Toll Brothers buys Summerlin land for 324-home development

A luxury homebuilder has picked up a large swath of Summerlin land for a new project.

Property records show Toll Brothers bought about 128 acres off Town Center Drive near Tropicana Avenue for $69 million last week, three months after the builder received county approvals for a 324-home development there.

“This is a pretty exciting deal for us,” said Toll group president Gary Mayo, who oversees Las Vegas operations.

The land sale was bigger than usual for Summerlin, Las Vegas’ largest master-planned community, and comes as the valley’s homebuilding market gains speed with rising sales and prices.

Builders closed around 4,200 sales this year through May in Clark County, up 21 percent from the same period in 2017, and May’s median sales price was almost $370,000, up 8 percent year-over-year, according to Home Builders Research.

Toll, based in Horsham, Pennsylvania, will offer much more expensive houses. Mayo expects final sales prices in the still-unnamed community to range from the high-$900,000 range to about $1.5 million.

He hopes to start doing utility and other infrastructure work in November and to open for sale in late January or early February.

The Clark County Planning Commission approved project plans this past April, and Summerlin developer Howard Hughes Corp. sold the project site to Toll on July 10.

Through a spokesman, Summerlin president Kevin Orrock deferred comment to Toll Brothers.

Summerlin, spanning 22,500 acres along the valley’s western rim, boasts more than 100,000 residents and fetches some of the highest land and house prices in town.

By the end of last year, Dallas-based Howard Hughes had more than 3,500 acres of residential land it could sell there. But the company doesn’t flood the market, helping keep prices high. It’s known for sending bid packages to select builders and, according to Land Advisors Organization broker Rick Hildreth, mostly sells 30 to 40 acres at a time.

Last year, Howard Hughes sold around 207 acres of residential land in Summerlin for an average of $584,000 per acre. By comparison, investors last year bought 2,135 acres of land in Southern Nevada and paid an average of about $280,000 per acre, according to brokerage Colliers International.

Builders’ land purchases have been rising fast in the Las Vegas Valley this year, and Toll’s acquisition wasn’t the only bulk deal.

Texas builder D.R. Horton acquired 200 acres in North Las Vegas’ Valley Vista community in late January and early February, and builders Lennar Corp., Shea Homes and Woodside Homes recently teamed up to buy 630 acres out of the Skye Canyon community in the upper northwest valley.

By all accounts, that was the largest single purchase of a Las Vegas Valley housing site in years.

Contact Eli Segall at esegall@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0342. Follow @eli_segall on Twitter.