Office building sells for $48M in Las Vegas

A suburban Las Vegas office building that stalled during the pandemic has now been sold, after the developers filled the place with tenants.

The developers of Narrative sold the four-story, roughly 100,000-square-foot building for $48 million, property records show. The sale closed this month.

LaPour Partners founder Jeff LaPour, who partnered on the southwest valley project with G2 Capital Development founder Frank Marretti III, said the building was 95 percent leased at the time of sale.

Narrative is located just south of the 215 Beltway between Durango and Buffalo drives. The developers broke ground on the project right before the pandemic hit, stopped construction for more than a year amid the turmoil, and then came back and finished it.

Tenants include Agilysys, which makes software for casino-resorts, hotels, restaurants and the like; commercial real estate brokerage Colliers International; and U.S. Bank.

Mystery buyer

Efforts to confirm the new landlord’s identity were unsuccessful.

The buyer acquired the building through a recently formed limited-liability company that is managed by an entity called NV Auto Pilot Partnership, according to county and state records.

Mailing addresses for the buyer match a UPS store with mailboxes and a law firm that, among other things, handles real estate deals. Both are in Las Vegas’ Summerlin community.

LaPour said the buyer would only describe himself for this story as a local resident who lives in Summerlin.

Overall, Las Vegas has a smaller office sector compared with other big cities, given that its major employers, hotel-casino operators, largely work from their resorts.

But more than five years after the pandemic sparked turmoil in office markets nationwide with widespread work-from-home arrangements, Southern Nevada’s share of empty offices has been lower than other metro areas that have a bigger supply of white-collar workspace.

During the second quarter this year, Las Vegas’ direct office-vacancy rate was 12.2 percent, compared with 21.8 percent in Los Angeles County, 24.7 percent in the Denver area and 25.5 percent in Chicago’s central business district, according to brokerage CBRE Group.

New buildings fill up

Locally, plenty of landlords own office buildings that are laced with empty space.

The Hughes Center office park just east of the Strip, for instance, was for years widely viewed as Las Vegas’ premier office district. But its vacancy rate is now 55 percent, and the property, which is up for sale, went into court-ordered receivership last year after the landlord stopped making its mortgage payments.

Still, LaPour said there is strong demand for newer, higher-end buildings in popular locations.

Summerlin developer Howard Hughes Holdings, for instance, finished construction in 2022 on a 10-story office building next to Las Vegas Ballpark. The building, known as 1700 Pavilion, was 92 percent leased by the end of last year, according to a securities filing.

The owners of a big mixed-use project near Narrative have also landed numerous office tenants.

UnCommons, developed by Matter Real Estate Group, has four office buildings along with apartments and food-and-beverage outlets. Three of the office buildings are fully leased, and the fourth had only a few spaces left but would be fully rented by year-end, Matter partner Jim Stuart recently said.

The majority of UnCommons’ office tenants moved there from the Hughes Center, he said.

However, new office construction has now ground to a halt in Southern Nevada, meaning the market will “get even tighter,” LaPour said.

Developers have pumped the brakes on office projects lately amid elevated borrowing costs, limited pre-leasing, and uncertainty around tariffs.

Pandemic hits

LaPour and Marretti unveiled plans for Narrative in mid-2019. That summer, they announced Colliers would move its local headquarters there.

The developers broke ground on the project in early 2020, but the coronavirus outbreak soon upended daily life and shut off much of the economy overnight.

The developers suspended construction around late March or early April of 2020, LaPour previously said, and they resumed in fall 2021.

Construction finished in late 2022, and Colliers announced in early 2023 that it had moved to the building. The firm left the Hughes Center for the new space.

Contact Eli Segall at esegall@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0342.