After nixing a move to Florida, where his wife Rhea Durham was born and has family, Mark Wahlberg isn’t waiting for his new mansion to be built at Las Vegas’s uber-luxury resort community the Summit Club.
Wahlberg, who paid $15.6 million for 2.5 acres on which to build a luxury mansion in the Summit Club, has also pulled the trigger on an already built bungalow in the same ritzy Summerlin enclave, paying $14.5 million for a 7,327-square-foot home, according to Clark County property records. The two-story home has four bedrooms, four full bathrooms and two half-baths, plus a garage of almost 1,300 square feet.
Wahlberg bought the home from Discovery Land Company, co-developer of the Summit Club along with the Howard Hughes Corp., the developer of the Summerlin planned community that sprawls along the western edge of the Las Vegas Valley.
The Summit began closing on lots in 2015 and has sold out all but one of 150 original lots and is in the process of expanding the community to sell even more. Last summer, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen paid a record $36 million for 4.5 acres on which to build a sprawling estate in the Summit Club. Las Vegas Raiders owner Mark Davis has a condo there and Vegas Golden Knight owner Bill Foley has a home there, too. So does Canadian pop icon Céline Dion.
How Wahlberg, co-owner of the Wahlburgers fast-food joint on the Strip, came to own $30 million in Sin City real estate is quite the story, according to Alicia Taylor, a broker with Clear Sky Realty in Las Vegas. Taylor was not an agent in either of the Wahlberg transactions, but she spoke to the prolific actor and producer in November 2020 via a Zoom call about his desire to find a contemporary Las Vegas home in a sufficiently secure location.
Given its high-tech security that’s unlike any other in Las Vegas, with body heat tracking for any intruders on the guard-gated 555-acre site, Taylor said she suggested the Summit Club. She said Wahlberg, who was at that time reluctant to go through the lengthy building process, had a $30 million to $35 million budget for a home. “He said he was looking for something with at least five bedrooms because he had four kids,” Taylor said. “The wife was trying to go to Florida, where her family lives, and he was trying to convince her to go to Vegas.”
Taylor said she suggested several homes in the Summit and, since there aren’t many properties in Las Vegas in that price range, also suggested buying property to custom build. Wahlberg was at one point interested in gaming entrepreneur Steve Wynn’s home on Summerlin’s Billionaires Row, which ultimately sold for $17.5 million, and he even looked at Céline Dion’s home in the Summit earlier this year, she said.
“I was still sending stuff off and on, and then they bought [land] at the Summit after I suggested that in the first place,” Taylor said, laughing. She doesn’t have any idea what size home Wahlberg plans to build in the Summit. Given his past propensity for size, it’s likely to be gigantic.
In the meantime, he’s got a 7,400-square-foot desert villa in which to roam around while overseeing construction on his new mansion, plus all the amenities and security offered at the Summit Club.
Taylor said she doesn’t know why Wahlberg wanted to move to Las Vegas and whether it was for tax purposes but did say Wahlberg told her back in late 2020 that he planned to list his home in Los Angeles. And he did, earlier this year, with a sky-high price of $87.5 million.
