Is Las Vegas becoming Los Angeles 2.0?
By 2021, as the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the globe, Las Vegas-based luxury real estate broker Ivan Sher started noticing a distinct migration pattern from California's affluent neighborhoods to Las Vegas.
"What I think pushed people over the edge" in California was government mandates that impacted them and their children in school, he said. "When you lose your options and things get mandated by the state, it becomes less enticing to be there no matter how beautiful it is."
Sher said anecdotally pre-COVID about 20 percent of his clients were from California, but that number jumped to around 80 percent during the tail end of the pandemic. Now roughly 60 percent of his clients are from California, he said.
Earlier in the year, Zonda ranked the Las Vegas Valley as the eighth-hottest market for luxury homebuyers, beating out such cities as Los Angeles and Boston. The top spot for high-end buyers to start 2025 was Charleston, South Carolina.
The influx of wealthy Californians drawn by a tax friendly, pro-business and less regulatory and bureaucratic environment has been well documented, and it has produced blowback from residents who worry Nevada will start looking like the Golden State.
When Sher talks about Las Vegas becoming Los Angeles 2.0, he doesn't mean it in a negative way. He said his clients who are relocating from California realize why they are coming to Nevada.
"What I can tell you is the people leaving California don't like what it's become and are looking for a different lifestyle and different opportunities and different economics, and so those people coming to Las Vegas are aware of how it can be, and don't want to go back to that," he said.
From 2020 to 2023, nearly 158,000 Californians relocated to Nevada, making up 43 percent of all new residents of the Silver State in that period, according to data from the Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles.
Sher's brokerage, IS Luxury, recently opened an office on Newport Drive in Orange County, California. He currently has approximately 37 active listings, with 43 percent priced over $5 million and 30 percent over $10 million. In addition, he has several off-market listings pending that are priced above $10 million.
So far in 2025, Sher has closed 21 transaction worth a combined $103 million - 16 on the listing side and five on the buyer side - with an average price point of $4.1 million.
A recent Concierge Auctions study found that the average price of an "ultra luxury" home in the Las Vegas Valley, defined as the 10 most expensive sales in a given market, jumped 107 percent from 2019 through 2024.
Sher said Las Vegas is going through a rebranding, turning into a "cosmopolitan" destination that caters to a wide range of people and not just the traditional casino and gaming sector.
He also pointed to the potential movie studio in Summerlin backed by Sony Pictures Entertainment and Warner Bros. Discovery Studio. He said Hollywood's move to Las Vegas most definitely won't mimic California's policies and political stances
"If it's (Hollywood) 2.0, they have to learn from their mistakes," he said. "Nobody wants to replicate what they're leaving California for. They want to do a 2.0 version, they want to think things through."
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