Lead investor in hockey bid buys office in Summerlin

The businessman spearheading the effort to bring a National Hockey League team to Las Vegas has purchased one of the city’s most upscale office buildings.

A company belonging to Bill Foley, the lead investor in the hockey bid and chairman of title company Fidelity National Financial, closed Thursday on the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation building at 1701 Village Center Circle in Summerlin.

Fidelity subsidiary Chicago Title bought the two-story, 22,291-square-foot building, which went on the market at $11.5 million in April 2014, for $9.3 million in cash.

The building will house Chicago Title and what is believed to be other administrative offices of Foley-related enterprises.

The NHL’s board of governors is scheduled to meet in September on a possible league franchise here. Foley and his backers have received more than 13,000 season-ticket deposits for a franchise that would start play in the 2016-2017 season in the $350 million MGM Resorts-AEG arena under construction behind New York-New York.

The Donald W. Reynolds Foundation will also lease back about 4,000 square feet of the building’s space until 2017.

The listing was an unusual offering in the local market.

There are few standalone, single-user office buildings in the Las Vegas Valley, particularly with underground parking and high-end touches such as stone and woodwork, said the building’s exclusive broker, Sam Gladstein of Realty Executives’ Gladstein Realty Group.

The Prairie-style architecture, with its clean lines and earthy color palette, is also a departure from the typical “West Coast, European-tile look,” Gladstein said.

The building has two kitchens, an executive dining room and a workout room with showers and lockers. Executive offices have en-suite bathrooms, and a private courtyard has a fountain. Finishes include trellis-covered walkways with wisteria, and exterior cladding of sandstone, granite, steel and glass. It has a prime suburban location across the street from the TPC Summerlin golf course and the upscale Eagle Hills and Tournament Hills neighborhoods. An adjacent acre could accommodate another office building of up to 20,000 square feet.

Gladstein called the office a “trophy” property and said that although he had interest from investors, he and his client preferred an end user — in particular a professional-services firm looking for a building with “stature.”

“It’s just so well-built, and the Reynolds Foundation put so much time and effort and money into such a great building,” he said. “It really needed someone who would understand what’s in the building.”

So when Gladstein read in March that Foley was looking for local office space, he cold-called Foley’s Florida office and worked his way up to company real estate executives.

Gladstein said they told him they were thinking of leasing rather than buying, but he sent them online links to information on the building and asked them to run it by Foley.

“I got a call that afternoon that (Foley) wanted to meet at the building at 4 p.m.,” he said.

Representatives with Orion Realty Group, a real estate subsidiary of Fidelity National Financial, did not comment by Thursday afternoon.

But the building “is a great fit for them,” Gladstein said. “The boardroom allows Fidelity to have large-scale meetings there, and it’s a nice, quiet location. The biggest part for us is that we identified the end-user type up front. It’s good to know that we identified the right group and were able to maximize the deal for the Reynolds Foundation.”

The property, designed by Marc Lemoine Architecture of Las Vegas, won a 1999 Pacific Coast Builders Conference Merit Award.

The Donald W. Reynolds Foundation listed the building because the philanthropy will have disbursed all of its charitable funding and cease to exist by the end of 2017.

Foley is building up his Las Vegas investment portfolio. In addition to the hockey-team effort, he bought a Summerlin home in March and has said he plans to open a steakhouse in the Las Vegas market.