Developers plan to break ground on retail center by 2013

The northeast corner of Sahara Avenue and Hualapai Way will finally be developed. Executive Home Builders and IDB Group USA - developers of One Queensridge Place and Tivoli Village - have announced plans to build a single-story, 200,000-square-foot retail center there.

The development will be anchored by a specialty grocer. Other stores will be a mix of retail - apparel, beauty, accessories and sporting goods - ranging from 10,000 to 40,000 square feet.

"There's been tremendous demand," said Ted Baker, a leasing representative with NewMarket Advisors. "It'll go quickly. It's a pretty extensive process. They give us a work letter of how they want their space delivered. We have to price that out, send it to bid. We get a price, and the tenant will negotiate the rent. Once we have the deal structure finalized, and we hit a certain threshold of leasing, we'll break ground. Based on the size of the tenants we're talking to, that's going to happen very, very quickly."

Ground is expected to be broken in early 2013, if not this year, he said. Baker added the developers have to meet only their own threshold of leasing before beginning to build, as their projects are not constrained by a pre-leasing requirement from a lender.

Developers said they are not ready to announce who the anchor grocer will be.

"I know everybody wants to know who it is, but the tenants themselves have some privacy issues," Baker said. "They don't want their competitors to know, that kind of thing. I can't disclose who it is."

He said he has had conversations with several different specialty grocers.

Frank Pankratz, president of EHB Companies, said he was not opposed to putting a Walmart product there. He said an anchor for a property of this size, roughly 20 acres, would be at least 50,000 square feet.

"I know at one time a Super Walmart had been contemplated there, and in the meantime some other retail and Walmarts and so forth have come up in the greater vicinity, so I guess it's a little bit hard to even comment on because we haven't nailed down the combination of tenants yet," he said. "... It could go a lot of different ways."

Should a Walmart Market, which averages about 42,000 square feet, end up there, Stan Evans said Summerlin people would find it convenient.

He lives within a mile of the one on West Cheyenne Avenue near the Las Vegas Beltway and said he likes having the market in the area. Evans said he would view the construction of a Walmart Market as "an added convenience. We do the bulk of our food shopping in Walmart. Having this thing, it doesn't have all the brands in all the sizes and shapes, but it's got most of the stuff ... and it's open 24 hours."

The developers would not say when they would be ready to announce the brands that will go there.

"Obviously, I'd love to go running around to (prospective tenants) saying, 'Hey, I've got XYZ tenant and ABC tenant," Baker said. "But retail is unlike office space and warehouse. It's something of a commodity and kind of a trade secret, and they protect it pretty closely. I'd be cutting my own throat if I told anybody who's going in there."

One thing that is known is that earlier plans to include multi-family residences on the property, alongside the retail, have been scrapped.

Baker said the project is "a very good indicator of the continued prosperity of the Summerlin market ... It's great that we have demand from national credit tenants for Las Vegas because, for several years, whether it was Costco or whoever, the major brands of the world have opted for other markets over Las Vegas. They only know what they think they know from the news, and that's unemployment and housing."

Contact Summerlin/Summerlin South View reporter Jan Hogan at jhogan@viewnews.com or 387-2949.