Why Summit Club Homes Sell Off-Market | Ryan Rose

by Ryan Rose

What Happened

Jeffrey Soffer and Colleen Soffer bought the Summit Club home for $25 million, with the transaction closing in July 2026, the Review-Journal reported on August 21. Soffer is the chairman of Fontainebleau Development, the company behind the Fontainebleau resort on the north end of the Las Vegas Strip. That makes him a familiar name in Southern Nevada business circles even though this purchase was a private residential deal.

The house itself is new. It was built last year and sits on a 0.8-acre lot inside The Summit Club, the private golf community developed by Discovery Land Company within Summerlin. It measures 9,857 square feet with six bedrooms and eight bathrooms. It also carries a garage of roughly 2,100 square feet, which is larger than a typical Las Vegas starter home all by itself.

The seller was Marc-Andre Fleury, the former Vegas Golden Knights goaltender. He bought the vacant lot for $3.9 million in February 2021 and built the home on it. County records show Soffer took a $15 million mortgage in connection with the purchase.

The most unusual fact in the whole file is the absence of one. The home was never formally listed. In a normal transaction, a listing generates a paper trail: a Multiple Listing Service entry, days on market, price changes, showing history. None of that exists here. The public record of this house begins with a lot purchase in 2021 and picks up again with a deed transfer in 2026, with a $25 million sale price in between and no marketing period at all.

Contemporary stone and glass estate exterior with a long private driveway, typical of new custom builds in Summerlin

Why It Matters to Las Vegas Residents

Most people reading this are not shopping for a $25 million house. The reason this matters anyway is that it exposes a gap in the data everyone uses to understand the Las Vegas market.

When you check a home value estimate, or read a headline about median prices in Clark County, those numbers are built on listings and closed sales that flowed through the MLS. Off-market deals sit outside a chunk of that pipeline. The sale price eventually shows up in county records, but the listing behavior that tells you how the market actually felt, how long buyers hesitated, whether the seller cut the price, never gets recorded. In the top tier of the valley, where a meaningful share of transactions happen privately, the picture is thinner than it looks.

That has a practical effect on ordinary homeowners in Summerlin and the northwest valley. If you own a $900,000 house a few miles from The Summit Club, the automated value estimate on your phone is drawing partly on comparable sales in your area. Those estimates work reasonably well in neighborhoods full of similar homes that all trade publicly. They fall apart at the top, where the houses are custom, the volume is low, and the deals are quiet. Anyone who has watched a valuation site guess wildly at a luxury property has seen this in action.

There is a second effect that hits buyers harder. If the best inventory in a community never reaches the public market, then searching the public market is not the same thing as searching the community. A buyer who spends a year refreshing listing sites for Summerlin's high end may be looking at only part of what actually sold. Access to the private side of the market comes from relationships, not from a search filter, and that is an uncomfortable truth for anyone who assumes the internet shows them everything.

The third effect is about expectations. When a $25 million sale surfaces with no listing history, it is easy to read it as evidence that luxury demand is red hot. It might be. It might also be one specific buyer wanting one specific house. A single off-market trade tells you almost nothing about the broader trend, and treating it as a market signal is how people talk themselves into bad pricing decisions.

Background and History

Off-market selling is not new and it is not unique to Las Vegas. It exists everywhere the price tier gets high enough that the seller values discretion more than they value competitive bidding. What has changed is how organized it has become.

In the traditional model, a seller hires an agent, the agent lists the property in the MLS, and every agent in the region can see it within minutes. That system exists because broad exposure usually produces the best price. More eyes means more offers, and more offers means a higher number. For the overwhelming majority of sellers in Clark County, that logic holds and listing publicly is the right call.

At the very top, the calculus shifts. A seller of a $25 million home may not want photographs of their family's private spaces indexed by search engines forever. They may not want strangers booking showings to tour a house they have no ability to buy. They may not want a public price cut on the record if the first number does not work. Privacy stops being a preference and starts being part of the value.

The Summit Club amplifies all of this. Developed by Discovery Land Company, it is a gated private golf community inside Summerlin built specifically around seclusion. Its residents include people who chose the community precisely because it keeps the outside world out. In that environment, a private sale is not a workaround, it is the house style. Buyers and sellers inside the gates often know each other, or know the same handful of agents who work that tier, and a deal can come together through a few conversations rather than a marketing campaign.

Nevada also makes the record thin by design. This is a non-disclosure state in practice for many transaction details, though real property transfer tax filings do let reporters and researchers work out sale prices. That is how a deal with no listing still becomes public knowledge weeks after it closes, which is exactly what happened here.

Modern desert-style luxury home with a large pool and expansive glass walls, comparable to new Summerlin custom construction

How an Off-Market Luxury Deal Actually Comes Together

The mechanics are less mysterious than they sound. An off-market sale generally starts with an owner telling a small number of trusted agents that the house could be available at the right number. Nothing is advertised. No sign goes up. The agents who hear about it keep a mental list of clients who fit the property, and they make quiet calls.

From there, a serious buyer usually signs a confidentiality agreement before seeing anything meaningful. Showings happen by appointment with the owner's schedule in mind. Photography, if it exists at all, may never leave a private link. Pricing is negotiated directly rather than discovered through competing offers, which means both sides lean heavily on their agent's read of the tier.

The escrow process, though, is almost entirely normal. Title work, inspections, appraisals when there is financing, disclosures, and the recorded deed all happen the same way they would on a $400,000 house in Aliante. That is why an off-market sale still becomes public: the deed and the transfer tax are not private, even when the marketing was. Financing works normally too, which is why a mortgage recorded against a purchase like this is simply part of the routine paperwork rather than a hint about anything.

The tradeoff for the seller is real. Skipping the open market means skipping the price discovery that competition produces. A seller accepts that in exchange for control, speed, and quiet. Whether that is a good trade depends entirely on the property and the owner's priorities, and it is a genuinely close call more often than people assume.

What a Private Sale Costs the Rest of the Market

Every off-market deal removes a data point from the shared record. Not the price, since that eventually surfaces through county filings, but everything around the price. Nobody learns how long the house would have sat, how many buyers walked through, or whether the first number was too high. That context is what agents use to price the next home, and when it goes missing the next seller is working with less.

Appraisers feel it too. An appraiser valuing a custom home in Summerlin's upper tier needs comparable sales, and comparables from private deals arrive late and stripped of detail. A closed price with no listing history is harder to interpret, because there is no way to tell whether it reflected open competition or a single motivated buyer. That uncertainty tends to make appraisals more conservative, which can slow financing on the next high-end purchase in the same neighborhood.

None of that makes private sales wrong. Sellers are entitled to their privacy, and no one is obligated to advertise their home to the world. It is simply worth understanding that the convenience is not free, and part of the cost lands on everyone else who is trying to figure out what homes in that community are actually worth.

Modern luxury home with floor to ceiling windows glowing at dusk, illustrating the high-end Summerlin custom home tier

What Happens Next

Watch The Summit Club's sales pace over the next several months. The community has a limited number of homesites, and each new closing at this level resets what the next seller believes their house is worth. When a $25 million trade lands with no listing behind it, other owners in the community notice, and some of them will test the water privately before they ever consider a public listing.

Also watch how much of Summerlin's high end continues to move without listings. The broader industry has been arguing for years about pocket listings and private exclusives, and the rules keep shifting. Local practice tends to follow national policy changes with a lag, so any tightening or loosening at the association level will eventually show up in how these deals are handled here.

For the rest of the valley, the useful thing to track is not this one house. It is whether luxury inventory in Clark County continues to sit outside the public market while the mid-tier stays firmly inside it. If that split widens, then market reports about the top end get less reliable over time, and buyers at that level will depend even more on who they know rather than what they can search.

Ryan's Take

The instinct most people have when they read about a $25 million off-market sale is that the system is rigged and normal buyers get shut out. I understand that reaction, but I think the real lesson is narrower and more useful.

Off-market works when a property is genuinely rare and the buyer pool is genuinely tiny. There are maybe a few dozen realistic buyers on earth for a specific 9,857-square-foot custom home inside a private Summerlin golf club. Reaching all of them does not require a billboard, it requires a phone. That is a completely different problem than selling a four-bedroom in Skye Canyon, where there might be two hundred qualified buyers this month and the only way to find the best one is to let all of them compete.

Where I see people get hurt is when they borrow the luxury playbook for a normal house. I have watched sellers agree to keep a $650,000 home quiet because it sounded exclusive, and then leave money on the table because three buyers never learned it existed. Exposure is what creates competition, and competition is what creates price. If your house is not truly one of one, going quiet is usually a cost, not a strategy.

Large custom home framed by mature landscaping on a private lot, similar to estate properties in the Summerlin foothills

What You Can Do

If you are selling anywhere in Clark County, ask your agent to make the case for exposure in plain numbers. How many buyers are realistically shopping your price band right now? If the answer is more than a handful, list publicly and let them bid. If your home is truly unusual, in a gated community, or your situation requires privacy, then a private approach deserves a real conversation, not a reflex in either direction.

If you are buying in Summerlin's upper tier, understand that the public search sites are a starting point, not the whole inventory. Tell your agent specifically what you want, down to the community, the lot size, and the build year, and ask them to work their network for properties that have not surfaced yet. That kind of search takes longer and requires patience, but it is the only way to see what the market is not advertising.

And if you simply want to know what your own home is worth, do not lean on an automated estimate, especially if you live somewhere with custom homes or few recent sales. Those tools are built for uniform neighborhoods with high transaction volume. A real comparative market analysis, done by someone who has walked the comparable homes, will get you far closer to reality.

Have questions about how this affects your home or neighborhood? Reach out to Ryan Rose or text/call 702-747-5921 anytime.