One of the few office towers in the Las Vegas suburbs has changed hands again, and its price keeps dropping.
The eight-story Bank of America building off Rainbow Boulevard, just south of the U.S. 95-Summerlin Parkway interchange, sold Nov. 5 for $18.25 million. Listing brokers with CBRE Group announced the deal today.
Westcore Properties, the seller, bought the tower in 2008 for $19.75 million, and previous owners paid even more, Clark County records show.
Commercial real estate sales prices, including for office buildings, have been rising in Las Vegas this year. However, the isolated BofA building — with easy freeway access but few amenities nearby — bucked the trend.
Still, it sold for a higher price than the market’s current average and has less empty space than the typical Las Vegas Valley office building.
Known as Westcliff Tower, the 81,300-square-foot building was 88 percent occupied as of last month. BofA, with a ground-floor branch and other offices there, occupies half of the building, according to a listing for the tower at 6900 Westcliff Drive.
The sales price was roughly $224 per square foot. Across Southern Nevada, office buildings are selling this year for an average of $170 per square foot, and the market’s vacancy rate is 18 percent, according to brokerage firm Colliers International.
Westcore CEO Don Ankeny did not return a call seeking comment. CBRE brokers who worked on the deal — and had listed Westcliff for $19.5 million — also did not respond to requests for comment.
Ankeny sold the tower to investors in New York and New Jersey. Government records indicate the buyers included Sam Gutman of Brooklyn, N.Y.; Eliyahu Barak of Roslyn, N.Y.; and a company called Congregation S.Y.E. Inc. in Lakewood Township, N.J. The person or people behind Congregation S.Y.E. could not be confirmed.
Efforts to reach the new owners were unsuccessful.
Westcliff Tower is flanked by large, vacant lots and is near some strip malls on Rainbow whose tenants include Goodwill of Southern Nevada and JCPenney. It’s in “kind of a funky area” that’s “a little bit less desirable” for office users, said broker Dan Palmeri, a director with Cushman & Wakefield Commerce Real Estate Solutions.
A few miles west, tenants can rent space in Summerlin in newer, albeit pricier, buildings with more amenities nearby, Palmeri said.
Westcliff is visible and easily accessible, but those are “really the only two pluses it has going for it compared to the competition,” he said.
Longtime Las Vegas developer Irwin Molasky built Westcliff in the 1990s, years after constructing a similar, though much bigger, office building downtown. That 17-story high-rise, at 300 S. 4th St., opened in 1975 and is known as the Bank of America Plaza.
Molasky’s company sold Westcliff in 2002 for $16.9 million to Triple Net Properties of Santa Ana, Calif. Triple Net sold it to Pennsylvania investors in 2005, during the real estate bubble, for $24 million, a 42 percent price jump.
San Diego-based Westcore bought it as the real estate market was sliding, paying about 18 percent below what the sellers from Pennsylvania had spent.