Henderson retail center to become medical office complex

Whenever real estate broker Mike Young drove past the Coronado Canyons retail center, he was confused, he said.

The Henderson property was dormant and laced with vacancies for years, even as other retail sites nearby drew tenants and the surrounding area grew.

Young and partners are now betting the long-struggling project has a brighter future as something else.

The Nigro family of developers teamed with brokerage firm IREPLV to purchase four buildings at Coronado Canyons, at the southeast corner of Green Valley and Horizon Ridge parkways, for $12.25 million. The sale closed in September.

The buyers picked up about 95,000 square feet of space that was empty except for one tenant, FSY Fitness. Instead of trying to fill the rest with retailers who would rent space from them, they want to sell individual units, mostly to doctors.

Their section of Coronado Canyons is pushed back from the street and offers diminished visibility to passers-by. Nigro Construction President Mike Nigro acknowledged that this is a problem for a retail center but not for a medical office complex.

“And that’s where we saw the opportunity,” he said.

Young, a senior associate at IREPLV, said there is already a “tremendous amount” of retail nearby. But in this area of Henderson, he said, there is virtually nothing available for doctors, attorneys or accountants who want to buy an office suite.

At a ceremony Tuesday, Young said his group’s newly acquired buildings sat dormant for seven years, a visible reminder of the Great Recession. He said in an interview afterward that a speculative investor named Bill Takahashi bought them after the economy crashed, and while the complex didn’t look terrible over the years, it was ignored.

The new owners said they have resealed and restriped the parking lot, replaced dead plants, painted the buildings and replaced the awnings.

“It looked tired,” said Todd Nigro, president of Nigro Development.

Coronado Canyons may not be a high-profile property, but its volatile history mirrors that of countless others around the valley.

In fall 2007, as the economy was showing signs of cracks, Community Bank of Nevada issued a $29 million construction loan to the property owner, county records show. But after the market tanked, Community Bank of Nevada was shut down in 2009, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., acting as the bank’s receiver, foreclosed in 2011 on the section that the Nigros and IREPLV just bought, according to property records.

Takahashi acquired that section in 2012 for $4.3 million from the FDIC, records indicate, and sold it two months ago for nearly triple that.

Efforts to reach Takahashi for comment Friday were unsuccessful.

Contact Eli Segall at esegall@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0342. Follow @eli_segall on Twitter.