NAI Horizon shutters office

Plans afoot to run LV branch under NAI Global brand

April 29, 2008 - NAI Horizon, the valley's third-largest commercial real estate brokerage, recently closed its 35-person office in Las Vegas. The firm's 14,000-square-foot local offices were inside Marnell Corporate Center, 6275 Via Austi Parkway. The company has operated in Las Vegas since 1996, first as NAI Americana Group and later as NAI Horizon.

NAI Horizon handled $524 million in local real estate transactions in 2006, trailing only CB Richard Ellis and Colliers International in volume. The company specializes in brokerage and property management in the retail, office, industrial, multifamily and investment markets.

"It's a tough market. Things have slowed," said Ron McMenemy, who founded NAI Horizon six years ago with partners John Schottenstein and Reggie Winssinger of Phoenix. "When housing dropped off, you began seeing a slowdown on the commercial side."

Schottenstein and Winssinger hired McMenemy a few years ago to run the Las Vegas office from Phoenix. He subsequently decided to sell his ownership stake last year but still stayed aboard as company CEO.

"My focus has not been on the day-to-day operations but looking after my own deals," McMenemy said. "I had been planning to leave for some time."

McMenemy had conducted more than 1,000 transactions totaling more than $350 million at NAI Horizon from 2004 to present. When he left to launch McMenemy Investment Services, a commercial real estate firm at 330 E. Warm Springs Road, it expedited the decision to shutter the local office. But plans are now under way to continue operating a Las Vegas branch under the NAI Global brand.

"We are in the midst of intensive meetings. We are going to be leaner and meaner and operated out of Las Vegas as opposed to Phoenix," said David Blanchard, executive vice president of Princeton, N.J.-based NAI Global, which has 375 offices in 55 countries. "This is a key marketplace, and we will not retreat."

McMenemy said he'd heard that many of the workers displaced by NAI Horizon's closing had landed at other firms, but wouldn't give specific names, firms or the number of people hired elsewhere. Blanchard, meanwhile, said that he was in discussions with several of NAI Horizon's "top producing brokers" to come under the NAI Global brand.

Several recent mergers by commercial real estate brokerage firms include Burnham Real Estate's 20-person local office becoming a part of Commerce CRG in January; and last year's Prudential acquisition of Las Vegas-based IPG Commercial Real Estate Services to form a local office under Prudential-IPG Commercial Real Estate Services banner.