What’s Fueling Las Vegas’ Growth?

Las Vegas metro area population reached two million in 2013. Today, our population is estimated by economists at over 2.2 million. And we continue to grow.

What’s driving this growth in southern Nevada?

When analyzing our local economy, it’s important to understand that today’s jobs base is already more diverse than it was a decade ago.

According to the Nevada State Employment, Training and Rehabilitation Department, essentially every local private sector industry but to some extent, financial services, is showing noticeable growth. As a result, the kind of job growth we’re seeing is much more sustainable than what we experienced before the recession, when so much of our growth came from gaming and tourism.

Construction is a major growth driver. Major projects Strip projects, such as Genting Berhad’s $4 billion Resorts World Las Vegas, the $350 million MGM-AEG arena, and the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority’s $2.3 billion Las Vegas Global Business District will add more than 20,000 jobs in the next two years.

Health care will bring on over 13,000 positions as the local population grows and continues to age. The retail and leisure and hospitality sectors will grow by approximately 15,400 and 41,200 jobs, respectively.

And companies continue to move to the Las Vegas metro area.

One major example is Sutherland Global, a back-end technology and support company that serves the insurance industry. In late 2015, they located their operations center in the old Citibank call center on West Sahara Avenue in the Lakes. They will employ 2,000 people by the end of 2016.

According to Jim Myers, Vice President for Customer Operations, Las Vegas was the perfect place to locate their operations center for the following reasons:

• Quality of the talent pool and the diversity of the skills that talent has.
• Assurance of 24/7 availability of cloud services due to Las Vegas location of Switch data center.

 Founded in 2000, Switch built the United States' largest data center in Las Vegas. The colocation, telecommunications and cloud services provider currently has 1.5 million square feet of capacity in Las Vegas, and continues to expand. Switch has more than 1,000 clients, including eBay, HP, Intel, DreamWorks, JP Morgan Chase, Sony, Boeing, and Fox Broadcasting.

According to Switch CEO and founder Rob Roy, their Las Vegas location was chosen for the following reasons:

• Proximity to California markets
• Low tax environment, especially compared to California
• Just outside California’s high power costs
• Lowest natural disaster ratings in the United States
• One hour flights from California cities to Las Vegas

 Since southern Nevada’s economy now has a broader base than before the recession, Las Vegas should be able to better weather the next economic slowdown. And we are well positioned to continue the steady growth we’ve experienced during the last several years.