Anchors at the project so far include a Borders, Fry's Electronic Store, Rave Motion Picture and Robb & Stucky. Apple, J. Crew and Mexx will count among some of the center's inline tenants. Town Square will also include 200,000 sf of offices and a luxury hotel, which will have an unusual feature for Las Vegas – no gambling. Drew Barkett, Turnberry's president of retail development and real estate, spoke with GSR about Town Square, which is due to open in the fall.

GSR: Do you expect to get mostly tourists at Town Square or locals as well?

Barkett: It's both, because of the artery system that is adjacent to the property, which is Interstate-15. About 18% of all of the tourists that come into the marketplace come in off of that. Then there's Interstate-215, which brings the suburbs together, from Henderson out to Summerlin. And between the intersections there are 400,000 cars that pass the site a day.

In my business, that's an exorbitant amount of traffic. Plus I have the luxury of having my front door on the Strip, so it brings a lot of people from the casinos and all of the tourists that come there. I think because you have 1.8 million residents that live in the metro market, I really think it will be a nice mixture between residents and tourists.

And with the multitude of restaurants that we have, I think we're a nice complement to the alternative of trying to get a seating in a casino restaurant. And, considering that lifestyle centers are fairly new to the scene, people want to touch it and feel it. It's not an enclosed, sterile shopping center. It's something different.

GSR: Was parking a problem with all of the traffic in Las Vegas?

Barkett: The way we designed this, we even went a step further off our property. We decided to do a flyover because we figure about 60% of the traffic is coming off of I-15 and I-215. We're building a flyover, which will cost about $6 million, to try to dampen the amount of congestion on the South side of the project. We also augmented it with three parking structures, and the parking is conducive to a lifestyle center of this size.

GSR: Have you had to change your leasing efforts for this project compared to a development in another area?

Barkett: No. The metro market is a very vibrant and strong market. There is a lot of buying power. And owning Aventura (FL) Mall, we know the resort market. They come in every week with money, money to be spent, and hopefully, to be left behind. I think we'll capture that. If anything, we upgraded the tenant mix from a traditional shopping center. We brought a mix, so it would attract the locals as well as a tourist base. We wanted to make something special and raise the bar level in Vegas.

GSR: Why did you decide to go with the lifestyle format?

Barkett: Our feeling is that this location beckons something special. We spent an exorbitant amount of time in the marketplace and felt that there wasn't a vibrant downtown or a meeting place. And those are catch words when you mention lifestyle centers.

Lifestyle centers are great, but still at the core of it is a shopping center but with a different twist to it. All shopping centers over time have changed, and you need to change to follow the market. You can't drive through an enclosed mall, but here you can drive through it. The pendulum, to me, is swinging back to the days of our parents who had a vibrant downtown with an old-time cinema. We want a sense of place that's been there and didn't just pop open over night.

I've never worked on a project where a vast majority of our time, besides the leasing efforts, went to the aesthetics and the elevations of the building where we have driven our designers and architects to a higher level. We said, "If we're going to make a statement in Las Vegas, we're going to have to take it over the top." We think this is going to be our crowning level.

GSR: Why did you decide to build something so large?

Barkett: We wanted to utilize the acreage we had. But what really capped it was when I unveiled this in the spring of 2004 in Las Vegas. I didn't quite know what reception I would receive on this. But I walked out of the booth, after having multitude of meetings with national retailers, and by 2 pm, I walked out and said: "Guys, we've got a problem. This shopping center is too small." I just had tenant after tenant after tenant, and we really shut things down for a few months to figure out how we can make this shopping center larger. So it's guessing. When you've been doing this business for so long, you get a feel for it, and when you're paying steep rates for land, you need to get the return.

GSR: Why did you decide to go with a non-gambling hotel?

Barkett: It is initially, but there could be thoughts of gaming down the road. We're still focused on non-gaming, but you always try to use the property to its fullest development opportunity. We just felt initially we wanted to focus on the retail. Gaming opportunities are very complicated and take more time. We really wanted to focus on the retail, office and entertainment components. But after they open you may find out better opportunities, so it could be there.

GSR: Why did you decide to do office space?

We have within a stone's throw of the site a couple million square feet of office that's still growing. We are leasing up our office at a much faster rate than we ever expected. And we found out that our hotel component is undersized, so we're probably going to convert our hotel into office and build a larger hotel.

This is great for everybody because it creates more daytime, on-property employee/shopper. The office component was the biggest shock we had. We're probably going to double the size of that and probably double the size of the hotel. It has been a surprising note to this.

GSR: Did the sizable amount of retail on the Strip worry you about building a project in that location?

Barkett: Initially, I had reservations on the amount of retail on the Strip. But what I found out was that it was really geared toward the tourist trade. People who live in the suburbs are apt to stay away from the Strip for a few reasons. It's not as family friendly as it used to be, and the opportunity of getting to it is difficult. We have an alternative to that because it's probably one of the best retail locations in the inner core of the Strip area. And you don't have to walk to the back of a casino to find retail or park your car and walk a quarter of a mile away. The retailers know how strong and vibrant this market is, and ultimately it's the retailers that make the decision. I think in Vegas I'll wrap up the leasing on it.