A buyer looking at CityCenter for the first time sees one gated development on the Strip: three residential towers grouped around Aria, all built by the same company, all finished within a year of each other, all photographed from the same rooftop angle in every listing deck. What that buyer usually doesn't see until the resale package lands in their inbox is that Veer Towers, Waldorf Astoria, and Vdara operate under three separate sets of rules for the one thing that actually matters after closing: what you're allowed to do with the unit.
Buy at Veer and you can live there, or lease it out for six months at a time, and that's the ceiling. Buy at Waldorf Astoria and you get a 30-day floor instead, plus a building that runs more like a hotel than a condo association. Buy at Vdara and you can put the unit into a nightly rental program the same week you close, but you'll likely be writing a check for it rather than signing a conventional mortgage. Same complex, same block, same MGM parentage back in 2009. Three different deeds.
Three Buildings, Three Governing Documents
Veer Towers are the twin 37-story residential buildings tilted five degrees toward each other, a Helmut Jahn design that earned LEED Gold certification and, more relevant to a buyer's day-to-day life, no hotel component at all. Units run from roughly 537 to 3,300 square feet, and the HOA rules require a minimum six-month lease term. Nightly and short-term rentals are prohibited outright. This is CityCenter's one building that behaves like a conventional residential condominium tower, which also means it qualifies for conventional Fannie Mae financing rather than the portfolio-lender workarounds the other two towers require.
Waldorf Astoria sits a few hundred feet away and reads like the same category of asset on a spec sheet, but it isn't. The building opened in 2009 as the Mandarin Oriental Las Vegas and rebranded in 2018. It splits its floors between hotel rooms and 225 privately owned residences that begin on the 23rd floor, which is why every unit in the building has an unobstructed view with no low-floor exceptions. Ownership here comes with a 30-day minimum lease term and an explicit prohibition on Airbnb and VRBO under the building's CC&Rs. It's warrantable financing with a hospitality premium layered on top, not a condo-hotel in the technical sense, but not a quiet residential tower either.
Vdara is the one true condo-hotel of the three. The 57-story tower holds roughly 1,495 units total, but MGM halted individual unit sales at some point after opening, and only around 149 of those units are actually held by private owners today. The rest sit with an MGM-affiliated development entity. The units that are individually owned, ranging from about 526 to 1,750 square feet, can go into Vdara's on-site rental program or be listed independently, including on Airbnb, at the owner's discretion. That flexibility is the entire reason to buy here instead of next door, and it comes at a real financing cost.
What the Rulebook Actually Costs You
| Tower | Ownership Model | Rental Floor | Typical Financing |
|---|---|---|---|
| Veer Towers | Purely residential condominium | 6-month minimum lease, no short-term rentals | Conventional, warrantable |
| Waldorf Astoria | Branded hotel residence | 30-day minimum lease, no Airbnb/VRBO | Conventional, hospitality premium |
| Vdara | Condo-hotel | Owner-optional nightly rental program | Cash or portfolio lender, non-warrantable |
That last column is where buyers get caught. A Vdara unit is classified as non-warrantable because the building operates with hotel-style transient occupancy, front desk staffing, and daily housekeeping woven into its structure, which knocks it out of standard Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac eligibility. Financed buyers typically need a portfolio lender, a down payment in the 25 to 40 percent range, and an interest rate one to two points above what a conventional Veer or Waldorf Astoria buyer would pay on the same purchase price. Most Vdara closings happen in cash for exactly this reason. A buyer who assumes CityCenter is CityCenter and shops purely on price per square foot can find a unit that pencils beautifully on paper and then discovers the financing math looks nothing like the tower next door.
The Fight That Doesn't Touch This Building
Clark County spent much of August 2026 rewriting its short-term rental enforcement. On August 18, county commissioners voted 5-0 to approve an ordinance that holds booking platforms like Airbnb responsible for verifying a property's business license before processing a reservation, part of an enforcement effort that traces back to the state's 2021 short-term rental framework and the county's own 2022 ordinance, which set buffer rules keeping licensed rentals a set distance apart and away from resort properties. The county's business license division reported roughly 220 short-term rental licenses issued so far under that system, with another 116 applications still pending.
None of it applies to Vdara's rental program. That fight is about unincorporated Clark County's residential housing stock, single-family homes and standalone condos where an owner applies for an individual short-term rental license from the county. A condo-hotel tower operates under a completely different structure: the building itself holds a transient lodging establishment business license through the City of Las Vegas, the same category that governs hotel rooms citywide, and Vdara's rental program runs under that license rather than a residential permit tied to an individual owner. It's also why nightly stays at Vdara carry Clark County's combined transient lodging tax, a rate that runs between roughly 13.38 and 13.88 percent depending on which Strip corridor the property sits in, collected from the guest and remitted by the building's operator rather than negotiated unit by unit. A Vdara buyer modeling rental income should be building that tax rate into their revenue assumptions from day one, not treating it as a surprise on the first statement.
For a Veer or Waldorf Astoria owner, this entire regulatory fight is background noise. Their units were never eligible for nightly rentals in the first place, so a county crackdown on unlicensed operators changes nothing about their ownership experience.
Matching the Deed to the Buyer
The three towers end up sorting buyers almost as cleanly as their governing documents sort the units. A buyer who wants a quiet, low-maintenance Strip pied-à-terre and has no interest in generating rental income tends to land at Veer, where the six-month lease floor and no-hotel-component design keep the building feeling residential rather than transient. A buyer who wants hospitality-level service woven into ownership, someone who values having hotel infrastructure downstairs without wanting to actually run a rental business, gravitates toward Waldorf Astoria. A buyer who specifically wants the option to generate nightly income when the unit sits empty, and who has the cash or the appetite for portfolio financing, is the one who should be looking at Vdara and nowhere else in this complex.
Before writing an offer at any of the three, a few questions are worth answering with the actual governing documents in hand rather than assumptions carried over from the listing:
- What is the minimum lease term in the specific building's CC&Rs, and does it match the intended use of the unit
- Is the unit financeable conventionally, or does the purchase require a portfolio lender and a larger down payment
- If a rental program exists, what percentage of gross revenue does the operator retain, and how does the transient lodging tax factor into net return
- What does the HOA's most recent reserve study show, since Nevada law under NRS Chapter 116 requires every common-interest community to commission one at least every five years, and a 15-plus-year-old high-rise is the kind of building where that document actually matters
FAQ
Can I get a conventional mortgage on a Vdara unit? Generally no. Vdara's condo-hotel structure makes it non-warrantable under Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac standards, so most buyers use a portfolio lender with a larger down payment or purchase in cash.
Can I list my Veer Towers condo on Airbnb? No. Veer's HOA rules set a six-month minimum lease term and prohibit short-term or nightly rentals entirely.
Does owning at Waldorf Astoria come with hotel services? Yes, in the sense that the building integrates hotel-level concierge and amenities into residential ownership, but the unit itself carries a 30-day minimum lease and cannot be placed into a nightly rental program the way a Vdara unit can.
Why does Vdara have so few individually owned units relative to its total unit count? MGM halted individual unit sales at Vdara after the initial offering, and the majority of the tower's roughly 1,495 units remain held by an MGM-affiliated entity rather than private owners, which is part of why inventory at Vdara tends to be thinner than at Veer or Waldorf Astoria.
If you're weighing which of these three buildings actually fits how you plan to use a Strip address, that's a conversation worth having before you tour a single unit. Michele Sullivan - MS Luxury Homes works with buyers across CityCenter and the wider Las Vegas luxury market who need someone who already knows which questions the governing documents answer and which ones they don't. Connect with Michele to talk through the fit before you write.
