3131 Kennedy Blvd. in North Bergen — Courtesy: JLL
By Joshua Burd
A vacant movie theater in North Bergen is set to become a self-storage facility after the sale of the property by Madison International Realty, brokers with JLL announced Thursday.
According to a news release, the 57-foot-tall, 73,398-square-foot building at 3131 Kennedy Blvd. has a steel frame and concrete masonry with large open spaces and high ceilings. That made it attractive as a conversion opportunity for the buyer, Safely Store, whose plans call for 103,000 square feet of climate-controlled self-storage across four stories.
JLL Senior Managing Director Jose Cruz, managing directors Nicholas Stefans and Jason Lundy and Senior Analyst Luke Ceccoli represented Madison in the sale of the 1.07-acre site.
“This represents a unique opportunity to convert a strategically located theater building into a best-in-class self-storage facility in an irreplaceable location with exceptional market fundamentals,” Cruz said. “The combination of prime highway visibility along heavily travelled Interstate 495, proximity to Manhattan via the Lincoln Tunnel and a significantly under-supplied market with strong demographic drivers creates compelling investment potential.”
Built in 1999, the property is within a zone that allows for wholesale business, storage, distribution and warehousing as conditional uses, the news release said. The site also includes 346 parking spaces originally required for the theater operation.
JLL added that I-495 and Kennedy Blvd. carry 140,210 and 31,155 vehicles per day, respectively, while the location provides direct access to major highways such as Route 3, the New Jersey Turnpike and Route 1 & 9. It’s also just 1.5 miles from the Lincoln Tunnel, one mile from Weehawken and Union City and 2.5 miles from Hoboken.
Within a three-mile radius, the property serves a population exceeding 603,000 residents with an average household income of $161,184, the listing team said. The lends itself to strong self-storage fundamentals in area where 72 percent of housing units are renter-occupied and one that has more than 132,000 multifamily dwellings, JLL said, while the current supply of 2.79 square feet of self-storage per capita is well below the national average of 6.1 square feet per capita.
