KVIG Informative

Milton Prell opened a $5 million hotel on a lonely stretch of highway outside Las Vegas in 1952, the sixth resort on what would become the Strip. It has changed hands at least five times since, spent eight years without its own name, and three of those sales alone added up to a combined $575 million.

Prell built the Hotel Sahara on the site of Club Bingo, a small casino he had opened with partners Al Winter and Sam Boyd on July 24, 1947, on land Melvin D. Close had purchased a few years earlier, according to UNLV Special Collections and Archives. Close sold the remaining acreage to the Club Bingo owners for $225,000 in July 1951, with Del Webb and L.C. Jacobson helping arrange the financing.

Del E. Webb Construction Company built the $5 million Hotel Sahara, which opened Oct. 7, 1952, as the sixth resort on the Strip, according to UNLV’s digital collections. Webb’s company didn’t stop at construction. By 1961, Del E. Webb Corporation had bought out the other owners of Sahara-Nevada Corporation, taking over as landlord while a separate company, Consolidated Casino Corporation, ran the casino floor.

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Webb died in 1974, and his company kept running the resort until mounting debt forced a sale. Paul W. Lowden, who already owned the Hacienda, bought the 932-room Sahara for $50 million in a deal that closed in August 1982.

Lowden later restructured his holding company into Sahara Casino Partners, which raised $51 million in a 1987 initial public offering, the first casino-based limited partnership to trade on the New York Stock Exchange. His Sahara Gaming Corporation agreed in June 1995 to sell the property to Bill Bennett, who completed the purchase later that year for $193 million through his Gordon Gaming Corporation.

Bennett ran the Sahara until he died in December 2002. His wife, Lynn, oversaw the resort until her own death in December 2006, after which Sam Nazarian’s SBE Entertainment Group and Stockbridge Real Estate Group agreed to buy the property from the Bennett family for $331.8 million, completing the purchase Aug. 1, 2007, with Stockbridge as majority owner.

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The Sahara closed for good on May 16, 2011, after 58 years in business. Stockbridge and SBE bought up the resort’s mortgage debt and broke ground Feb. 13, 2013, on a $415 million conversion partly financed through foreign investors in the federal EB-5 visa program, reopening Aug. 23, 2014, as SLS Las Vegas, with Stockbridge holding a 90% stake and SBE the remaining 10%.

Nazarian sold his remaining 10% stake to Stockbridge in a deal the state approved in November 2015. Meruelo Group bought the resort in 2018, and, as part of an ongoing renovation, restored the original name on Aug. 29, 2019, bringing the Sahara back to the Strip after an eight-year absence under someone else’s brand.

Three of those sales alone, the 1982, 1995 and 2007 deals, add up to $575 million changing hands over a hotel Milton Prell built for $5 million. Under Meruelo Group, it is still collecting new owners’ money the same way it always has, one sale at a time.