It’s hard to believe that more than two years have passed since we launched Real Estate NJ with what I felt was a compelling cover story: Foreign investors were making a splash in New Jersey and paying impressive prices for properties across the state. That trend has seemingly slowed since then, at least when it comes to high-profile deals involving trophy properties. But the good news is that New Jersey is still drawing investors from beyond the state — whether it’s New York, Chicago or the West Coast — who are entering the market for the first time.
Editor’s Note
Hear directly from Editor Joshua Burd as he brings you the highlights of this month’s issue of Real Estate NJ and his observations from recent interviews.
New year, new optimism
Among those of you who shared your predictions for 2019, the worst thing I heard was “I’m not sure yet.” And if uncertainty is the worst thing we have in the year ahead, I think we’re well-equipped to take our chances. In the interim, we’re thrilled to begin our third full year of Real Estate NJ, the only New Jersey-based publication dedicated exclusively to commercial real estate.
A white knight for Whitehouse Station
For all the buzz around walkable, urban submarkets and higher-density workplaces, our readers have never lost interest in the fate of the Merck property in Whitehouse Station. I was reminded of that on Jan. 3, when a story about a potential buyer for the complex quickly became the most-read item we’ve ever had on RE-NJ.com.
A new twist on mixed-use
As you’ll read in this month’s cover story, a joint venture is banking on health care as a key ingredient in a long-awaited, mixed-use project in Gloucester County. Consider that the 35-acre development, known as Washington Square Town Center, includes a 40,000-square-foot medical office building as a way to balance the amount of retail on the site. The plan also calls for a 110-bed assisted living facility, which will provide the tax revenue that might otherwise come from a more traditional commercial use.
Metaphorically speaking
As you’ll read in this month’s cover story, Vision Real Estate has thrived with what it describes as “an assembly line mentality” for transforming old corporate campuses, with the right mix of creativity and capital and a full-service, in-house team that has landed some of the state’s most coveted tenants. It’s now building on that track record with other high-profile projects in Morris County and a growing list of value-add investments across northern and central New Jersey.
Redrawing the map for industrial
As you’ll find out in this month’s cover story, developers and brokers that have long focused on New Jersey are now stretching beyond the traditional boundaries of the state’s industrial market. And they are stretching them in every direction — for different reasons — in their quest to keep pace with tenants that are adopting a more regional approach.
A remedy for retail
Our July cover story takes a look at the growth of medical retail and all of the nuances that come along with it. For one thing, there seems to have been a perfect storm that paved the way for this movement: Retail was hurting after the Great Recession, while the Affordable Care Act expanded the insured population and changed how health care was delivered. As you might guess, New Jersey was impacted by these forces as much as any other market.
Editor’s note: Mastering the middle
Even before I started covering commercial real estate full-time, I still came across development stories during my earlier days as a metro reporter in Central Jersey. One of those stories came when I was covering Bound Brook, a borough in Somerset County that had a tired downtown and a history of being battered by flooding from the Raritan River. But in early 2011, we learned that a developer named George Capodagli was interested in building the type of new apartments that were starting to crop up elsewhere in the state.
Making strides
No matter how much I write about commercial real estate, it’s never enough for me to fully appreciate the connection between a developer and one of his or her buildings. That said, Peter Sudler summed it up well enough earlier this year, when he spoke about demolishing a vacant, antiquated office building to make way for a new industrial development.
