Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

The Siegel Group’s building buy is its latest attempt to ‘take over’ Las Vegas

Stephen Siegel-Michael Crandall

Steve Marcus

Stephen Siegel and Michael Crandall of The Siegel Group, are shown in the courtyard of the Rumor boutique hotel, the former site of St. Tropez, on Sept. 9, 2009.

For The Siegel Group, “where” it does business is as revealing as “how.”

The where speaks to the company’s investment in wherever it might be headquartered, and it has put even more of its money on Las Vegas with its acquisition of a 36,000-square-foot building at 3790 Paradise Road. The new HQ is just up the street a spot from its old headquarters, positioned on a little less than an acre across the road from the Country Club at Wynn Las Vegas.

Yes, an errant fairway wood could land you in the parking lot of one of Las Vegas’ busiest commercial development companies.

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  • Siegel Group

Siegel Group's Rumor and Gold Spike

An exclusive tour of The Siegel Group's Rumor and Gold Spike photographed by Tom Donoghue. Michael Crandall, director of business development, and CEO Stephen Siegel are pictured here at Rumor. Launch slideshow »

The reason Siegel Group moved out of its old haunt, which was in the plaza where Firefly, Satay and Marrakesh do business, was a simple absence of space. The company has been doing something of a muscular, Hulk-like expansion since it took over operations of Rumor, The Artisan, Gold Spike and the Resort at Mount Charleston last year.

The new building cost $3.3 million, a long-term loan financed by a Las Vegas lender. The seller was represented by Kent Clifford of Clifford Commercial real estate company of Las Vegas.

“We were outgrowing our underpinnings,” Siegel Group Director of Business Affairs Michael Crandall says. “If you saw our old building, we just kept expanding to (suites) 100, up to 109, and finally half the doors in our hallways are ours.”

Crandall says the message from the company founded by Stephen Siegel is, “We’re really bullish on Vegas. We’re backing up our words. We’re still buying stuff in this economy.”

Of course, the company has a different idea of “stuff” than you or I might. Their acquisitions are the stuff of big structures, in most cases buildings that have been neglected for many months and even years. That was the case with onetime eyesore Gold Spike, the renovations of which have finally been completed.

Moving into a bigger headquarters is not the only recent business move made by the company, either. Two months ago, Siegel Group -- in an entirely characteristic display of swooping in to snag a creaky property -- bought Charlestonwood Apartments. The musty dwellings located at 2900 E. Charleston Blvd. (at Eastern Avenue) dated to the 1980s and were in rickety condition. They had been foreclosed on in 2009, giving Siegel a chance to snap up the buildings and the 4.6 acres for $3.6 million. Workers began upgrading the apartments immediately, and they are now called Las Residencias.

As for the boutique properties Siegel seized over the past couple of years, the suites at Rumor have been finished, and a modest-size meeting room that can accommodate about 50 has been completed. Gold Spike, as noted, is finished after a once-over that took longer than anyone on the Siegel team anticipated.

Up at the Resort at Mount Charleston, the renovations of the scenic but largely ignored hotel could be finished in six months. Still to be finished is a redo of the bar, restaurant and lobby. New carpeting and wall coverings have been added to many of the resort’s rooms. Most of the work is cosmetic.

“Some of the rooms are done, and they look great,” Crandall says. “We just want it to be finished and be done.”

The company is known for smaller projects, nothing in the scope of CityCenter or the recently unveiled Cosmopolitan Las Vegas, the opening for which both Siegel and Crandall attended. They were impressed, but they have big plans, too.

“We want to take over Vegas,” Crandall says, “one property at a time.”

Follow John Katsilometes on Twitter at twitter.com/JohnnyKats.

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