Las Vegas is known around the world for its towering, glitzy casinos and its always-changing roster of things to do.
And for the people who live here, it’s a place of never-ending expansion, from new housing tracts and apartment complexes to new streets and highway work.
All of this means that, in Southern Nevada, construction is big business.
One firm that’s getting in on the action is Boston-based contractor Suffolk Construction Co.
A construction-management company, Suffolk has been working on projects in Southern Nevada since 2023. It announced in February that it was moving its local office to the Hughes Center office park just east of the Strip and that it was hired to lead a renovation project at the Flamingo.
As outlined in the news release, its other projects include the Four Seasons Private Residences Las Vegas, a luxury two-tower complex in Henderson’s wealthy MacDonald Highlands enclave, and Campus for Hope, a homeless-services complex that will feature around 900 beds.
The Four Seasons project is slated to feature 171 condos among the high-rises. The homes will span from about 2,300 to 8,400 square feet and are priced from around $5.1 million, with delivery expected in 2027, according to a recently issued project update.
Overall, Suffolk boasts more than $10 billion in annual revenue, 3,500 employees and offices across the country.
Pete Tuffo, president of Suffolk’s Gulf Coast region, national gaming and Las Vegas operations, spoke with VegasBusiness about the company and the construction business. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q Construction prices have been a huge issue since COVID hit. They really skyrocketed in 2021, ’22. My impression has been that the rate of growth has since slowed, but nothing’s really gotten much cheaper. Can you talk about construction materials prices as they are now?
A You’re spot on. What we have seen now is that pricing has stabilized and is predictable, but we haven’t seen it revert back to pre-COVID pricing. And we have seen labor costs continue to increase, but at a slower rate. But we haven’t seen anything really come down to pre-COVID rates.
Why do you think that is?
I believe part of it is just opportunistic. There’s still a lot of construction right now. The market hasn’t really shifted downward. It continues to grow. It may shift throughout the country, but I don’t foresee prices coming down significantly in the near future.
How does Las Vegas, when it comes to construction materials pricing, compare to other markets that you operate in, especially Florida?
The pricing’s a little bit more than what we would see in Florida, but it’s definitely on par with other major metropolitan areas that we’re in, whether it’s New York City, Boston, our offices in California. I look around Las Vegas right now, and there’s a lot of work going on. It’s really supply and demand, and right now the demand still seems to be up for those materials. One of the things that the Strip is known for is that, as a lot of people say, it’s constantly reinventing itself, which really comes down to a ton of construction. There’s a lot of remodeling, renovation, teardowns, new construction.
Have you seen that change, or does it still seem pretty busy?
It seems incredibly busy. Las Vegas has always been very resilient, and as people’s entertainment dollars go in different places, the casinos are incredibly smart and stay ahead to make sure they’re matching the clients’ demands. I’m pleasantly surprised by the amount of opportunities out there, and a lot of it is what you’re saying — restaurant remodels, nightclubs, hotel additions, amenity spaces being upgraded.
With the Four Seasons residences project, those are two towers essentially built on a sloping hillside. How do you engineer that? How is building these towers different from, say, building towers on flat land on Las Vegas Boulevard?
There was a lot of prework to get that site prepared to allow the towers to go up as seamlessly as they’re going up right now. There was a lot of blasting into the mountain and setting the pad. I would say the difference between building up in the mountain as opposed to building down on the Strip was the amount of site prep, the forethought that needs to go in, the logistics to actually get people to and from the site, and the haul-off of the rock, and what do you do with it after you blast it. That site was being prepared for 18 months before you ever started seeing anything go vertical, and now that it’s going vertical, it’s going up as a standard job. But getting up the hill is a challenge.
You mean getting all the crews up and hauling your materials up the hill?
We had to create a construction entrance to get all the way up there, and it’s pretty steep, and it’s kind of a winding road, and the road was under construction while we’re actually building the job. So there’s a lot of logistical coordination that needs to take place to make sure that everything goes seamlessly.
One thing that developers often run into here is caliche, which is basically a rocklike soil, and they might have to blast it or do heavy drilling to get through it. Is there anything similar in, say, the Tampa area where there’s an unforeseen, natural roadblock that developers hit?
Yeah, but it’s typically the opposite. What you’ll find are voids, like cavities. As you drill piles to do the foundations on one of these taller buildings, they have a theoretical volume of grout that should go into the hole. You dig the hole, you drop rebar in the hole, you fill it full of grout, and you expect that it’s, say, 30 yards of grout per piling. Well, you’ll find these voids and openings, so instead of 30 yards, it’s 50 yards. We run into really, really soft soil, and you end up putting more grout into the ground.
Can you explain just how complex a casino project is from a construction standpoint? A warehouse developer once told me that a warehouse is just four walls with a bunch of air in between. And then you go to the other end of the spectrum, and I think casinos are probably there in terms of complexity.
I agree with you. It’s actually one of the things that has drawn me to want to lead our Las Vegas and national gaming efforts because I find the projects to be fascinating, exciting and very complex. You look at how many aspects there are of a casino, whether it’s the parking garage, the back-of-house areas, the casino floor, the restaurants, the hotel, the performing arts theater. All of those components, and coordinating them to be finished at the same time and delivering that wow factor when you open the doors, that is truly complex.
Contact Eli Segall at
esegall@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0342.
