Henderson shopping center sells for $30M
A local real estate firm has purchased a Henderson strip mall for more than $30 million, long after it went into foreclosure and sold for a fraction of its current value during the Great Recession.
Sansone Companies acquired a 10.3-acre retail plaza on Stephanie Street just south of 215 Beltway for $30.6 million, property records show. The sale, by Southern California real estate firm Tavaco Properties, closed last month.
The retail center, Stephanie Beltway Plaza, spans about 100,000 square feet and includes EōS Fitness, indoor playground Uptown Jungle, a Trek bicycle shop and several other tenants, said Neil Sansone, a principal with the new landlord.
Sansone said his firm has garnered some strong leasing activity and is looking to construct additional space for undeveloped plots on the property.
He also said the retail center is in an ever-expanding area of Henderson and that his firm focuses on strong locations near the freeway.
“It’s great real estate,” he said.
Gantry, a commercial mortgage banking firm, announced this week that it arranged the financing for the acquisition.
Buyers pull back
In Southern Nevada overall, investors cut back on buying retail plazas over the past few years amid a rise in mortgage rates that pushed up borrowing costs.
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.
Still, availability for space is tight.
Southern Nevada’s retail vacancy rate slid to 3.9 percent in the fourth quarter of last year, the lowest in more than a decade, Stater found.
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, Stater previously told the Review-Journal.
‘Not a pretty market back then’
Stephanie Beltway Plaza was built in 2006, property records show. It opened during Southern Nevada’s easy-money-fueled real estate bubble and suffered the same fate as countless other properties around the valley after the market imploded: it went into foreclosure.
In 2010, lenders foreclosed on the plaza and then sold it for just $5 million to Tavaco Properties of West Hollywood, property records show.
Adjusted for inflation, the sales price amounts to $7.3 million today.
Tavaco partner Sam Tavakoli said Wednesday that when they toured the property back then, the broker asked why they were even looking at Las Vegas.
The Las Vegas-area’s unemployment rate hovered in the 13 percent range in 2010, up from about 4 percent during the year the plaza opened, federal data shows.
When Tavaco bought the property, it was only about 30 percent occupied, according to company founder and CEO Andrew Tavakoli.
“It was not a pretty market back then,” he said.
Contact Eli Segall at esegall@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0342.
