WG Group and the Krausz Companies completed two significant Las Vegas acquisitions within weeks of each other in the fall of 2018, acquiring the Tropicana Beltway Center for $59 million and the Westbay office park for $20.5 million — a combined $79.5 million deployed in rapid succession across two distinct asset classes. The transactions were reported by the Las Vegas Review-Journal in early November 2018, with WG Group partner Benjy Garfinkle and Krausz executive vice president Jay Krigsman among the parties cited in the coverage.
Tropicana Beltway Center, purchased from Houston-based Weingarten Realty, is a retail center totaling approximately 250,000 square feet within a larger complex that includes Lowe's and Walmart anchors — both of which were excluded from the sale. The acquisition gave WG Group and Krausz a large-format retail asset in the southwest Las Vegas submarket, strategically located near the 215 Beltway and positioned within a dense residential and commercial trade area. Westbay office park, acquired from Beverly Hills-based Omninet Capital for $20.5 million, is a 108,000-square-foot Class-A office campus at Charleston Boulevard and Campbell Drive that was 98 percent leased at the time of closing. Omninet had originally purchased the property in fall 2011 for $7.8 million in the post-recession environment.
The paired acquisitions reflected WG Group and Krausz's confidence in Las Vegas commercial real estate at a point in the cycle when the market's fundamentals had recovered materially but cap rates had not yet compressed to the levels that would characterize the next several years. The two firms had previously partnered on the ManhattanWest redevelopment — completed as The Gramercy and ultimately sold in components for more than $100 million — and the Tropicana Beltway and Westbay acquisitions continued that partnership model across a diversified asset mix.