Curaleaf Holdings (CURLF 4.41%) is about to roll the dice on two brand-new retail assets in the state of Nevada, including a large dispensary in Las Vegas.
The company announced Friday that it has closed its acquisition of the retail properties of privately held Acres Cannabis. That company operated a pair of dispensaries, one located in Las Vegas near the Strip (the main tourist street in the city) and one under construction in the eastern Nevada town of Ely.
Image source: Getty Images
The retail stores are part of a larger, slow-burning deal between the two companies.
Last March, they signed an agreement under which Curaleaf would acquire Acres Cannabis is its entirety. Besides the two dispensaries, the latter's assets included 37 acres of land in rural Nevada, on which sits a 269,000-square-foot cultivation facility that features a 3,200-square-foot extraction laboratory. The land is located in Amargosa Valley, Nevada, which is close to Las Vegas.
Eventually, according to Curaleaf, this property is expected to grow 100,000 pounds of dry flower annually.
The closing of the retail portion of the deal comes several weeks after regulators signed off on it. Last October, the real estate aspect of the two companies' arrangement was completed.
When Curaleaf originally announced the deal last year, the company said that it represented "a major step in expanding our vertical platform in Nevada." With the closing of the retail part of it, the company now holds two cultivation facilities and two processing sites, plus the pair of dispensaries.
As with several other states in the Western U.S., Nevada has legalized cannabis for both medical and recreational consumption.
Of the two dispensaries, the one in Las Vegas is currently in operation. A large space described as a "cannabis experiential store," it's 19,000 square feet in space that features a museum area and an open-view processing kitchen where a number of its products are made. Appropriately for its location near the city, it is open 24/7.
The dispensary in Ely is not yet open; Curaleaf anticipates this will occur in the second quarter of this year.
Both dispensaries will be rebranded under the Curaleaf name, the company said.
In spite of this encouraging expansion, Curaleaf's shares have followed the general trend of bearishness in marijuana stocks. Since Curaleaf announced the Acres deal last March, the company's share price has fallen by more than 9%.
