Budget shrunk from billion-plus to 0 million
Forced by the recession to create its new Las Vegas resort on an adaptive reuse model, SBE, parent of the new SLS, reduced construction costs by between one-third and 40 percent and cut the project timeline by five to six months, according to Hotel News Now.
“It’s remarkable what we were able to accomplish with a $400-million-plus renovation budget,” said Arash Azarbarzin, president of SBE Hotel Group, speaking at the Boutique Lifestyle Leadership Symposium, held last month in Las Vegas. “It’s a 2.4-million-square-foot building in which we created nine restaurants, three nightclubs, two pools, 60,000 square feet of casino space, 1,600 guestrooms and a 2,500-space garage. And we did it on budget and on time. Actually we were able to open two weeks early.”
The resort casino has a hotel with almost 1,600 rooms. It opened in September on the north end of Las Vegas Strip.
“When we started on this journey we had a much larger vision of what we wanted to do,” said Azarbarzin. “We had a budget of between $1.2 billion and $1.3 billion, and we envisioned adding a 1,000-room luxury tower to the hotel. But the recession came along, and we were forced to go through four or five iterations of the plan until we ended up with what we have.”
Azarbarzin says the approach “may have started a trend. In the past, all new hotels in Las Vegas were created by demolishing, imploding and destroying existing buildings and then starting from scratch. We could be the start of a domino effect that you’ll see elsewhere on the Strip and in the city.”
