Ten years after he sold the Fontainebleau in Las Vegas, Jeffrey Soffer repurchased the unfinished project and plans to finally complete it.
More than 60 stories high, with more than 3,700 rooms, the project began during a building boom in the mid-2000s but screeched to a halt as a result of the Great Recession, and was kept from being completed for the past two years by the Covid pandemic.
There were also bankruptcies, several owners and years of uncertainty.
Soffer has joined forces with Koch Industries—which had an estimated $115 billion in revenue last year— and together they reacquired the project last February. Construction has resumed with plans to reopen in the fourth quarter of 2023. By the end of March, an estimated 3,000 construction workers will be on site.
Soffer told CDC Gaming Reports, “The nice thing about this is that the hard part’s done because the structure is up. … Now you’re just filling in the pieces,” adding that the project is about three-quarters completed.
Soffer and his “well-funded” partners plan to create a luxury destination resort that can compete with the best of them. Or as Fontainebleau Development President Brett Mufson put it, “We’re going right after the high end of the market.”
Mufson won’t say how much it will cost to complete the project but said that if one were to try to construct it from scratch today it would cost more than $6 billion.
Soffer acquired the original Fontainebleau in Miami Beach in 2005 and announced plans for a Las Vegas version later that year. Along with casino executive Glenn Schaeffer they broke ground in 2007.
However the real estate market plunged the following year and some of the projects financial backers backed out, resulting in lawsuits. In 2009 the project went bankrupt. It was acquired by billionaire Carl Icahn in 2010. He bought it for $150 million but sold it for $600 million. More construction followed, but without completion. In 2018 the project, then owned by Steve Witkoff and Marriott International, dubbed it Drew Las Vegas.
The pandemic led to more delays. Witkoff announced that the resort would open in 2022, while he worked to obtain a $2 billion construction loan. But as the coronavirus shut down gaming, so did construction.
Last February Soffer and Koch acquired the property through a “deed in lieu of foreclosure,” for $350 million.
