Page 15 - 2021 Spotlight NJ's Top Law Firms
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 institutions in health care and higher education.
“We don’t have enough of those kinds of places that are as dynamic
existing robust utilities infrastructure at 95 Greene St. in Jersey City, a former Colgate-Palmolive manufacturing plant. It recently launched base building improvements including extensive upgrades to mechanicals, HVAC, vertical conduits and a new rooftop generator, along with high-end amenities and common spaces.
Its plans also call for a new prebuilt lab suite on the third floor, which
it will deliver by late this summer, but that wasn’t always part of Thor’s strategy. Melissa Gliatta,
an executive vice president with the Manhattan-based firm, said it
originally envisioned completing part of the infrastructure upgrades and then doing individual lab spaces as it signed leases.
“Now we’re looking at doing build- outs because it’s become about timely delivery,” Gliatta said, while also citing the time lost due to the pandemic. “We’ve got to catch that back up somehow.”
Diaz and other panelists lauded the new state incentives that will be available under the recently adopted New Jersey Economic Recovery Act of 2020. But he argued that “part of the solution
here from an economic development standpoint”
with good transit access.”
Sullivan noted that, “at some point those market dynamics either work or don’t work” with respect to building those facilities. So the state’s new incentive programs could play a role in coaxing developers to create space that is plug-and-play or at least closer to delivery.
To be sure, developers say it’s all
but cost-prohibitive to build new, ground-up life sciences facilities on a speculative basis. Peter J. Cocoziello Jr., a principal with Bedminster-based Advance Realty Investors, noted
that such projects typically have specialized dimensions, higher floor loads and robust HVAC and utility requirements, among other needs, which could raise construction costs to some $500 per square foot.
“So the best thing to do is try and find something that was typically built by a large-scale
pharmaceutical
REALESTATENJTM 13
    as they need
to be,” Sullivan said during the NAIOP program. “So we need
to have more mixed-use, R&D- centric places developed in and around transit or
Melissa Gliatta
should also be reforming the state’s Municipal Land Use Law to help streamline local approvals, especially for so- called as of right projects.
 Tim Sullivan
“New Jersey, to me, is in an absolute perfect position to attract the best
of the best,” Diaz said. “We’ve got to speed things up. Our speed to market has to change dramatically.” RE
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 company or
a corporate-
owned facility,”
Cocoziello said.
“And you’ll
find that those
older buildings
were typically
built much better, they had narrower footprints, they were in clustered communities — multi-building campuses — and those sort of users always thought about the future.”
Advance did exactly that with a former Sanofi U.S. research complex in Bridgewater, which it acquired in 2014 and subsequently repopulated with new tenants such as Nestle Health Sciences. The company then sold part of the campus — namely, a 783,500-square-foot portfolio of high- end lab and office space — to Thor Equities in 2019 as the latter looked to grow its life sciences portfolio.
Thor is looking to capitalize on an
Peter J. Cocoziello Jr.








































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