Phil Ruffin Pens Column on Future of Vegas

LAS VEGAS-When does a savvy casino owner on the Las Vegas Strip think the market will have fully returned? Oh, about 10 years from now.

That’s the prediction of Phil Ruffin, the man who sold a tear-down on 35 acres there for $1.2 billion in 2007 and this past spring paid $775 million for Treasure Island. Ruffin, who also owns a piece of He the Trump International Tower here, made his prediction in an article he penned himself for the Las Vegas Sun that was published earlier this week.

By 2020, he says, the traffic count at the airport will be 45- to 50 million, thanks in part to an increase in foreign visitors and the market will have absorbed the 21,000 rooms that were added between January 2008 and January 2011–plus thousands more because the projects stalled during construction also will be completed, as will a couple of ones that were planned but never started. Room rates also will be much higher, he says.