When developer Sansone Companies announced the groundbreaking for an upscale office project in the southwestern Las Vegas Valley, the job market had been improving for years and companies were taking up more office space.
It was also February 2020.
Over the next month, the coronavirus outbreak turned daily life in Las Vegas upside down, devastating the economy and turning the Strip into a ghost town with closed resorts when the valley’s unemployment rate soared over 30 percent.
It also sparked waves of local and national employers to send employees home for fear of the virus, raising the question of how much office space companies really needed when people were working from their couch, kitchen table, or home office.
The pandemic is of course far from over and the Las Vegas office market still faces many questions. But the bosses at Sansone are pushing their glass-and-steel complex Axiom, saying they have a lot of interest from potential tenants.
Axiom, on Rainbow Boulevard, north of Beltway 215, is to include two four-story office buildings with a three-story garage in between. The approximately 30 million US dollar first phase, consisting of an office building and the garage, should be completed as early as next month, according to Neil Sansone, a director of the company.
He estimated the building is more than 30 percent rented and said negotiations with tenants about additional space are ongoing. The developers hope to break the ground for the second building next year.
Located right on Beltway, the first building makes a distinctive look with its reflective blue panes of glass, angled design, and Nike-esque swoosh that cuts through the exterior.
Sansone’s brother Miles Sansone, also an executive at the company, said leasing activity had not slowed amid the pandemic but noted that deals are taking longer to come and added that his group has made a lot of phone calls regarding the property accepts and offers tours.
“We felt that a building like this would definitely help define or advance a tenant’s identity or branding. … It’s hard to miss for us, ”he said.
Overall, the southern Nevada office market was “hit hard” by the pandemic and is now “somehow back to where we started,” said John Stater, Las Vegas research manager at Brokerage Colliers International.
Net absorption, or the difference in square feet occupied from one time period to another, decreased 325,447 square feet in 2020, according to Colliers data. That year through the second quarter, absorption increased 296,240 square feet.
Many office workers are still banned from their buildings, and Stater believes that such arrangements will “somewhat” but not drastically reduce demand for space.
He noted that an increase in vacancies could push prices down and stimulate more business.
Sansone Companies, founded by Miles and Neil’s father Roland Sansone, isn’t the only group developing more office space in Las Vegas, nor is it the only building in the Southwest of the Valley that has been one of the fastest growing areas of southern Nevada for years.
Matter Real Estate Group is developing UnCommons, a 40-acre mixed-use project in the southwest of the valley that is expected to include more than 500,000 square feet of office space.
Developer Joe Sorge is building Evora, a 42-acre mixed-use company in the southwest that requires 240,000 square feet of office and other commercial space, and Summerlin developer Howard Hughes Corp. is building a ten-story office building next to the Las Vegas ballpark.
When Hughes Corp. Announcing plans for the project in January, Kevin Orrock, the company’s regional president in Las Vegas, said he believed workers would return to their offices.
“Humans are social animals,” he says.
Contact Eli Segall at esegall@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0342. Follow @eli_segall on Twitter.
