Event marketer Derse expands Las Vegas operation

A big trade-show and event marketing company has expanded its local footprint.

Milwaukee-based Derse is boosting its space by nearly 50 percent, moving from an 89,000-square-foot plant near Tropicana Avenue and Interstate 15 to a 133,400-square-foot warehouse and fabrication center at 3200 E. Gowan Road in North Las Vegas. The new building opens Monday.

The number of local Derse employees will stay at 50.

“We’ve outgrown our current facility. We needed more space for our employees, and we needed to grow as our number of clients has grown,” said Logan Terry, general manager of Derse’s Las Vegas operation.

Jeremy Green, a first vice president specializing in industrial space with local brokerage CB Richard Ellis, represented Derse in the lease, which will run about seven years. Green said the deal is unusual for its size: The local market has fewer than a dozen available properties with at least 100,000 contiguous square feet under one roof.

The lease also reflects an improving industrial market as the economy picks up, Green said. Including the Derse deal, which was inked in March, the Las Vegas Valley absorbed more than 1 million square feet of net industrial space in the first two quarters of 2013 — numbers the market hasn’t seen in more than five years, he said.

Still, industrial vacancies were high in the second quarter, at 16.2 percent, according to numbers from local research firm Applied Analysis.

Derse, which has 400 employees companywide, has been in Las Vegas since 1994. It develops trade-show and event-based marketing and advertising campaigns and materials for companies in gaming, the automotive industry, consumer electronics, construction, medical devices, pharmaceuticals and sports and recreation.

With its new space, Derse will better be able to build, store and stage exhibit booths for clients who want to see how a display looks before it hits the convention floor, Terry said.

Because it needed such a large space, it took a while for Derse to find it. The company scouted the market casually for about a year, and spent another six months looking seriously. The company chose North Las Vegas because that’s where it was able to find space, Terry said.

Dan Doherty, SIOR, and Chris Lane of Colliers International represented the landlord, PAR Industrial, a division of Pacific Life Insurance Co. They said in a March transaction note that the deal was worth about $3.5 million.

Contact reporter Jennifer Robison at jrobison@reviewjournal.com or 702-380-4512.