Grant money lures companies downtown

Before e-commerce retailer Trend Nation relocates its operations and roughly 40 employees to downtown Las Vegas, extensive renovations must be finished on its new home: a 60-yearold building in dire need of repair.

Trend Nation founder and CEO Brad Howard said he expects the $1 million-plus rehabilitation — including structural rebuild, asbestos removal and inside gutting — to be completed by late March.

For Howard, it was well worth the work: a chance for the company, which started 12 years ago in the northeast valley, to be centrally located and cater to a millennial workforce with the area’s bevy of nearby bars and restaurants. But the company isn’t doing it alone; the city is chipping in.

As downtown redevelopment continues at a torrid pace for retail and restaurant industries, Las Vegas seeks to incentivize one sector that has lagged behind the revitalization boom: the office market, which has seemed to be the slowest to recover from the Great Recession, said Bill Arent, the city’s director of Economic and Urban Development.

To recruit more companies to move to the greater downtown area, the city this fiscal year introduced the Office Tenant Incentive Program, offering grant money to help small to midsize businesses with the costs of entering into older properties that might be less traditionally considered office spaces — or the “hidden gems of the marketplace” as Arent described them.

Trend Nation was awarded

$50,000 in November, making it the first recipient of the program.

“It was a key factor in us choosing the downtown area,” Howard said.

Companies must sign at least a five-year lease to be eligible for the program, Arent said, but he suggested that overall, the “barrier to entry is pretty low.”