LAS VEGAS-The Las Vegas industrial real estate market may be one of the slowest to recover, but Red Rock Developments recently held a groundbreaking on a new 180,235 square foot food storage and distribution building for Nicholas and Company. Hansen-Rice is the contractor and financing and long term ownership were provided by Lexington Realty Trust.  

Red Rock was represented in lease negotiations with the tenant in house by John Barker, and by Gabriel Silverstein, of Angelic Real Estate.  Nicholas was represented by Kyle Roberts, of Newmark Grubb ACRES from Salt Lake City, UT.  The lease transaction was the largest dollar value member-to-member transaction of the quarter within SIOR.  Silverstein and Louis D'Lando of Angelic also represented Red Rock in the $29 million financing and sale transaction with Lexington.  It was the latest of several projects on which Red Rock ended up paired with Lexington.  “The strength of our relationship with Lexington not only helped get to the best economics on the transaction, but allowed us to meet some very demanding timing needs of the tenant to fund pre-development costs even before the lease was signed," said Barker, "and to fully negotiate most of the key documents in under a month.”

“Red Rock Developments has been the trusted and capable business partner we wanted on our game changing expansion. In addition to providing a very competitive proposal for our project, we both share the same business philosophy — be one with our partners in mutual success,” said Tony Sansone, vice president of finance at Nicholas & Company.

Nicholas is the largest independent broad-line food distributor in the Intermountain West region, and this facility will substantially increase their ability to service the southern portion of their service footprint which is currently served by a facility in Salt Lake City.  "While there is high vacancy even in new product in the Las Vegas industrial market, there is a dirth of both very large boxes and of speciality food distribution space for tenants who need that kind of space," said Silverstein, "Which is why a build-to-suit, customized to Nicholas' needs, made sense."  

Silverstein noted that for food distribution spaces across the country there was build-to-suit activity throughout the recession for that same reason, despite their high cost per square foot, often as much as $200 per square foot to $250 per square foot.  

The facility is on schedule to be completed early in the second quarter of 2014.