From left: Accordia’s leadership team includes Chris Hayes, managing director; Matt Pizzolato, executive vice president for acquisitions and capital markets; Frank Recine, principal; and Jason Bogart, founding principal. Photo by Aaron Houston for Real Estate NJ
By Joshua Burd
It may be Accordia’s newest acquisition, but the three-building, 59,000-square-foot medical office campus on Mountain Boulevard in Warren is familiar territory for the commercial real estate firm.
As Jason Bogart notes, the deal comes 19 years after Accordia bought the complex for the first time — securing what was its first property after the company was founded four months earlier.
“It’s full circle,” said Bogart, who had launched the firm alongside veteran developer Joe Romano, and it’s a moment that comes at a fitting time for the Fairfield-based team. Accordia is entering a new phase as a developer, investor and asset manager, with a revamped business plan and several major projects and acquisitions on the horizon. That reboot has taken shape in recent months with the high-profile additions of Frank Recine and Matt Pizzolato — both former prominent brokers with JLL, with close personal ties to Accordia — who are now part of the firm’s leadership team after Romano’s recent retirement.
“It’s just an exciting time,” Bogart said, later adding: “I think that the reason this is going to be wildly successful is because we are all of the same mindset and … we complement each other with our personalities.
“It’s going to be a very exciting ride for the next three to five years as we build this thing up.”
Accordia launched in June 2005 as a partnership between Romano and Bogart, former colleagues at Advance Realty Group, who had complementary skillsets that they sought to combine. Bogart, who was 32 and the father of two newborns at the time, recalled that he “grew up” in the business with a focus on finance, deal structuring and underwriting. Romano, for his part “had the 30 years of experience behind him and the reputation and wherewithal to pick up the phone and make deals and have people listen to him.”
Known as Accordia Realty Ventures, the firm initially focused on commercial and medical office properties and small-mixed use assets in the $10 to $30 million range. The company would soon go after larger deals as it moved into the industrial and multifamily sectors, with a portfolio that at one point grew to more than 3 million square feet before several recent dispositions.
Among several projects, it was a partner and development manager for the first phase of Harrison Yards, which had 192 luxury apartments and ground-floor retail space steps from the Harrison PATH station. It also built and sold a 133,000-square-foot industrial facility in Linden and, in tandem with EverWest Real Estate Investors, acquired a 369,000-square-foot warehouse in South Brunswick while developing some 200,000 square feet of new space on adjacent land.
But Romano decided late last year that he would retire after some five decades in the business, leaving the company’s future in Bogart’s hands. The latter began to craft a new vision and business plan for Accordia with the help of Chris Hayes, the firm’s managing director and longtime head of property management, one that focused on three distinct strategies: acquisitions and capital markets, development and third-party property and asset management.
“The timing just felt right with the markets slowing down,” Bogart said, pointing to the estimated $1.5 trillion in debt that will come due for commercial landlords before 2026. “A lot of that we could see in the market around us — the loans that had been made to certain borrowers, to certain assets. We could see how they would be in trouble and how they were going to need some help, and because we were always a small entrepreneurial firm, we felt like we’re well equipped to fix bad real estate. Whether that’s bad by lease terms, bad by financing strategy, bad by physical aspects, there’s always some way for us to increase value, because we have a pretty diverse background and expertise.
“So we came up with this plan to try to help some of the institutions, some of the banks, some of the non-real estate owners to fix their assets and to create value,” he added. “And we’ve been making a big push on that side of the equation. And the plan was to have different division heads who come in and find real rainmakers and producers.”
Bogart admits that, “coming out of a 20-year partnership, I was very much looking forward to running my own company and not having to make decisions with groups of people.” But that changed as he decided to show the business plan to about a half-dozen friends, confidantes and trusted colleagues that he had come to know over three decades in real estate.
“It very quickly changed my opinion,” Bogart said. “I don’t need to be the guy in charge if I can collaborate with some of my closest colleagues in the industry. So it was an easy decision.”
That included Pizzolato, then a managing director with JLL’s Morristown-based capital markets group, whom Bogart and Romano had helped break into the business roughly a decade earlier. The debt and equity broker, who started as an analyst with HFF before the firm was acquired by JLL, would quickly rise through the ranks while arranging several deals for Accordia during that time.
More importantly, Bogart said, he had watched Pizzolato grow into a leader in the field, “and just to see how impressive he was and his ability to talk and make connections and understand valuations of deals blew me away.” So “when Matt came to me and said he wanted to be a part of it … it was natural for him to fall into the acquisitions and capital markets role.”
Pizzolato, for his part, said he wasn’t initially looking for a change.
“They were friends, mentors, clients over those years,” he said of the Accordia team. “And as this sort of Accordia 2.0 was coming about, (Jason) shared the vision and started to plant the seed.”
He added that he has “always thought about being on the principal side,” but balked at the idea of working for a family office or for a larger institution where he’d be just a small piece of the team. Conversely, the thought of joining Accordia, where he could become a partner and continue to shepherd deals from start to finish, “was something that really attracted me.”
“And it’s guys that I’ve known for 10 years, too,” said Pizzolato, now the firm’s executive vice president for acquisitions and capital markets, “so I wasn’t taking a risk of not knowing who I’m working with.”
Recine, a veteran leasing broker with JLL, followed a similar path, starting as a sounding board for Bogart after some 20 years of friendship and several deals together in their respective roles. Their conversations about Accordia’s future began in early January on a ski trip that Bogart, Recine and Hayes took to Snowbird, Utah — specifically, “on a chair lift on the way up to the mountain” — with Bogart noting that he “was telling Frank about the new business plan and, of course, asked him for some advice.”
He later sent Recine the outline for his formal input, only to have his phone ring about two weeks later.
“I figured he wanted me to fix his car or quad,” Bogart joked. “(But) he said he needed to talk about something important. That’s when he let me in on the very shocking news that he was interested in the business plan.”
Recine, by that point, had been a broker for more than two decades and one of the top performers in the New Jersey office sector. He began in 2001 at CBRE, having earned a law degree but instead opting for a career in real estate, before moving to Newmark in 2006 and then to JLL in 2017 as part of a well-known team that also included Tim Greiner, Blake Goodman, Brendan McBride and Colleen Maguire.
“It’s been an industry that’s treated me really, really well,” Recine said. “I don’t take it for granted by any means. And, honestly, that’s probably why I never considered leaving.”
But the longtime broker, who also began to dabble in development during the pandemic, said the allure of joining with Bogart and Accordia “just hit me in the head one day.” Those discussions moved quickly because “we were all aligned as to the vision and what we wanted to accomplish,” even though neither side took the decision lightly.
“At the end of the day, as we were going into this, there’s business and there’s friendship,” said Recine, now a principal with Accordia. “So we wanted to make sure that we were doing it for the right reasons.”
He took comfort in the fact that they were coming from different sides of the business, he added, “because I said, ‘If I’m going partner with someone, I want someone who’s different than me that has a different skillset than I do.’”
By the spring, Accordia had largely built out the team of top talent that Bogart had envisioned. That team included Hayes, who joined the firm in 2011 after nearly three years with Grubb & Ellis, where he was a property manager whose assignments included some five Accordia buildings.
He noted that the firm’s portfolio has ebbed and flowed. Importantly, though, “we were never overgrowing the staff, but growing diligently, which was great because there’s upturns and downturns.
“And through some of those lulls in the markets, management was always really integral in keeping the business going, having cash flows and keeping the back office staff and the operation up and running,” Hayes said, enabling the company to continue to pursue development projects and new acquisitions.
Accordia is now off and running with its updated strategy. It announced in May that it had taken over property management at a three-building, 73,163-square-foot portfolio of medical office buildings in Montvale that Recine had repositioned, an arrangement that predated his move to the firm.
Meantime, its reacquisition of the Warren medical office campus at 34 Mountain Blvd., which it initially held for 10 years, comes with a value-add opportunity at a property whose tenants include Summit Medical Group. Its immediate plans include modernizing common areas such as restrooms and corridors, new front glass doors, painting the buildings and adding a new courtyard with seating and eating areas, along with new landscaping. Accordia also expects to install new signage inside and outside the buildings.
“It’s a repositioning play,” Bogart said, later adding: “It’s an easy, cosmetic fix for us. We can just go in and put a little capital into the building, restructure some of the leases and it’s … a deeply discounted basis to where we bought it (in 2005).”
Accordia is also under contract to buy a 35,000-square-foot industrial property in the Southeast, which it expects to close on in mid-November, in the first piece of what it figures to be a growing portfolio in the region.
“We’ve been looking down in the Southeast, focused on Florida and the Carolinas,” Pizzolato said. “They’re probably the two pockets we’re going to be spending a lot of time in.”
All the while, the new-look team has forged ahead with several development projects that had entered the firm’s pipeline in recent years. In Roxbury, Accordia is seeking approvals for a two-building, 500,000-square-foot industrial complex at the intersection of Route 46 and Interstate 80 that could break ground in 2025. It’s also pursuing two residential projects, including a 95-unit development in West Caldwell that is in the entitlement process. The second multifamily project would involve the restoration and adaptive reuse of the historic Sisters of Christian Charity convent in Mendham, where Accordia hopes to build some 120 units that would help satisfy the borough’s affordable housing obligations.
As for whether Accordia plans to make any other high-profile hires, Bogart said the firm will add support staff, but “we’re very conscientious of adding assets under management before adding people in seats.” It is, however, looking to renew partnerships in the institutional space while creating new ones.
“Matt brings a ton of relationships to the table,” Bogart said. “A lot of household names both on the lending and equity side, so we expect we’ll probably create some new partnerships. This has been a great reset for us as far as just the brand and what we’re looking at next.”
Notably, the revamped firm has quickly developed a brokerage division under Recine’s leadership. It now has multiple agency assignments at office buildings in New Jersey and elsewhere that it’s comarketing with JLL, while it’s engaged to handle more than 1 million square feet of active tenant requirements, largely due to “25 years of relationships” that kept in touch after he moved to Accordia, he said.
“It’s something that we weren’t really thinking of when we started this,” Recine said, “but it was a business line we couldn’t look away from because it just kept falling in our lap.”
Those businesses will continue to develop from Accordia’s longtime home at 100 Passaic Ave. in Fairfield, where it recently changed office suites and began construction on a new space. It’s only fitting, Bogart said, that the company give itself “an upgrade and a fresh image” as it embarks on its next chapter.
“We’re elevating the look and feel and the mentality of the company,” he said. “We want to be known as one of the best developers in every market we go to. So we’re going to buy quality assets, we’re going to do quality work with quality partners. And this office needed to get that look and feel so that we all understand it.”
