Page 17 - 2021 Spotlight NJ's Top Law Firms

Photo by Aaron Houston for Real Estate NJ
Courtesy: Larken Associates
Slated for completion later this year, the 191-unit Hillsborough Village Center will include a mix of one-, two- and three-bedroom apartments spread across elevator and duplex-style buildings, along with 28,000 square feet of ground-level retail space.
A rendering of the now-completed Autumn Ridge development, a 198-unit luxury apartment community at 1500 Hyde Blvd. in Lopatcong
walking and biking trails.
In Bordentown — a new area for the company, Gardner said — Larken broke ground on the Reserve at Crosswicks, a 272-unit development at 8000 Bowery Lane that will feature high-end finishes and a clubhouse with a game room and pet salon. It’s expected to be completed by the summer.
And Larken recently broke ground on the Ridge at Readington, featuring 168 garden apartments and 85 apartments in elevator buildings
on Route 22 near Oldwick Road. That project, a redevelopment of an existing medical office park on 17.2 acres, is expected to be completed in summer 2022.
The original plan for the site “was basically a fail. We never got past the third building and only really built about 25 percent of the square footage,” Gardner said. They had
a hard time finding tenants for the buildings, he said. Instead, they acquired five or six acres adjacent to the site and offered it to Readington as part of its affordable housing plan.
“It’s going to be a beautiful project,” Gardner said.
Larken had long focused on for-sale housing, he said, while noting that his father had always wanted to do apartments. The company began several projects intended as rental units, then made them for-sale because of the strong condo market. More recently, though, Larken switched to rental because “nobody was buying,” Gardner said.
He said he’d consider a for-sale project again. A property in South Jersey he’s in negotiations on,
for instance, would be part for-
sale townhouses and part rental apartments. But the company’s focus now is on rentals.
“My dad built a lot of commercial, a lot of industrial and we’re continuing to do the same stuff now,” Gardner said, in addition to the pipeline of apartments they’re creating. Larken also buys and renovates existing apartments.
“That’s been pretty lucrative for us, and it’s also taught us a lot about running residential rental projects and all the challenges,” he added. “We’ve become pretty good at it now, and I just hope we keep growing.”
The goal now, he said, is to keep building up a platform. “I’d like to be able to feed the machine. We need to find new properties” to build on. Larken Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer Lenny Tartamella, who runs Core Enterprises, Larken’s in-house construction division, has been “instrumental in building the organization,” Gardner said.
He said the trick for Larken, which has grown to around 120 employees, is to get other people in sync with him and Tartamella, so they make the same decisions and handle customer service the same way: “We’re trying to be a very customer- centric company.”
The firm’s new projects are attracting a mix of renters, from singles and professionals to older people, Gardner said. The pandemic has pushed a lot of people out of New York City. Additionally, “I think
a lot of suburban single-family homeowners were able to sell their homes at a price that they maybe couldn’t get in the past.” Many
people are downsizing, he said, and “a lot of the people have not been from that far away. They’ve been from Somerset, Hunterdon, Warren counties already.”
In addition, many new-construction projects in New Jersey set between 15 and 25 percent of their units aside for affordable housing.
Tartamella said the projects are designed to appeal to a broad range of people. “You could really be
anyone and see yourself living in our community.”
Gardner said Larken is using an outside marketing firm as well
as their in-house team to reach potential renters and build lists of prospective tenants. Their existing portfolio is between 95 and 98 percent full, he said.
“We put so much energy into it, and to see them starting to lease up is very exciting,” he said. RE
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