The Lakes

The Lakes is the neighborhood that put water in the desert and a post office behind it. Built from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s inside City of Las Vegas limits, the two-square-mile community wraps around Lake Sahara, its man-made centerpiece, one lake where the original plan drew two, ringed by gated single-family enclaves, lakefront homes, and condominium sections that were the valley's western frontier when the first docks went in.

The lending here is the mature-neighborhood book. Conventional carries the everyday purchase and refinance, an equity line puts thirty years of appreciation to work on remodels the 1980s floor plans have earned, a reverse mortgage lets owners sixty-two and up stay on the water they bought decades ago, and second-home structures serve buyers keeping a Lakes address as their Las Vegas base.

Practical texture: association layers here can include lake-related components, and on waterfront parcels the insurance conversation and the association's water responsibilities get read together in week one. The housing stock is late-1980s vintage at its core, so roofs, panels, and plumbing get eyes before the appraiser arrives, and condo sections bring the full condominium review alongside the borrower's own file.

Lake Sahara's shoreline, the Sahara Avenue corridor east to the Strip, and the mountains west frame a community that traded desert lots for waterfront when nobody else in the valley was trying. Ask Art for a current read on the market before you write an offer.

In the mid-1980s the ground west of Fort Apache was the edge of everything, and the developers who platted The Lakes made an audacious pitch for it: a master-planned community wrapped around man-made water, with Lake Sahara as the centerpiece and lakefront lots in a city that averages four inches of rain a year. The plan originally drew two lakes; one was built, and it was enough.

The community got a second distinction in 1985 when Citicorp made The Lakes the home of its enormous card-payment processing center, and the postal service created dedicated ZIP codes carrying the place name The Lakes, Nevada, so that millions of Americans' payments would not read as mailed to Las Vegas. The processing center closed in 2014, but the ZIP name endures, a piece of banking history attached to a neighborhood that spent the 1990s watching the valley's growth roll past it toward Summerlin and keeps its water, its gates, and its mature streets as the reward for having been first.