Big land sale near Las Vegas bags $181M

A developer has sold a sprawling land tract in Apex Industrial Park to a data-center operator, property records indicate, raising the prospect of another big project in the area.

VanTrust Real Estate sold nearly 205 acres in the North Las Vegas industrial park for almost $181 million, records show. The sale closed Aug. 8.

Property records indicate the buyer was Utah-based Novva Data Centers.

Overall, Southern Nevada’s industrial real estate market has slowed over the past year or so with increased vacancies and a pullback in construction. But the need for data storage is by no means pumping the brakes, especially with the rapidly spreading use of artificial-intelligence technologies.

VanTrust Executive Vice President Keith Earnest, who leads its projects in Nevada and other Western states, confirmed the developer sold the land, located along Interstate 15 around 20 miles northeast of the Strip.

He declined to comment on the buyer’s identity, citing confidentiality agreements.

Novva already operates a data center in North Las Vegas near the Las Vegas Motor Speedway, in a building it purchased three years ago from VanTrust, according to property records and business-entity filings.

Novva did not respond to multiple requests for comment on the land deal.

Warehouse market speeds up, then slows down

VanTrust had acquired the land as part of a roughly 350-acre purchase in 2021 for $44.75 million. At the time, it unveiled plans to build a 4.5 million-square-foot industrial campus.

The developer’s land purchase amounted to less than $130,000 per acre. This month, its sale came to more than $880,000 per acre.

The land it sold is next to a cluster of industrial facilities that VanTrust built in the past few years. Its project, Vantage North, was part of a wave of construction at the southern edge of Apex, after the desert industrial park plodded along for decades with little development amid a shortage of infrastructure.

More developers began staking claims amid a series of factors. A new water pipeline was built to serve the area; available land in the popular industrial pocket around the Speedway was largely gobbled up, and what was left carried higher price tags; and demand for distribution space in general shot higher, especially after the pandemic hit, with the surge of online shopping.

More recently, Las Vegas’ industrial market has been hitting the brakes. Vacancies soared last year due to a slowdown in pre-leasing for new projects, and the pace of new construction has dropped off.

VanTrust put up three buildings at Vantage North and leased one to a warehousing and distribution firm that serves retailers and other clients. The other two buildings remain empty, but Earnest said his team is in negotiations to sell or lease both.

He said that his company initially purchased raw land in Apex and undertook plenty of infrastructure work.

He also noted that President Donald Trump recently signed a bill that proponents say will help fuel growth in Apex by speeding up the permitting process for utilities and other infrastructure.

‘Water-free cooling’

Data centers, meanwhile, are basically warehouses filled with computer servers and other gear needed to store clients’ data.

Such facilities typically rely, in part, on water to cool the servers, an issue that has drawn increased attention as Southern Nevada grapples with a decades-long drought and a deeply shrunken Lake Mead, the reservoir that supplies about 90 percent of the Las Vegas-area’s water supply.

Since last year, a ban on evaporative cooling systems was finalized in Southern Nevada, effectively eliminating the possibility of constructing data centers that are more water-intensive.

Novva, however, says it uses “water-free cooling systems” that rely on ambient desert air to cool the interior, as well as refrigeration and a closed-loop chiller.

Contact Eli Segall at esegall@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0342. Review-Journal staff writer Alan Halaly contributed to this report.