Editor’s Note
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.
A growth industry in the making
Insiders say that now is the time to discern which municipalities will be receptive to the prospect of legalized recreational cannabis, if and when it becomes a legal industry in New Jersey. That prospect is likely many months from being a reality, if not more, but the concept has the support of Gov. Phil Murphy and several well-known lawmakers.
