Sam Cherry closed Thursday on the shuttered Bent Inn, paying $3.2 million for the 33-room downtown hotel and outlining a plan to turn its guest rooms into studio apartments.
The 48-year-old chief executive of Cherry Development told the Las Vegas Review-Journal the purchase gives his shareDOWNTOWN complex next door a direct connection. He said he expects to spend just over $1 million on the conversion. The hotel sits at the northeast corner of Ogden Avenue and 11th Street.
What The Conversion Would Add
Guest rooms are planned as studios. The property's 2,400 square feet of retail space is slated to become a hospitality concept, according to a buyer news release reported by the Review-Journal.
Cherry said he plans to open the apartment building in 90 days. 8 News Now separately reported that renovations were expected to be completed in mid-2027. Those are two published schedules for related work on the same shuttered property, and neither account supplies the other's timeline.
The existing pool and spa are planned for refurbishment as an amenity for shareDOWNTOWN residents. Cherry's group also planned to start cleaning the site Friday morning. That was a stated plan for Nov. 13, not a confirmed completion of the cleanup.
A Sale The Online Record Had Not Caught Up With
Clark County property records, as reported by the Review-Journal, show lenders foreclosed on the Bent Inn site in May. Cherry bought the property from those lenders. By midday Friday, the sale still had not appeared in the county's online property sales records. Cherry indicated that paperwork processing may have been delayed amid widespread email outages.
The $3.2 million figure is what Cherry said he paid. The just-over-$1 million conversion budget is likewise his stated plan, not a filed construction contract or a finished bid.
A Boutique Hotel With A Short Run
The Bent Inn opened in fall 2023 as Las Vegas' only gay-owned boutique hotel and the city's first hotel of its kind. It marketed itself to LGBTQ travelers. It then closed less than a year after opening. The Review-Journal reported an abrupt closure in September 2024, with the owners citing an ongoing legal dispute with the general contractor.
KTNV reported that the owners also said financial issues caused by several pending lawsuits led them to shut down. The hotel later reopened in 2025. Management announced a final closure in fall 2025 and wrote that some things just aren't meant to be.
Those owner statements explain the closure they described at the time. They are not a court finding on the contractor dispute or the lawsuits.
The Complex Next Door, And The Ones Before It
Cherry Development opened the 84-unit apartment project beside the Bent Inn in 2023. That is the shareDOWNTOWN building the new purchase is supposed to connect. The company had already opened a 63-unit shareDOWNTOWN building in 2020. An earlier Review-Journal account described Cherry breaking ground on a four-story, 63-unit shareDOWNTOWN project at Casino Center Boulevard and Colorado Avenue, with apartments planned at 480 square feet and expected rents of $1,100 to $1,300 a month. Those expected rents belonged to that earlier plan, not to the Bent Inn conversion.
This year Cherry Development opened the 104-unit shareWESTSIDE. Cherry plans to open the two-story Good Word Social Club next to that Westside complex early in 2027. Downtown, he developed Soho Lofts two decades ago and built the 16-story Soho Lofts and the 22-story Newport Lofts. He owns a unit on the 15th floor of Soho Lofts.
He unveiled the Bent Inn housing plans Thursday evening at an event marking Cherry Development's 25th anniversary. Shelley Berkley presented him with a key to the city and said he is making Las Vegas a more livable and wonderful place to live.
A Thin Year For New Apartments
The purchase lands in a slower construction cycle. The Review-Journal has reported that the Las Vegas Valley's multifamily pipeline has fallen to its lowest level since 2021, and that only about 3,400 apartment units are expected to be added to the valley's stock this year, the lowest annual total in four years.
Rents in Las Vegas had been dropping consistently for more than a year, while apartment owners were offering concessions on close to half of the units on the rental market. A Marcus & Millichap executive, quoted in that same report, said higher borrowing costs and tighter bank lending standards were making multifamily financing harder.
A 33-room hotel conversion is not a substitute for a large new apartment delivery, and nothing in the reporting ties Cherry's purchase price or 90-day target to those valleywide figures. What it does show is a developer adding studios by reusing a foreclosed boutique hotel rather than waiting on a fresh tower.
By Friday afternoon, the practical markers were still ahead of the paperwork and the calendar: a cleaning planned for that morning, a sale not yet visible in the county's online sales records, and two public timelines, 90 days and mid-2027, that have not been brought into line.
