Las vegas is the quaking epicenter of the real estate boom. Two hundred people move there every day, adding the equivalent of a Wilmington, N.C. every year. Land prices have quadrupled in the past five years, and home prices rose 24% in the first half of 2005. On the famed Vegas Strip land values have soared from $600,000 an acre in 1999 to $16 million today, just shy of what you'd pay for an acre in Manhattan. In the next five years 80 high-rise condominium towers with 37,000 apartments are slated to go up. Donald Trump is building a tower—Ivana is, too—as are actor George Clooney, club king Rande Gerber and veteran Strip players like Hard Rock founder Peter Morton and the Palms' impresario George Maloof. Yet now, in the middle of this real estate mania, this successor to dot-com madness, MGM Mirage Chief Executive Terrence Lanni is going all in. Lanni, one of the canniest financial minds in Vegas and steward of the number two gambling company in the world, will break ground later this year on the biggest and most ambitiously different property Sin City has ever seen: CityCenter.
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