And, indeed, it started out that way five years ago when one celebrity-branded high-rise after another made splashy announcements. There was to be George Clooney’s Las Ramblas, Ivana Trump’s Ivana, a hotel-condo by the celebrity chef Charlie Palmer. Web sites and entire real estate agencies sprang up around the notion that the market for luxury living on the Strip was limitless.

It hasn’t quite worked out. Each of those projects was canceled before even a shovelful of dirt was displaced. The St. Regis Residences, wedged between the Venetian and Palazzo resorts, stands as a truncated shell, construction having been unceremoniously halted in November by the financially troubled developer Las Vegas Sands.

Donald Trump built the hotel-condo Trump International Tower and saw reservations sell out, but a year on has managed to close on just 23 percent of the 1,286 units. His second tower has been postponed indefinitely. One completed condominium tower, Allure, has had such trouble closing on units that the developer has taken the unusual step of marketing the building to gay men and lesbians on the promise that a gay-themed hotel-casino may someday be built next door.

Whether the desire to own a residence or live on the Strip was overestimated or whether the nation’s real estate and economic collapse dashed these visions of glamour and profit, the Las Vegas second-home market is clearly different today from what it was giddily anticipated to be earlier this decade.

The buildings at CityCenter, the $8.6 billion six-structure development just south of the Bellagio Hotel and Casino, embody the uncertainty in the condominium market. The developer, MGM Mirage, holds deposits on 434 of the 670 units at the twin-tower Veer condominiums and 210 of the 227 at the residences atop the 400-room Mandarin Oriental Hotel. But there is no telling how many will close when the buildings open in December. The company also canceled 210 units in another building, the Harmon, when construction problems there forced the company to build 21 fewer floors than intended. The Harmon is now planned solely as a hotel and is due to open in late 2010, a year late.

“We have written very few new contracts in 2008, and the beginnings of ’09 are not any better,” said Tony Dennis, MGM Mirage executive vice president for residential sales. Even so, the company, which raised prices in February 2008, does not plan to discount them. “We have a philosophy that the real estate is finite, that CityCenter is exceptional and that lowering prices in the short term offends the buyers who come before and undermines the philosophy,” Mr. Dennis said.

Mr. Trump also isn’t lowering prices, saying he has reduced the $535 million mortgage to “a very low number” partly through 20 percent nonrefundable deposits and by, for the time being, renting out as hotel rooms those units that don’t close. He said he was astonished at the stalling of the St. Regis, which is visible from his tower across the street. “They have an empty building right in the front entrance that stopped construction,” Mr. Trump said. “I don’t know whose idea that was. They have a concrete frame standing there; you talk about a mess.”

When second-home seekers do buy on or near the Strip, real estate agents say, most pay cash. That’s what Harry Bienenfeld, 64, of Old Brookville, N.Y., did last year when he bought a 3,200-square-foot, three-bedroom, three-bathroom unit with two terraces for $1.055 million at Turnberry Place, a four-building high-rise complex just off the Strip that was completed in 2005 and is seen as the most successful of such projects.

Mr. Bienenfeld bought the property for an especially Vegas-y reason: he was tired of having to gamble a certain amount to earn free rooms and amenities at resorts on the Strip.

“When you stay in these hotels, you always feel the pressure to meet your minimums,” said Mr. Bienenfeld, a retired commodities trader who said the last straw was a visit to the Bellagio when he was charged more than $1,000 a night for his room upon checkout because he hadn’t played enough. “This way I own my own place and play as much or as little as I like.”

Mr. Bienenfeld admits he wishes he had waited — he bought in February 2008 and the property would probably be significantly less now — but he said he was confident about Las Vegas in the long term.

“I think Turnberry Place, because it’s mostly third or fourth homes for most people, will continue to hold their value,” Mr. Bienenfeld said. “For those who can afford to hold on, Las Vegas isn’t going anywhere. It’ll be back.”

Some second-home browsers in Las Vegas put off by what they see as unreasonably high prices on the Strip have found themselves considering properties in unexpected parts of town.

Such was the case of Richard Thum, a frequent visitor from San Antonio, who joined a recent bus tour of foreclosed properties aimed at second-home buyers and led by Jennifer Martin, a real estate agent. Ms. Martin’s tour began first at a trio of single-family houses in the suburbs, which mildly irritated Mr. Thum, who was focusing on condominiums on the Strip.

“This isn’t what I planned to look at,” muttered Mr. Thum, who had stayed an extra day and skipped Valentine’s Day evening with his wife to take the tour.

By the time the bus arrived at a pair of units at Turnberry Place, though, Mr. Thum had made a mental shift that startled even him. The third house in the suburbs was a 2,300-square-foot, three-bedroom single-family home with a kidney-shaped pool that was listed for $194,500. It had last sold for $395,000 in April 2006 before Wells Fargo foreclosed on the owners in January.

Mr. Thum was charmed by the place and unimpressed by what he found at Turnberry. He was shocked that a 2,195-square-foot two-bedroom, three-bathroom unit on the 14th floor was listed at $454,900 even though the deck, which provided a spectacular southward Strip view when it was completed in 2004, now faced a mammoth parking structure for the soon-to-open Fontainebleau Hotel and Casino. The unit, foreclosed upon in December, last sold for $850,000 in March 2005.

“My impression when we first started was that I wanted a condo, but I also was expecting to see blighted neighborhoods of houses with rows of foreclosed signs, and that’s not it at all,” said Mr. Thum, a 53-year-old commercial real estate agent who visits Las Vegas at least three times a year. “And look at the prices. There’s no way I would spend $500,000 to look at a parking lot when I can pay a third of that for a house, a pool and no association fees.”

Real estate agents say his is a common reaction these days. Nevada has the nation’s highest foreclosure rate — one in 76 homes is owned by a bank — so real estate agents are aggressively pushing the prospect of astonishing deals. The city enjoyed its best January ever this year in terms of single-family home sales, although more than 80 percent of those units were foreclosures.

“I hear from a lot of people who are only familiar with the Strip, who think they want to live a few blocks off the Strip,” said Robin Camacho, a real estate agent who writes the House Advantage blog for the Las Vegas Advisor, a Web site aimed at visitors. Ms. Camacho, whose 27 sales in 2008 put her among the top sellers in the region, said all were foreclosed properties. “You’ve got to have an awful lot of money to not think twice to put down $1 million on a condo near the Strip,” she said, “and it also might not be worth it.”

ONE of Ms. Camacho’s clients was Darlene Robidoux of Winnipeg, Manitoba, who came to town with her husband, Paul, in October with one rule for their search for a second home: it had to be at least 20 minutes away from the Strip. “When I go there, I want to not initially think, ‘Oh, I’m in Vegas,’ ” Ms. Robidoux said. “I want to be able to go and think this is my second home and relax there.”

The couple drove in for their annual 10-day visit with a blank check in hand, capable of spending as much as $90,000 for a condominium unit. They found precisely what they sought, a 980-square-foot, two-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment in the northwest community of Summerlin, for much less. The unit, which last sold for $165,990 in 2005 before being foreclosed upon last year, had been listed for $84,900 but — in a stroke of Vegas-sized luck — fell to $58,400 the day the Robidouxes chose to take a look, and their $61,100 topped an existing bid.

“When we left, we were just in shock,” said Mrs. Robidoux, 43, a dispatcher at the hospital where Mr. Robidoux is a systems analyst. “In the car, we’d say to each other, ‘Did we just buy a condo?’ All the way back home, we were like that.”

Mr. Thum, who is debating whether to bid on the house with the pool, is wondering if in fact the Las Vegas market has hit its bottom yet. He said he was confident, though, that even if it has not and he buys now, values will rise again sooner or later.