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Developer buys land in North Las Vegas after Apex plant is nixed

Updated February 4, 2025 - 4:56 pm

After a beverage-can maker scrapped plans for a new facility in North Las Vegas, a warehouse developer has bought the site and unveiled its own project.

EBS Realty Partners announced Tuesday that it teamed with a real estate investment firm to acquire nearly 91 acres in Apex Industrial Park for $31 million. They aim to break ground later this year on a complex called Apex Ridge.

Plans call for two industrial buildings that span 1.36 million square feet combined, according to a news release.

EBS founder Quinn Johnson, whose Irvine, California-based firm has developed more than 7.4 million square feet of industrial projects, noted in the release that North Las Vegas has seen strong demand for industrial real estate over the past decade.

He also said the Las Vegas Valley is within a day’s round-trip drive to Southern California ports, and that distributors here can service nearly 20 percent of the U.S. population within two days.

Industrial slowdown

Overall, warehouse developers packed the valley, especially North Las Vegas, with new projects in recent years and signed waves of tenants, as the rapid growth of e-commerce sparked more demand for distribution space.

But the pace of construction has dropped in the region, and a sharp jump in empty warehouse space last year was fueled by a slowdown in pre-leasing for new projects, according to John Stater, Las Vegas research manager for brokerage firm Colliers International.

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.

Johnson, of EBS, said Tuesday that the Las Vegas area isn’t the only region with a slowdown in the industrial market lately.

But tenants are still touring sites, he said, and amid Southern Nevada’s shrunken supply of land for big warehouse projects, his group views the North Las Vegas venture as a great opportunity.

Can plant scrapped

EBS and Connecticut-based Penwood Real Estate Investment Management acquired their land in Apex — a massive industrial park off Interstate 15 at U.S. Highway 93 — from Ball Corp.

In September 2021, Ball announced plans to build a $290 million plant in North Las Vegas, saying the facility would supply aluminum containers to beverage-industry customers.

The same day, the Nevada Governor’s Office of Economic Development said its board approved $17.5 million in tax breaks over 10 years for the Colorado-based company. According to GOED, Ball was required to create nearly 180 jobs in the first two years of operation at an average wage of more than $33 per hour.

Its facility was designed to span more than 750,000 square feet at the southern edge of Apex, city officials said at the time.

Soon after, Ball closed its purchase of roughly 91 acres in Apex for about $28.3 million, property records show.

However, Ball never built the project, saying in fall 2023 that it “permanently discontinued plans to construct the North Las Vegas beverage can plant.”

It sold the Apex site this past September, property records show.

GOED spokeswoman Carli Smith said Tuesday that board approval is not the final action in the process and does not guarantee that tax breaks will be awarded if subsequent steps are not followed.

Ultimately, none were ever awarded to Ball, she confirmed.

Contact Eli Segall at esegall@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0342.

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