A Boston real estate investment giant has spent more than $100 million for two very different properties on opposite sides of Las Vegas.
AEW Capital Management bought a warehouse near Las Vegas Motor Speedway last month for $54.25 million, property records show. Spanning around 350,000 square feet, the building, IDV Speedway, is vacant and was built about a year ago, according to JLL Capital Markets, which represented the seller.
.embed-container {position: relative; padding-bottom: 80%; height: 0; max-width: 100%;} .embed-container iframe, .embed-container object, .embed-container iframe{position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%;} small{position: absolute; z-index: 40; bottom: 0; margin-bottom: -15px;}
The deal followed AEW’s acquisition of a Summerlin strip mall for $56.1 million in October, property records show.
The 10-acre plaza, Vista Commons, is at the corner of Charleston Boulevard and Desert Foothills Drive. It is fully leased and anchored by one of the most-visited Albertsons supermarkets in the nation, according to JLL, which represented the seller in that deal as well.
.embed-container {position: relative; padding-bottom: 80%; height: 0; max-width: 100%;} .embed-container iframe, .embed-container object, .embed-container iframe{position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%;} small{position: absolute; z-index: 40; bottom: 0; margin-bottom: -15px;}
AEW has offices around the globe and says it manages more than $86 billion in assets. Efforts to get a comment from the company this week were not immediately successful.
Locally, AEW not only bought properties that are about 25 miles apart, but it invested in real estate sectors that are moving in different directions in some keys ways.
In the retail market, investors pulled back from buying properties in Southern Nevada over the past few years amid a rise in mortgage rates, though availability for space is tight.
Last year, 20 shopping centers traded hands in the Las Vegas area, up from 17 the year before but down from 70 in 2022, according to a report from John Stater, Las Vegas research manager for brokerage firm Colliers International.
He told the Review-Journal that investment deals fell primarily because of higher borrowing costs.
Stater also noted that despite widespread predictions that brick-and-mortar retail would go extinct, tenants have adapted to online shopping habits, many retailers have shrunk their footprints, and some landlords have chopped up vacant big-box stores into multiple spaces.
Overall, Southern Nevada’s retail vacancy rate slid to 3.9 percent last quarter, the lowest in more than a decade, Stater found.
In the warehouse market, developers packed the Las Vegas Valley with new projects in recent years and signed waves of tenants, as the rapid growth of e-commerce fueled strong demand for distribution space.
But the pace of construction has dropped, and a sharp jump in empty warehouse space last year was fueled by a slowdown in pre-leasing for new projects, according to Stater.
“The demand has fallen off,” he told the Review-Journal.
About 4.4 million square feet of industrial space was under construction in Southern Nevada last quarter, down from 17.5 million square feet a year earlier, according to Stater, who found that the market’s vacancy rate climbed to 8.6 percent last quarter from 2.9 percent a year earlier.
“Southern Nevada’s explosive industrial growth might finally have caught up to it,” he wrote in a report.
Contact Eli Segall at esegall@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0342.
