If you want a glimpse of a booming real estate market, take a look at a cluster of new warehouses near the North Las Vegas airport.
SunPoint West, a newly built industrial park, sold last month for more than $140 million. Construction didn’t finish until September and the project was fully leased before completion, said Michael Kendall, broker for Colliers International, which worked on the sale.
Southern Nevada’s industrial real estate market has grown significantly in recent years, and it has accelerated further post-pandemic as increased online shopping has fueled demand for retail space.
Industry vacancies are at an all-time low, landlords are asking for higher rents and buy buildingsand the developers keep launch projectsespecially in North Las Vegas.
Kendall, vice president of industrial capital markets at Colliers, said it’s been “pretty common” in recent years in southern Nevada for developers to fully lease a project before construction is complete.
“Demand continued to outstrip supply,” he said.
Developer SunCap Property Group and project partner Diamond Realty Investments announced plans for SunPoint West in early 2021. The six-building project, at Cheyenne Avenue and Coleman Street, occupies nearly 40 acres and spans approximately 730,770 square feet.
Colliers announced the sale last week.
The resort traded for $143 million, according to property records. Kendall, whose team represented the developers in the sale, confirmed to me that German asset manager DWS Group had bought the park, as the property records show.
DWS did not respond to a request for comment.
Mike Orr, SunCap’s senior vice president, said in a statement that “it is company policy not to comment on sale prices or related parts available to our projects.”
He said the project was fully leased at the end of the first quarter of this year and that SunCap “continues to be bullish on southern Nevada,” adding that its next project is under construction in northern Las Vegas.
Across southern Nevada, the industrial vacancy rate was just 1.3% in the third quarter, according to Colliers, which reported more than 8.3 million square feet under construction. More than half of that was in North Las Vegas.
Highlighting all the activity: VanTrust Real Estate announced Wednesday afternoon that it has begun construction of the first two buildings of a 350-acre industrial complex that is development in the Apex Industrial Park in North Las Vegas.
One of the buildings not yet constructed has already been leased to Saddle Creek Logistics, which will occupy 580,000 square feet, according to the release.
Just about 40 minutes after receiving the announcement, a press release from Link Logistics arrived in my inbox, stating that the company had inaugurated two industrial projects in North Las Vegas.
One will cover 350,000 square feet while the other will consist of three buildings totaling 720,000 square feet.
A warehouse is not the most exciting type of real estate. As a developer told me years ago, it’s just four walls with a lot of air between them.
But in Southern Nevada, developers can’t build enough, investors keep loading them, and businesses keep filling them.
Contact Eli Segall at [email protected] or 702-383-0342. Follow @eli_segall on Twitter.