Wynn Resorts' Las Vegas investment has an uncertain future

The recent allegations of sexual misconduct lodged against CEO Steve Wynn have obscured the prospects for the Wynn business or investors, and this extends also to the significant investment the casino operator has placed on Las Vegas, with the purchase of massive parcel of land across the street from its existing Encore and Wynn Las Vegas properties.

The 34-acre property, which once held the iconic New Frontier complex, was purchased by Wynn for $336 million with no indication of what was planned. It was speculated that the price was so cheap it couldn't be passed up, and the property would be mothballed until it could be seen whether other projects by Wynn and other resort operators that were under way would pan out.

But Steve Wynn apparently had other ideas. He was willing to make a big bet that Las Vegas was on a comeback and that the Oct. 1 tragedy at the Route 91 Harvest Music Festival, at which nearly 60 people were killed by a gunman, would cause only a short-lived downturn.

In a conference call with analysts to discuss the resort's fourth-quarter and full-year 2017 earnings resorts, Wynn said he was going to be building a fourth hotel on the site.

There's a good reason behind the plan. "[H]otels are extremely profitable," Wynn said on the call, and he said it was among the best divisions the casino operator had because "we operate at 50% to 60% margins." Every additional dollar of hotel revenue Wynn receives is pure profit.

Until the tragedy, Las Vegas had been undergoing a renaissance. Although visitor volumes had been soft through the summer, rotation of shows out of Vegas had volumes slowing -- and then the events of October caused them to tumble. They ended up staying depressed for the rest of the year.

Before that, the casino operators had been counting on a revival. Wynn was developing the $1.6 billion Paradise Park behind his existing resort, which will feature a 20-acre lagoon and a white-sand beachfront, as well as a 47-story, 1,500-room hotel. MGM Resorts (NYSE: MGM) was turning its attention to Vegas after having spent $7 billion around the world developing new casinos. It would now be focusing its capital expenditures closer to home, starting with the upgrade of the Monte Carlo, which would be transformed into the Park MGM.

Additional development from Resorts World and The Fountainbleu are scheduled to occur in the years to come.

That's why it seemed Wynn Resorts would hold off for the moment with its new piece of property, but the resort operator believed he could profit handsomely by getting another hotel built there. Coming in with a luxury room in the middle of 6 million square feet of convention space -- half a million of which was Wynn's own high-quality space -- Wynn said he was going to get the buildings up "as fast as I can."