30 Acres at the Strip's Southern Gateway: Lily Funds Closes Out Its South Las Vegas Land Play

LAS VEGAS

Some of the biggest moves on the Strip happen long before a single blueprint is filed. This week, one of the south Strip's defining private land plays quietly closed its books: Lily Funds, LLC, the private investment company and family office founded by Thomas "Tom" McManus, announced Oct. 8 that it has completed sales across its nearly 30-acre South Las Vegas Boulevard land assemblage.

The firm didn't make a splash of it. The announcement came via a PRWeb release — a corporate closing notice for a years-long strategy of assembling, holding, and placing land with buyers pursuing hospitality, entertainment, and transportation projects. But the details in the release read like a map of where the south Strip is headed: a planned Top Gun-themed entertainment destination, a proposed NBA arena site, and a county aviation purchase, all on land one family office spent years quietly stitching together.

Two July closings, one landmark month

July was the milestone month, according to the release. In early July, a Lily Funds-affiliated company sold a separate nearby parcel across from Mandalay Bay intended for a proposed NBA arena. About a week later, the final parcel in the nearly 30-acre assemblage itself closed — the site earmarked for the planned Top Gun-themed entertainment destination, Top Gun Vegas, developed by Advent Allen Entertainment in partnership with Paramount.

The Top Gun parcel is the more colorful of the two closings. The project has been on the Strip's radar since July, when property records reporting showed a 2.48-acre site at 4815 S Las Vegas Blvd changing hands for $12.5 million — land now lined up for an entertainment attraction built around the Top Gun brand. The NBA arena parcel, meanwhile, lands in the middle of Las Vegas's long-running quest for a major-league basketball franchise: the city has the fans, the NBA history on the Strip, and the will — the arena site was the missing piece.

"We recognized the potential of the South Strip and assembled a meaningful land position in one of the world's most recognizable destinations," McManus, the firm's founder and CEO, said in the release. "These closings demonstrate our ability to identify opportunity, execute a focused investment strategy and connect valuable properties with buyers pursuing ambitious projects."

The earlier deals that built the position

The October announcement was the capstone, but the strategy started years earlier. In 2020, Lily Funds sold 5.25 acres at 5051 Las Vegas Boulevard — the Dream Hotel site — to developers Shopoff Realty Investments and Contour Real Estate. In 2021, the firm sold approximately 17 acres to the Clark County Department of Aviation for $60 million, a deal approved by the Clark County Commission. And along the way, Lily Funds completed a land transaction with The Boring Company tied to transportation infrastructure in the resort corridor.

That last one is easy to overlook, but it says something about how land value works on the modern Strip. A family office's South Strip strategy didn't just include hotels and entertainment venues — it included a piece for the tunnel network that moves people between them. The release doesn't disclose aggregate proceeds or final parcel prices for the completed sales, so the full financial scorecard stays private. What the public record shows is a pattern: buy early, wait patiently, and sell into the specific ambitions of specific buyers.

Who Tom McManus is

Lily Funds, founded in 2013 and based in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, is the vehicle — but the strategy has McManus's fingerprints all over it. The release lays out a Nevada track record that runs well beyond the resort corridor: Tuscany in Henderson, a roughly 550-acre master-planned community planned for approximately 3,000 homes with a golf course now known as Chimera Golf Club; and, in Northern Nevada, the acquisition of approximately 5,000 acres of agricultural land near Gerlach and the perfection of 18,300 acre-feet of water rights.

"Across these investments, the common thread has been recognizing value in land and scarce resources," McManus said in the release. "Our approach is to identify opportunity early, do the work required to unlock it and remain disciplined throughout the investment."

It's the classic family-office playbook: identify the asset the market is undervaluing, do the unglamorous work of entitlement and assemblage, and stay disciplined when the market comes to you. On the South Strip, that discipline meant holding land near the entertainment corridor through years when the southern end of Las Vegas Boulevard was still mostly parking lots and billboards — and selling into a moment when developers, sports leagues, and entertainment brands are all bidding for the same ground.

A corridor coming into focus

Zoom out and the significance of the Lily Funds closings is really about geography. The south Strip is mid-transformation into a sports and entertainment district: the Athletics' ballpark is rising at the former Tropicana site, a proposed NBA arena has a Lily-positioned parcel waiting across from Mandalay Bay, and a Top Gun-themed destination is lined up for a 2.48-acre site on South Las Vegas Boulevard. Each of those projects needed land; one quiet family office spent years assembling it.

The release is careful to note that the proposed projects remain subject to their respective development and approval processes. Nothing here is shovel-in-the-ground yet — the NBA arena is still proposed, the Top Gun destination is still planned. But the land chess is over. The pieces are placed. The next moves belong to the developers, the leagues, and the Clark County Commission.

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