Las Vegas Launches Program to Attract Remote Workers

The City of Las Vegas has launched a new program to attract technology workers that have the ability to work remotely to move to the market. The city’s Economic and Urban Development department is leading the campaign, which has been rolled out on Linkedin and a new website called Innovate. The team is targeting employees in Seattle and San Francisco.

“We felt that we had a value proposition. Las Vegas has 300 days of sun, no income tax and more affordable cost of living,” Ryan Smith, business development manager in the Economic and Urban Development Department at the City of Las Vegas, tells GlobeSt.com. “These are attractive to the markets that we are targeting in our campaign, which include San Francisco and Seattle. We launched the digital campaign and we launched a targeted Linkedin campaign to reach out to specific companies that have announced permanent remote work. We want to have conversations directly about their employees moving to Las Vegas.”

While the pandemic has been a motivator to launch the campaign, it wasn’t the catalyst. In fact, the city already had the program in motion at the beginning of the year. “We have had people moving to Las Vegas from California and other major markets before the pandemic, and remote work was already starting to gain some steam,” says Smith. “During the pandemic when people started to work from home, and some companies started to announce permanent remote work policies. Other companies have announced that there would be a remote work option or a compromise.”

There are a number of factors driving the city’s interest in attracting remote workers. The impact from the pandemic is perhaps the most immediate. “We were hit really hard by the pandemic, and we still have about 15% unemployment,” says Smith. “Getting people here with steady incomes will help to stabilize the economy. When companies are looking at locations for new offices, they look at the workforce. If we have those people here, we might also be able to attract more companies in the future.”

Attracting new workers will also continue to grow and diversify the market, driving trends that were in place prior to the pandemic. “This will help us diversify our economy and stabilize our revenue,” says Smith. “A lot of these people have a lot of discretionary income and even on the hospitality side, these workers will be supporting local businesses. That would help our economic situation as well.”

The campaign is targeting tech workers because many of the companies are adopting remote work policies, but tech workers will also help to drive other initiatives in the market. “We want to be on the forefront of global and industry trends,” says Smith. “We have made investments into driving innovations, and we have cut a lot of red tape for smart cities projects. We want to accelerate those programs, and bringing technology workers from the Bay Area could help with that as well.”

Already the program has been an early success with a lot of interest from employees and companies. “We have gotten a ton of inquiries, and we are talking to individuals every single day that have the ability to work remotely,” says Smith. “I have spoken with multiple people at Google about this opportunity, and people on my team are talking to workers at Microsoft, Facebook and Uber. We are seeing that a lot of people have an interest in Las Vegas.”