OneRepublic frontman Ryan Tedder knows that, at first glance, his ownership of a bunch of office buildings in Las Vegas doesn’t make any sense.
After all, he’s a Grammy-winning songwriter and producer known for such hits as “Apologize,” “Stop and Stare” and other tracks. In other words, not the usual profile of a real estate investor who buys buildings in Southern Nevada office parks.
“I’m aware of … how random this looks” he said in an interview with the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
But as Tedder described it, Las Vegas is an ideal place to buy commercial properties. And now he’s expanding his presence in town with a development that aims to bring a new wave of high-end, and high-priced, office space to the suburbs.
Tedder and partners held a ceremonial groundbreaking Thursday for Halo Tower, a planned eight-story office building in the southwest Las Vegas Valley.
Plans call for the steel-and-concrete building, along Sunset Road near the 215 Beltway, to span more than 200,000 square feet and feature an indoor/outdoor rooftop boardroom space with an amenity deck, according to a marketing brochure.
‘This is where the city is moving’
Developer Ofir Hagay, founder of Moonwater Capital, said that some site work has begun for the roughly $125 million to $130 million project.
He expects to start construction on the building by this summer and finish in summer 2028.
The project is also named for a hit single that Tedder co-wrote: Beyoncé’s “Halo.”
Overall, developers largely pumped the brakes on office construction in Southern Nevada over the past few years amid market and economic headwinds, including elevated vacancy rates and borrowing costs, according to brokerage firm CBRE Group.
But upscale office buildings that were developed in the southwest valley and Summerlin in recent years have filled up with tenants, and the group behind Halo Tower is getting in on the action.
The listed leasing rate for Halo Tower is $4.50 per square foot. By comparison, across Southern Nevada, the average direct asking rent for office space in the first quarter of this year was $2.57 per square foot, CBRE reported.
Tedder, for one, noted the new project is in a growing and popular section of the valley, with new office buildings, apartment complexes, restaurants and other projects that have taken shape in recent years or are on the way.
“This is where the city is moving,” Tedder said. “This is where people want to be; this is where people want to work.”
‘Real estate’s my main gig’
Tedder was buying office space in Las Vegas by 2018, when he led a group that purchased a four-story building at Rainbow Boulevard and Post Road in the southwest valley for more than $30 million.
He went on to buy other office buildings in Southern Nevada and even a Walgreens building on the Las Vegas Strip. He has said that his investors on the $38 million drugstore purchase included DJ duo the Chainsmokers.
All told, Tedder estimated on Thursday that he owns, with partners, around 1.5 million square feet in Las Vegas, a tally that includes Halo Tower. The portfolio is almost fully occupied, he said.
He told the Review-Journal that he had long wanted to invest in real estate, adding that music drops in value and eventually becomes public domain, and he sought to buy something tangible.
Tedder also said that he’s been to Las Vegas more times than he can count over the past two decades or so and is very familiar with areas outside the Strip. Plus, about a decade ago, his team started analyzing high-growth cities around the country.
As he recalled, they wanted to determine which of these cities were the most pro-business and were places they’d want to visit, and they zeroed in on Las Vegas.
He has invested in real estate outside Nevada, but he noted that Las Vegas property values plunged during the Great Recession some 15 years ago, creating a big supply of bargains.
“It was a true analysis,” Tedder said. “It wasn’t just like, ‘Oh, let’s go to Vegas.”
During the event on Thursday, he told attendees that his “other job” is the “exact opposite of building an eight-story office building in southwest Las Vegas.”
“Real estate’s my main gig,” he said toward the end of his remarks. “My part-time gig is music.”
Contact Eli Segall at esegall@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0342.
