The land is still home to the businesses you mention, as well as a Smith & Wollensky's restaurant. But Project Jackpot, to borrow a term from the computer industry, is vaporware.
Project Jackpot was an idea that was run up the flagpole by Spectrum Management Group, which owns a long stripe of real estate along the Strip. The idea was to bundle up a hodgepodge of small businesses, including the nine-acre Metroflag mall, and build a megaresort on it.
Spectrum picked up the Jackpot site from developer Robert F.X. Sillerman after his plan for a high-end Elvis Presley-themed resort went into receivership. Sillerman had envisioned a 4,000-room, 500-condo megaresort and had acquired the rights to Presley's likeness. After Sillerman's company plunged into bankruptcy, Spectrum gained for a "substantial discount" land that cost Sillerman $566 million to obtain, though the parcel is almost certainly even cheaper now, given the deflation of land prices on the Strip.
As is the tradition with these sorts of things, Spectrum managed to garner some ink for Project Jackpot.
"We have a lot of ideas and a lot of capital. We intend to clean it up and explore every option to upgrade it," Spectrum Managing Partner Jeffrey Schaeffer told the Las Vegas Review-Journal when Spectrum, a consortium of four investment firms, took over the site in 2011. "We’re experienced real estate investors and we intend to create value over time," Schaeffer predicted.
However, we wonder, after five years, how much more time it might take. Aside from Spectrum's lack of a track record in casino-resort development, investment/loan capital might be a problem. Genting Group and Crown Resorts, two companies with far more experience (and funding) in the casino business, are having trouble finding financiers to back the Resorts World Las Vegas and Alon projects on the north Strip. True, the small Lucky Dragon Hotel-Casino was able to get completion money, but just by the skin of its teeth.
There’s also the configuration of the Spectrum acreage. Its narrowness would probably force any project into a stacked layout like the Cosmopolitan, which no one has shown any inclination to imitate. Also, like the Cosmo, the Project Jackpot land wraps around a timeshare complex, the Polo Towers, impelling Spectrum to either buy out thousands of timeshare owners or architecturally finesse the problem.
Spectrum wouldn't discuss Project Jackpot with LVA. However, the bottom line is that nothing is happening.
