In a perverse way, though, the city's current boom helped developers here avoid the kind of frantic overbuilding that plagues condominium developers and condo owners in cities like Miami and Washington. John Restrepo of the Restrepo Consulting Group, a real estate firm based here, said that a "gold rush fever" had swept through the Las Vegas condo market, with more than 100 luxury condo projects, totaling 72,000 units, announced since 2005.

But escalating land prices and a steep rise in construction costs, Restrepo said, "caused most of these guys, who were never much more than a Web site and a dream, to fade away." Today, there are just 22 luxury condo projects, representing 10,000 units, under construction, he said, "and a large portion of those units have been sold."

The MGM Mirage is not the only casino company venturing into the condominium business. So, too, is the Venetian, which will add a 270-unit condominium tower to its property along the Strip.

"Las Vegas has morphed from a place that is simply a casino box with rooms to rent for 23 bucks a night," said William P. Weidner, the president of Las Vegas Sands, the parent company of the Venetian. "It is now a place with mixed-used developments which take advantage of the new Las Vegas, a multiday-stay destination and a place where increasingly people want to live."

The scale of Las Vegas' hotel industry and the size of its properties put other cities to shame. Even the massive 2,000-room casino resort Wynn is building next to Wynn — it would rank as New York's largest hotel — will not crack Las Vegas' top 15.

Not to be outdone, Fontainebleau Resorts recently announced plans for a $2.8 billion, 3,900-room resort on the northern end of the Las Vegas Strip. And developer Ian Bruce Eichner has raised $3 billion to build a 3,000-unit condo-hotel, the Cosmopolitan Resort and Casino, on the Strip.

(And there is the likelihood of more large-scale projects on the horizon. Yesterday, Goldman Sachs paid $1.3 billion for the four Nevada casinos owned by Carl C. Icahn's American Real Estate Partners, including the Stratosphere Las Vegas Hotel and Casino, but also a precious 17 acres of undeveloped land on the Strip.)

Even without the new hotel properties, the 151,000 guest rooms in the extended Las Vegas area, according to Smith Travel Research, a lodging industry data broker, are nearly twice the 80,000 rooms in New York City. Orlando ranks second to Las Vegas with 111,000 rooms.

And yet Las Vegas has more new hotel rooms under construction (11,000) than any other city in the country, as well as more rooms on the drawing boards (35,000).