, it owed $6.6 million to Park Place Properties (another Robinson/Davis corporation), $43,000 in delinquent property taxes to Clark County, was afflicted with two lawsuits, multiple mechanics liens, and a deed to the tune of $1.1 million, held by a Houston-based LLC.
Emerging from Chapter 11, Wingate Airport South borrowed $2 million from aptly named Save LP. Toward the end of 2012, having reincorporated (in February 2012) as Wyn of Garden, Robinson’s company borrowed another $2,215,000 from Mountain West Debt Fund. In February of 2013, the property was quitclaimed (transferred in lieu of payment) to Holiday Home LLC. Robinson subsequently reincorporated Holiday Home as Sher-Inn LLC.
By this point the cost of the Wingate was spiraling out of control. Sher-Inn borrowed $4 million from the Abundant Life Foundation, a local non-profit, in March of last year, but that didn’t keep the wolf from the door very long. If anything, it may have accelerated the project’s demise. On November 11, First American Title filed another notice of default for $4,094,134 and the property went into pre-foreclosure the same day.
According to RealtyTrac, the Wingate-to-be has a carrying cost of $18,169 a month. It also has seven criminal or sex offenders living within a one-mile radius and two drug labs have been busted in that area. The property is currently managed by Robinson’s Scotsman Trust, which -- as you mention -- has kept it free from blight. But Robinson seems to go from crisis to crisis and if his vast structure ever becomes a Wingate by Wyndham it will have defied odds longer than you’ll encounter in any of the casinos in Vegas.
