A Las Vegas businessman has bought the city’s shuttered Lucky Dragon Hotel and Casino and plans to convert it to a non-gaming hotel.
Don Ahern, chairman and CEO of construction equipment supplier Ahern Rentals, will pay $36 million to acquire the 2.5-acre property on Sahara Avenue just west of Las Vegas Boulevard, according to local news reports.
He told reporters he will rename the 203-room hotel, which has been closed since last October, and convert the separately housed casino, closed since last January, into a meetings and convention facility. He did not provide a timeline for the reopening or for any remodeling or renovation plans.
The sale price was considerably less than the property’s primary lender, San Francisco-based Snow Covered Capital, was hoping for to cover the nearly $50 million in debt it held on the failed resort. But SCC principal Enrique Landa was glad to get it after a foreclosure auction last year failed to elicit a single meaningful bid.
Commenting on the sale, Landa characterized it as a “terrific property with a bright future,” albeit one that was undone by the wrong business model.
“We’re very glad it has a new owner with a long-term vision,” he said.
Tremendous fanfare greeted Lucky Dragon on its November 2016 debut. Not only was it the first ground-up gaming resort to open in Las Vegas in nearly a decade, but it appeared to position itself in an entirely unique way as a boutique casino targeting Asian and Asian-American gamblers with top-to-bottom Asian-themed décor and signage and with a game mix and food and beverage offering designed to back it up.
Yet it failed pretty much out of the gate. Experts have attributed this to under-capitalization𑁋a problem that first emerged during its construction𑁋which prevented it competing with its much larger Strip competitors on credit and comps, and its Sahara Avenue location, which was too far from the main tourist action on the Strip.
The problems were apparent in the first year when management began closing restaurants and laying off staff. Then, with lenders threatening foreclosure, its demise was sealed when developer Andrew Fanfa closed the casino early in 2018 and filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection shortly after with the idea of finding a buyer. The hotel stayed open, but when no buyer was found by last fall, its doors, too, were closed.
