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Larry Canarelli receives Lifetime Achievement Award

Larry Canarelli said building homes has been his dream since he was a young child living in a tent by a river in central California. The tent burned. Later, as a fourth-grader he said he found a classified ad in the local newspaper for a house for sale. He presented it to his parents. They accepted his proposal and used his mom’s tip money from her waitress job as a down payment. Finally, the family had their own home.

As an older child, Canarelli, who is the founder of American West Development Inc., said he used to love to flip through his grandmother’s coffee table book filled with photographs of California mansions.

It’s those experiences, he said, that have driven his career of more than 40 years in the homebuilding industry.

He received the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Silver Nugget Awards ceremony held March 29 at the Renaissance Hotel.

“I work for the enjoyment of work,” he said, over the thunder of applause, as he received the award.

Having been involved in helping to build Green Valley, one of the first master-planned communities in the valley, Canarelli is still planning projects and building planned communities throughout Southern Nevada.

One of his projects is Mountain Trails in Pahrump. The 4,400 home master-planned community will be adjacent to the existing Mountain Falls community. It will feature a 20-acre water park and a 24-hour child care facility, catering to the Las Vegas commuter. It is expected that home models will open on Blue Diamond Road in late 2015, Canarelli said.

When he moved to the Las Vegas Valley from California in the mid-1970s, he was a sales agent for national builder, Metropolitan Homes.

Steve Schorr, vice president of marketing for the Las Vegas Review-Journal, said he remembers Canarelli trying to sell him a house in 1979.

“But I could not afford $49,000 (the cost of the home),” he said.

Schorr said the Silver Nugget’s Lifetime Achievement Award “honors those who have given so much to their industry.

“It’s a great tribute to the movers and shakers that have kept themselves going through the years,” he said.

Since opening his own company in 1984, Canarelli has developed more than 100 new-home communities and built more than 16,000 homes in the Las Vegas area.

In 2013, the privately held company reported that it closed on 730 homes in Southern Nevada, second to the publicly traded D.R. Horton, according to Home Builders Research Inc., a Las Vegas-based research company.

Canarelli helped develop the planned community, The Lakes, in the mid-1980s. Later he built Whitney Ranch, a community of 3,000 homes, three schools and two recreational facilities. He then assembled tiny parcels into a 1,250-wacre landmass that become Silverado Ranch, where he led several builders into developing a full-service community.

The company has won numerous Grand Gold Nugget Awards for the Best in the West home designs as well as the Home of the Year Award by the Southern Nevada Home Builders Association. Twice, the National Association of Home Builders presented American West Development Inc., with the ACE Award, which honors the best large homebuilder in the United States. NAHB also recognized Canarelli as one of “10 Legends of National Housing.”

He was Southern Nevada Home Builders Association’s president in 1987.

In 2010, Larry was honored by SNHBA as a pioneer in the Southern Nevada homebuilding industry.

He and his wife, Heidi, have four children. The family, including 11 grandchildren, continue to live in the Las Vegas Valley.

The Clark County School District named a school after the couple, the Canarelli Middle School.

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