Furniture Showcase, Often Idle, a Success in Las Vegas

By ALISON GREGOR

LAS VEGAS — A $3 billion development that is fully used only two weeks a year is proving to be a lucrative gamble in Las Vegas, its developers say. In only three years, the World Market Center Las Vegas has already become the leading showcase of the home furnishings industry in the western part of the nation, and it is still less than half built.

Planned as one of the world’s largest commercial complexes, it is ultimately envisioned as a collection of eight buildings totaling 12 million square feet on 57 acres in this city’s downtown.

The center currently consists of three buildings of five million square feet, the third having opened in July. When fully built, the development will be almost as large as the World Trade Center in Manhattan was before Sept. 11, 2001 (it had seven buildings totaling 13.4 million square feet).

Financing has already been obtained for a fourth World Market Center building, though developers have not yet broken ground on the 1.8 million-square-foot structure, and won’t do so, they say, until they have leased most of the building.

The center, which rises out of the Nevada desert like a huge cruise ship on a calm ocean, has space devoted solely to home furnishings and some ancillary industries. Much like a city’s football stadium, it remains largely dark for the greater part of the year, with only two five-day furniture shows, each attracting more than 50,000 buyers.

But the formerly unproved real estate business model has thus far been a success, the center’s owners said.

“We really believe in the consolidation of this industry to Las Vegas, and if you speak to people in the industry today, it’s clear that will be the ultimate outcome here,” said Jeffrey T. Blau, president of the Related Companies, one of the nation’s largest mixed-use property developers, which joined the project after the first building opened in July 2016.

Mr. Blau said the concept of a piece of commercial real estate sitting largely idle most of the time might seem counterintuitive, but it makes sense for furniture makers, who keep their furniture in the center’s showrooms all year, even though they do almost all of their business in July and February.

“Because their product is so heavy and bulky, it makes it more economically attractive to pay rent year-round than to ship their goods in and out,” Mr. Blau said.

The center’s developers would not reveal the annual rents charged for the five-year leases offered because the range is so broad, but said they were comparable to midlevel Las Vegas retail rents, which for showrooms run about $200 a square foot.

The center was originally envisioned by Shawn Samson, who at one time led the real estate development company that built the two largest malls in the world, and Jack Kashani, who has 20 years of experience in commercial and residential real estate development in the United States. The two men sought out an experienced real estate partner — the Related Companies — as they prepared to develop the second building, a huge and largely windowless structure without precedent in Las Vegas.

“When we began studying the furniture industry nine years ago, we came to the conclusion that there was an opportunity to create a state-of-the-art, 21st-century facility in Las Vegas for the trade,” Mr. Samson said. “The idea was to create an entirely new platform for the furniture manufacturers, who have essentially given up manufacturing to Asia, and have become branding, sales, distribution and marketing companies.”

Because manufacturing has been moving offshore — foreign companies have more than doubled their United States market share in the last decade —Mr. Blau said that the country’s historically largest furniture market, held twice a year in 180 buildings scattered around High Point, N.C., which is served by only about 1,000 hotel rooms, seemed vulnerable.

“Marts existed in High Point because that’s where all the manufacturing was,” he said. “The industry, the shows, built up around the manufacturers.”

Mr. Samson and Mr. Kashani “believed there was a much better way to showcase the annual shows for the industry,” Mr. Blau said. “They studied locations in terms of air lift, and where people like to go, and Las Vegas was a natural. And they were able to tie up a large parcel downtown.”

Because of the lack of alternative show space for furniture manufacturers, the long leases and the nature of the industry, the Las Vegas developers said they were protected from economic down cycles.

Taken from www.nytimes.com