A Bounty in the Desert

For clients and employees alike, LM Construction owner and President Larry Monkarsh’s door is always open. The Las Vegas firm specializes in retail warehouses, residential construction and office buildings.

By James Scalzitti
Construction Today, December 2005

Construction in the Las Vegas metropolitan area is booming. Ground is broken day in and day out on new high-rise hotels, condominium projects and resort areas. These projects are bringing more people into the area to live as well as to build these works. That, in turn, fuels the need for more retail warehouses, affordable housing and office buildings.

That’s where LM Construction comes in. Founded just under 10 years ago by Larry Monkarsh, the company originally built industrial warehouses and distribution centers, but has since built a diverse client base, riding the wave of growth Las Vegas has experienced.

“It’s phenomenal,” Monkarsh says of the building boom Las Vegas has gone through in just the past few years. The area was affected greatly by the slump in travel in the aftermath of 9/11. In less than a month after the terrorist attacks, 26 organizations cancelled their conventions in Las Vegas, he notes.

Prior to Sept. 11, 2001, LM Construction had been having its best year ever, with sales of $16 million to that point. Through the remainder of 2001, the company had sales of just $2 million, which still made it its best year to that point, but much of the work it had expected didn’t materialize. “When you’re building warehouses for [convention] exhibitors,” Monkarsh says, that business suffers when conventions cancel.

Since that time, the market “has recovered, and then some,” Monkarsh says. “It’s very dynamic here now.” Skyscrapers are being built downtown, and recent additions to the landscape include a new federal building and a new IRS building downtown. “Conventions have come back tremendously,” he says. The building boom has created a change not only in the face but the personality of Las Vegas, he notes. “The $49 dollar night rates [for hotel rooms on the Strip] are long gone,” he says. “The casinos have redefined themselves. The free buffets and the cheap rooms are long gone. It’s so dynamic that everyone wants a piece of the action.”

The building boom presents one problem, though. There is a dearth of both manpower and materials, Monkarsh says. It’s a situation that exists throughout the United States, but the situation is more pronounced in Las Vegas. “There just aren’t enough people here to do all the construction,” he says. Many people are moving to Las Vegas to work in the construction industry, but when they get there “they have to have places to live and they need affordable housing. That drives retail,” which drives so much more.

Las Vegas’s casinos aren’t the only institutions that have changed in recent years. “We had to diversify,” Monkarsh explains, “because there just isn’t enough industrial land in town to keep the industrial developers busy.

“We redefined ourselves and brought out a new slogan, ‘building from your point of view’,” he adds. This is more than a slogan to Monkarsh, though, because he brings two decades to the construction industry, experience that began with his family’s company, EJM Development, while growing up in Southern California. EJM was heavily into building apartments, condominiums and homes in the Los Angeles area in the 1970s and ‘80s, Monkarsh recalls. In the early 1980s, the company moved its focus into industrial projects.

Monkarsh moved to Las Vegas in 1995, “primarily to build products for my family’s development company,” he says. His experience with an array of projects helps him understand the concerns of project owners, he says. “I really understand and feel the pains of construction costs,” he says, and LM provides project owners with multiple budgets that show the costs of using different materials and different building systems, he says. “We give them as much information as they need to make their decisions.”

The company has separate divisions under the LM umbrella: tenant improvements, shell construction, architectural drafting, paint and metal stud framing and drywall. With the opening of the metal stud and drywall division in 2002, LM started doing work for other contractors, as well, Monkarsh adds. “We really are quality-oriented when it comes to the drywall,” he says. “We like to say the drywall in your office will look better than the drywall in your house.” Monkarsh notes that LM is “not necessarily going to be the least expensive,” contractor, but the quality of the work and materials will exceed that of its competition, providing long-term benefits, and the company is competitive on cost. “We try to keep it in-house and provide a quality product at a competitive price,” he adds.

“Very rarely am I beat substantially on a bid,” Monkarsh says. “We work off of smaller profit margins” than many general contractors, and rather than hoping to “make a killing on an individual project,” Monkarsh says he wants his customers to have the money available to come back to him repeatedly. It’s not always the price, though, that keeps his customers coming back.

“We really do have a good reputation in town,” Monkarsh says. “We do strive for 100 percent customer satisfaction.”

While it may not be possible to keep 100 percent of a company’s customers happy 100 percent of the time,“We can always be happy knowing we’ve done everything in our power to make our customers happy,” he says.

[ Click here to go back to In The Press page ]