That’s some expensive dirt.
Developers of Ascaya, the long-delayed mountain-mansion project in Henderson, have sold their first lot — a 0.46-acre parcel for $925,000.
The sale closed Friday, property records show, and sales of two other lots are expected to close soon, listing broker Florence Shapiro said.
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Those parcels also are about a half-acre and are expected to sell for around the same price as the first one. The buyers are all local residents, Shapiro said.
Meanwhile, 50 people are on a waiting list for parcels higher up the mountain that aren’t available for purchase yet, according to Shapiro. Prospective buyers are flying in from California to tour the site, she said.
“We’re getting a lot of action,” Shapiro said.
The first round of sales comes two months after Ascaya management reopened the project site, located south of Horizon Ridge Parkway off Roma Hills Drive, almost 1,000 feet above the valley floor in the McCullough Range, after years of inactivity.
Work crews have graded lots, built roads and installed underground utilities, but Ascaya doesn’t have a single house. With dozens of empty, cake-layered pads carved into the mountain, it has symbolized the excesses and failures of the boom years.
Management now aims to sell the 313 lots in phases and to have the project fully developed in a decade or so.
To prevent cookie-cutter homes from blanketing the mountain, they are imposing design restrictions to ensure each house has a unique, contemporary desert-themed look. Also, they are not selling lots to builders who would construct homes without buyers lined up, the sales team has said.
Under Ascaya’s development guidelines, each home must be at least 4,500 square feet, sales manager Darin Marques said in August. There is no maximum.
Ascaya is being developed by Hong Kong tycoon Henry Cheng, whose family was buying land in the Henderson mountains as far back as 1990.
Cheng blasted away the mountainside during the boom years last decade — with plans for mansions overlooking the valley from street names such as Heavens Edge, Stonecutter and Epic View — but tabled the project in 2009, after the economy collapsed.
His group spent at least $200 million building the site. They reportedly drilled, blasted and moved 15 million cubic yards of solid rock, cutting at least 140 feet deep.
Neighbors complained the blasting shook their homes and cracked windows and foundations.