Boarded-up buildings, and some history, in real estate listing south of Las Vegas

SEARCHLIGHT — With fewer than 500 people living here, Searchlight has a housing market that’s, well, small.

Just five homes are currently listed for sale, as seen on Zillow. But driving through this tiny former mining boomtown outside Las Vegas, another option of sorts is up for grabs: a boarded-up house that’s uninhabitable.

A spread of land with a cluster of old structures — and a piece of local history — is on the market for $60,000 in Searchlight. The price was cut by $25,000 over the weekend, the listing shows.

The 0.86-acre property, on U.S. Highway 95, consists of three parcels separated by public rights-of-way. A family used the property off-and-on as a residence until the 1980s, but the structures are now “uninhabitable,” according to the listing.

The main building, covered with sheets of plywood and a broken-in-half sign for the listing agent at Compass Realty & Management, looks like a small single-family house. The other structures, including one with a mattress inside, look like shacks.

“Everything is boarded up,” the listing says.

According to the listing, the property also has a slice of Searchlight history: It was built in 1927 as a hospital.

Buying in Searchlight

Perhaps best known as the late Sen. Harry Reid’s hometown, Searchlight is about 60 miles south of the Las Vegas Strip. As of 2020, the unincorporated town had just 445 residents, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Searchlight has a community center, an elementary school named for Reid with just 10 students enrolled this year, and a post office, among other things. The center of town is also less than 15 miles west of Cottonwood Cove, which has a marina along the Colorado River at the mouth of the Lake Mohave reservoir.

Compass Realty agent Diane Kendall, a Searchlight native who still lives here, said the town’s residents are mostly seniors.

She said that Searchlight has long had property owners from California who come to town because of the proximity to Lake Mohave. But she’s also noticed buyers from Las Vegas picking up homes in Searchlight over the past few years, adding it seems they’re either retired or semi-retired.

Kendall said the property on U.S. 95 that she’s trying to sell has water meters and sewer connections and has had power. The utilities are turned off, she noted.

She figured no one has lived there for decades, though Kendall said she has found squatters there and called the police.

Boomtown

Overall, Searchlight is a pretty sleepy place, though it also has a history of gold and silver miners trying to strike it rich.

Searchlight “began to boom” in 1902 and peaked in 1907, with a reported population of 1,500 people, according to the Searchlight Historic Museum.

A map dated 1906 showed more than 300 mining claims in the area, but when gold and silver mining costs went up and the grade of the ore went down, “people started to move on to the next boomtown,” says the museum.

By 1927, Searchlight’s population had shrunk to about 50 people, according to the museum.

Still, prospectors didn’t give up.

Around 2013, a group from Michigan had plans to mine in Searchlight and process the materials on-site into gold bars, records show.

Also, a company in Henderson called Searchlight Minerals Corp. had a 3,200-acre placer gold project a few miles south of town. In 2010, it received final approval of its plan of operations from the federal Bureau of Land Management, allowing the firm to drill, according to a securities filing.

But to save cash, the company postponed further exploration in the area as it focused on a project in Arizona, and then in 2014 it allowed its Searchlight mining claims to lapse, securities filings show.

With its century-plus history of mining, Searchlight was also poked with holes that weren’t filled in.

The Nevada Division of Minerals, in a 2017 report on abandoned mines, said that the state or its contractor surveyed and recommended closure for 378 mines statewide that year, including 19 hazards near Searchlight.

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