The obvious number is $300 million. The interesting one is $30.5 million, and the two men who wrote that check both live inside the guard gate.
Buyers comparing The Ridges to Ascaya, MacDonald Highlands, or The Summit Club in 2026 tend to read the Amara Golf Club story as an amenity upgrade. It is, but treating it as only that misses the mechanism that will actually move prices inside the community over the next 24 months. Amara is a defensive acquisition first, a golf project second, and the pricing implications differ by enclave in ways the current median doesn't capture.
The move most buyers are not pricing correctly
Andrew Pascal, the CEO of PlayStudios and a former COO of Wynn Resorts, and Mike Mixer, co-founder of the Las Vegas office of Colliers International, bought Bear's Best Las Vegas in 2024 for $30.5 million under Mulligan Holdings. Both are Ridges residents. Their stated motivation was partly protective, and the reference point they named was the Badlands golf course saga: a shuttered course, a developer's rezoning bid, and years of litigation that ended in a costly settlement for the City of Las Vegas.
The Badlands outcome is the shadow that hangs over every golf-fronting lot in the valley. A course closes, a developer files, and homeowners who paid a premium for the fairway view spend the next decade fighting to keep it.
The solution Mulligan chose was conversion to a private club at a scale that makes any future rezoning fight essentially moot. You do not spend $300 million on a clubhouse, a redesigned Jack Nicklaus championship layout, a six-hole Par-3 course, simulators, and 15 villas if you plan to bulldoze it for tract homes in fifteen years.
That is the fact the median price on the portals cannot express. Ridges owners with fairway exposure just had their single largest tail risk retired by two of their own neighbors. Buyers evaluating those same lots today are pricing them as if the risk still exists.
What actually changes between now and October 2026
The last public round at Bear's Best was played on June 22, 2025. Redevelopment officially began that September. The projected reopening date for Amara is October 2026, with the villas completing by the end of 2027. The site sits on more than 200 acres in Summerlin South, west of the 215 Beltway, with a reconfigured entrance off Flamingo Road.
The design team is worth naming because it signals the intended tier. Course architecture is by Jackson Kahn Design. Landscape architecture is by OJB. Construction is by PENTA Building Group, with project management by Hatchwell Studios. This is not the roster you assemble for a facelift.
The amenities inside the two-level clubhouse include underground parking, a spa, a fitness center, a wine lounge, banquet rooms, and a fine dining restaurant. Recreation adds a family pool with cabanas and a smoothie bar, a sports lounge, four pickleball courts, volleyball, and an event lawn. The old driving range becomes the new six-hole Par-3 course, with simulators handling all-season practice.
For a buyer touring homes in the next six months, the useful question is not "will Amara be nice." It will. The useful question is which enclaves benefit and by how much.
The enclave map has shifted
The Ridges spans 793 acres at Summerlin's highest elevation with roughly 380 homesites across twelve individually gated enclaves. Not all of them sit against the golf corridor. The redevelopment concentrates value in the ones that do.
| Enclave | Fairway exposure | Typical price band | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fairway Hills (Toll Brothers) | Direct, condo product | $680K – $1.7M | Lowest-risk entry to a Ridges address with Amara adjacency |
| Silver Ridge | ~83 homes overlooking former Bear's Best fairways | $2M – $5M | Semi-custom, mountain-view corridors |
| Falcon Ridge | Direct, several fairway-backing lots | $2.5M – $6M | Walk-to-first-tee positioning |
| Redhawk | Direct, ~80 custom homes on one-third to one-acre lots | $3M – $8M | Slightly more accessible than Azure or Promontory |
| Arrowhead | Golf and Strip views on ~one-acre lots | $2M – $5M | Estate-sized lots at relative value |
| Azure, Promontory, Rimrock, The Pointe | View-dominant, elevation-driven | $5M – $20M+ | Top three 2025 sales all in Azure at $13.5M to $16M |
The fairway-fronting enclaves are the ones where the Amara math changes the calculus. Comparable analysis from Southern Highlands and Red Rock Country Club shows golf-fronting homes carrying a 12 to 18 percent premium over non-golf lots once a course is fully active. Nevada Real Estate Group's projection for Ridges fairway lots specifically is 10 to 15 percent appreciation as the course reopens and membership fills.
The catch is that Amara is a private club, and the residence and the membership are two different transactions.
The membership economics live outside the closing
Amara is capped at 265 memberships. Two hundred and fifty are general, and 15 are reserved for the club villa owners. Initiation is $250,000, and it escalates every 50 memberships sold. Monthly dues are approximately $4,000 and cover family access including children up to age 25. The 15 club villas will run 2,000 to 2,500 square feet on lots from about 11,300 to 24,520 square feet. Custom homesites adjacent to the course are planned at 4,000 to 6,000 square feet.
Three points that trip up buyers who assume the club and the community are the same thing:
- Ridges residency does not include Amara membership. You can own on a fairway lot, look at the course from your kitchen, and still not tee off there. Membership is a separate application against a hard cap.
- Villa ownership does not automatically confer membership either. Only 15 villa-linked memberships exist, and villas and memberships transact separately.
- Buyers purchasing a Ridges single-family home from a current Amara member move to the front of the membership waitlist. That priority is the quiet lever, and it turns certain resale listings into two-in-one transactions in a market where the cap is 265.
For a buyer whose primary motivation is the golf, the sequencing matters more than the address. Getting under contract on a home whose seller holds a founding membership is materially different from buying an equivalent home next door whose seller does not.
Reading the current market against the catalyst
The Ridges recorded a 2024 median sold price of $4.44 million at roughly $813 per square foot, per Las Vegas REALTORS MLS data. In Q1 2026, GLVAR data put the median at $2.95 million, up 6.4 percent year over year. A February 2026 snapshot came in near $2.7 million, weighted toward condo and semi-custom sales that month. Movoto's May 2026 list-side read was $2.99 million at $736 per square foot, with a median 52 days on market. The wide swing between the annual custom-heavy median and the quarterly condo-heavy median is not noise. It's a signal that the community trades in two distinct tiers, and each is responding to Amara differently.
At the low end, Fairway Hills condos ($680K to $1.7M) are the cleanest expression of the catalyst. Low carrying cost, direct proximity to the course, no membership pressure. If Amara opens on schedule in October 2026 and fills toward its cap, the golf-adjacent condo product is the pure play on the amenity narrative.
At the top end, Azure, Promontory, and Rimrock trade on their own fundamentals. Supply is thin enough that a $12M to $16M sale reflects the specific house, not the neighborhood tape. The three highest 2025 sales all closed in Azure, ranging from $13.5 million to $16 million. Amara helps the story on those listings, but the buyers at that tier are underwriting the individual property.
The interesting inefficiency sits in the middle. Redhawk, Falcon Ridge, Silver Ridge, Arrowhead. Fairway-adjacent, custom or semi-custom, with a median days-on-market around 47 to 52. That is the band where the 10 to 15 percent projected appreciation compounds against a pricing base the broader Las Vegas Altos Research read still describes as a Market Action Index of 35 with 34 percent of listings carrying price reductions. Ridges pricing power is not the Ridges tape. It is house-by-house.
The HOA and carry are still the same
Amara does not change the community's cost structure for non-members. Summerlin master association dues run roughly $70 per month for Ridges homeowners. The Ridges sub-HOA runs $295 to $485 per month depending on the village. Verona and Arrowhead owners pay an additional village sub-HOA for attached or patio-home common elements. Guard-gate staffing, private streets, common landscape, and Club Ridges access are all inside that stack.
If you never intend to join Amara, the Amara story is still a property-value story. If you do intend to join, your total monthly at a general membership adds roughly $4,000 on top of the HOA and the mortgage, with the $250,000 initiation as a separate capital event.
FAQ
Is Bear's Best still open to the public? No. The final public round was played on June 22, 2025. The site is closed for redevelopment and is projected to reopen as the private Amara Golf Club in October 2026.
Can I buy a home in The Ridges without joining Amara? Yes. Ridges residency and Amara membership are separate. The community has its own private amenity, Club Ridges, which includes a fitness center, pool, spa, and lit tennis courts, and does not require an Amara membership.
Are the 15 club villas already spoken for? Villa construction is expected to begin in 2027 and complete by year-end 2027. Villa ownership and the 15 villa-linked memberships transact together in some cases but are not automatically bundled, and specifics are handled directly by the club.
Does the priority waitlist for buyers of member-owned homes actually matter? It matters most in the first 18 months after the October 2026 opening, when the cap fills fastest and the initiation fee is escalating in $50-membership tranches. After that, the mechanism still exists, but the urgency softens.
If you are weighing a purchase inside The Ridges in the window before Amara reopens, the enclave you choose and the seller you buy from will drive the outcome as much as the list price. LeBo Luxury represents buyers and sellers across Summerlin's guard-gated communities with two decades of Las Vegas transaction experience and a founder-led approach built for the specific frictions of this market. Request a complimentary luxury home valuation or a private consultation on Ridges inventory, on- and off-market.
