Wynn Is Doodling on the Strip's Most Valuable Empty Lot

The most valuable empty lot on the Las Vegas Strip has sat untouched for almost a decade. On Thursday, for the first time, Wynn Resorts said out loud that it is starting to think about what goes on it.

“Across the street, we have started to doodle and think about across the street here in Vegas and what relationship that property might have to our existing assets and how we might be able to build probably at a lower all-in dollar cost than a freestanding integrated resort by leveraging its relationship to Wynn and Encore,” CEO Craig Billings told analysts on the company's third-quarter earnings call. “So we've started to think about that.”

That is the whole announcement. There is no project, no design, no name and no timeline — and Billings would not give a window when an analyst pressed him: it could be a year, it could be three years. What changed is only this: the land is now being talked about as a next move instead of a someday asset.

The land is roughly 38 acres directly across Las Vegas Boulevard from Wynn Las Vegas and Encore — the former New Frontier site plus four adjoining acres. Wynn bought it in December 2017 for $336 million, about $8.84 million an acre, folding it into one contiguous holding of roughly 280 acres. The New Frontier was imploded in 2007 and the lot has been empty ever since. Steve Wynn floated a “Wynn West” tower on it in early 2018 before that plan was shelved, and county-approved plans drawn up for the site in an earlier era — a 1,100-room resort — were extended out to an April 2026 construction deadline without a shovel ever turning.

The economics Billings pointed to are the interesting part. Whatever rises across the street would not have to carry itself as a freestanding integrated resort. It could lean on what already stands there — the Wynn and Encore brand, the guest database, the restaurants, the back of house — and that, in his telling, is how it gets built at a lower all-in cost than a standalone property. A third Wynn address on the north Strip, priced off infrastructure that is already paid for.

It is not first in line, either. Wynn's building attention is on Wynn Al Marjan Island in the United Arab Emirates, on schedule for a September 2027 opening, and Billings said the Las Vegas thinking gets serious as that project eases. The remarks also landed in a softer quarter: Las Vegas operating revenue came in at $575.2 million, down from $621.0 million a year earlier, after table games held 18.9 percent against an expected range of 22 to 26 percent — a run of bad luck the company put at just under $24 million.

For now, it is a doodle. But doodles on 38 acres across from Wynn have a way of becoming towers, and this is the first time the company has said the pencil is moving.