After working from a collection of buildings near the airport, one of the biggest construction firms in Southern Nevada has put its people under one roof.
The Penta Building Group moved its corporate headquarters to an office building off Green Valley Parkway at the 215 Beltway in Henderson. It bought the building at 2290 Corporate Circle last year for nearly $16.8 million, property records show, and announced the move in May.
Penta was previously based in a Las Vegas office park on Warm Springs Road at Gilespie Street, a mile south of Harry Reid International Airport. But the firm was scattered among several buildings there, President and CEO John Cannito said in an interview.
“Culturally, it was a lot better to have everybody in the same place,” he said. “Safety wise, it was a lot better to not have people walking through parking lots to get to different buildings.”
Penta is a construction powerhouse in the Las Vegas Valley, with a portfolio of projects from the Strip to the suburbs. It has worked on casinos, timeshare towers, pro sports venues, convention centers, nightclubs, retail properties, office space, healthcare facilities, and more.
Its current projects include the under-construction guitar-shaped hotel tower at the not-yet-open Hard Rock Las Vegas, formerly The Mirage.
Overall, Penta booked around $2.25 billion in revenue for 2025, according to trade publication Engineering News-Record.
The contractor also has offices in California and Arizona, though Cannito said around 50 percent of its revenue is generated in the Las Vegas area.
Cannito, a longtime Penta executive who joined the company in 2004, spoke with the Las Vegas Review-Journal about the move to Henderson and the construction industry. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q How long had Penta been based on Warm Springs?
A I think it was about 2005 when we moved there, and when we moved, we had one building. Over the course of the up-and-down roller coaster of the Las Vegas construction economy, we grew, shrunk, grew, shrunk, and then grew. We’d outgrown that building so quickly we started buying and leasing spaces around the rest of the corporate park. So we were in about five different locations.
Did you find that you were slowing yourselves down by not having everybody under one roof?
We were 100 percent not as efficient as we are now. There’s overlap between HR and accounting; there’s overlap between preconstruction and marketing; there’s overlap between the executive team and all those different areas.
One of the biggest issues over the last four or five years in the industry has been construction prices. There was a huge run-up in 2021 or ’22 and then it seem to level off, but nothing has really gotten any cheaper. What is the contracting industry like right now in Las Vegas?
In Las Vegas, it’s very busy. There’s a lot going on. But you are 100 percent right about the cost of construction; it’s been going up since the pandemic. I believe part of it is because there was so much pent-up demand. A lot of properties stopped doing things during the pandemic. As far as construction costs, they spiked and then seemed to level off a little bit, but we have a general saying that nothing ever gets cheaper. I’ve been in construction for almost 40 years; I’ve never seen it go backwards. Data centers are the shiny penny for the construction industry nationally right now, and they’re creating competition for procurement — for electrical equipment, mechanical equipment, structural steel. That’s a big part of the reason the costs are going up.
I’m sure this is something you deal with and talk about, but every subsector of commercial real estate will have ups and downs. What do you do to keep getting business when you’re not seeing as many bidding opportunities for, say, new warehouses?
It’s not what we do when we see it; it’s what we’ve been doing for the five years before we see it. And we learned our lesson the hard way. In the 2000s, we were just growing, because all of our work was hospitality and gaming work within a three-mile radius of the Strip. And we got devastated by the recession. We went literally from $700 million in revenue a year to about $188 million in revenue per year by around 2010.
Everything evaporated on us, so our executive team basically got together and said we have to prevent this from ever happening again. So we started diversifying; we went into Southern California, Northern California and Arizona. But that doesn’t help the Las Vegas region. Geography diversification is a short-term Band-Aid at best. The long-term answer to your question is market diversification, and you’ve got to do it before you need it. Around 2014, 2015, we started focusing on healthcare, the Clark County School District, some of the industrial stuff. We maintained the gaming, but we also started focusing on different aspects of it.
When the pandemic hit, there was pretty much an immediate freeze on all kinds of construction for a little while. How did that impact Penta, at least initially, and how did you come out of the chaos of COVID-19?
You can ask me about this 60 years from now, and I will be able to talk in clarity about it. I remember sitting in our main conference room and watching the governor talk about whether he was going to shut down the Strip or not. It was one of those moments where you can’t believe you’re seeing what’s happening. Construction was exempt from the shutdowns, and we actually had work going on. I got our corporate safety director and our safety managers together, I got our HR people, and we started building policies to keep people safe. How do we get people to come to work and keep people safe, and how do we work within the regulations that were given to us but also keep people safe?
We also started building care packages and delivering them around the valley and even into California. We took hand-sanitizer, toilet paper, meat and all that kind of stuff and distributed them. There was also the preplanning piece of it. We were diversified enough into some of the tribal gaming projects that we were doing, so we were able to shift people over to some of those jobs in the short term. We also sat down as an executive team and budgeted a certain loss that we were going to take, how much money we were going to spend to carry people. We knew it wasn’t a permanent thing, and we wanted to make sure we had the same talented people here when that happened.
When did you start to notice a pickup in commercial construction in Las Vegas even though the economy was in shambles?
For us, the first thing was the restarts. It was the jobs that had stopped that were now restarting. Then we started jumping into warehouse projects, schools, public works projects. There were also a lot of different emergency programs because all of a sudden, all these different places had different rules and regulations for dealing with the public. You had schools and restaurants that wanted to put up plexiglass and renovate their spaces to accommodate some of the pandemic restrictions. Then some of the properties started catching up on renovations. As you know, up and down the Strip, there are constant renovations going on, so it was a matter of catching up.
Besides COVID, has there ever been a time when things shut off construction-wise on or near the Strip, or has it always been a very busy, lucrative market for construction?
It slowed down significantly during the recession. There was a major slowdown, mostly of new construction, and even the renovation work slowed down back then, too. But I would say it never stopped. The pandemic was the first time that I’d say it stopped.
Contact Eli Segall at esegall@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0342.
