Illinois investors have paid big bucks for a once-abandoned Summerlin health-club property.
Inland Private Capital Corp. paid $51 million for the Life Time Athletic facility near Red Rock Resort, county records show. The transaction closed last month.
The sales price was the highest nationally this year for a freestanding, single-tenant retail building, according to Faris Lee Investments broker Patrick Luther, who represented the seller.
Investors are paying rising prices for Las Vegas commercial properties, though it’s all but unheard of to pay nationally high amounts amid the improving but still lagging local economy. The valley’s unemployment rate, 7 percent as of August, has been chopped in half since the depths of the recession but remains highest among large U.S. metro areas, federal data show.
Moreover, the purchase marks a drastic turnaround for the upscale gym. Developer Life Time Fitness Inc. halted construction during the recession last decade, leaving the 6-acre, partially built property to collect dust on busy Charleston Boulevard.
“At one point, they weren’t even going to finish this,” Luther said.
Life Time, which sold the property in June to the company that flipped it to Inland, has a 20-year lease in Summerlin. The health club sits in one of Southern Nevada’s most affluent communities.
The facility boasts a 143,000-square-foot main building; a multilevel parking garage; an indoor swimming pool, a soccer field, sport courts and a climbing wall; an outdoor pool with water slides; a spa and salon; and a cafe, Faris Lee marketing materials show.
Minnesota-based Life Time operates 117 facilities in the United States and Canada — including one in Henderson that opened last year — under its Life Time Fitness and Life Time Athletic brands. Efforts to speak with a company representative about the Summerlin deal were unsuccessful Monday.
The seller, New York-based Gramercy Property Trust, acquired the facility as part of a $300 million, 10-property purchase from Life Time; the health-club chain rented back the gyms as part of the deal.
Gramercy’s sale to Inland closed Sept. 16.
Inland, part of the powerhouse Inland Real Estate Group of Cos. in Oak Brook, Ill., is no stranger to Las Vegas retail. A former affiliate in late 2012, for instance, bought a majority stake in six Southern Nevada shopping centers from developer Terri Sturm, founder of Territory Inc., for almost $300 million.
Inland representatives did not respond Monday to requests for comment.
The Summerlin health club, 10721 W. Charleston Blvd., opened in 2011. But before that, like many other real estate projects in town, it got mothballed after the economy tanked.
Life Time started construction in October 2008, shortly after the U.S. financial crisis began, and pulled the plug by April 2009. The company resumed construction by September 2010.
Eli Segall can be reached at 702-259-2309 or [email protected]. Follow Eli on Twitter at twitter.com/eli_segall.