The Ridges

The Ridges is Summerlin's summit, in altitude and in price: a 793-acre guard-gated village conceived in 2000 along the ridgeline that gives it its name, where fourteen neighborhoods of custom and builder luxury homes look east to the Strip skyline and west to Red Rock Canyon. The western edge borders federally preserved land, which means the view that sells these lots can never be built out from under them.

The lending here is the valley's high book. Jumbo is the working currency, with loan amounts well past the Clark County conforming limit on most closings, new construction financing carries the custom builds and tear-down rebuilds now that raw custom lots are nearly gone, second-home structures serve the buyers who keep The Ridges as their desert address, and an equity line gives an owner liquidity against a property that rarely trades.

Practical texture: files here move through the Summerlin master association, The Ridges village association, and often a sub-association behind a second gate, and appraisals lean on a thin set of true comparables, so the value conversation starts early. Large loan amounts also mean reserves and documented liquidity get read as carefully as income.

The village centerpiece, the Jack Nicklaus designed Bear's Best course with its replicated signature holes, is being reimagined as the private Amara Golf Club, and Club Ridges anchors daily life with its nine-thousand-square-foot fitness and swim campus. Ask Art for a current read on the market before you write an offer.

When Summerlin's planners reached the rocky shelf at the community's far southwestern edge around 2000, they chose to make it the master plan's crown: a guard-gated village of custom homesites platted along the high ground, with a Jack Nicklaus course threading the canyon washes below. Bear's Best opened as a collection of Nicklaus' favorite holes recreated from his courses across the Southwest, and the village grew neighborhood by neighborhood, Promontory Ridge taking the highest ground of all.

A quarter century on, The Ridges is where the valley's luxury market sets its ceiling. Custom land is essentially built out, so the market has shifted to resale and to tear-down rebuilds, and the course at the village's heart is being transformed into the private Amara Golf Club. What has not changed is the geometry that made the village work in the first place: preserved federal land to the west, the Strip lit up to the east, and a ridgeline in between that holds some of the most valuable residential ground in Nevada.