Page 24 - RE-NJ

22 SEPTEMBER 2023
Logistics firm NRS is building a new 490,429-square-foot distribution center at 1075 Secaucus Road in Jersey City. Francis Walsh (left), CEO of NRS, and Dean Brody, executive managing director with JLL, recently visited the site to discuss the speculative project.
INFILL APPEAL
Developer eyes 490,000 sq. ft. of new industrial space minutes from Lincoln, Holland tunnels
Construction is underway on a project that will bring nearly 500,000 square feet of new
industrial space to Jersey City, in
a rare ground-up development in the submarket that will create the largest high-end logistics facility within five miles of the Lincoln and Holland tunnels.
Its developer, NRS, is a fourth- generation logistics firm that is well- versed in the real estate business, having built or operated millions of square feet during its six decades in business. It’s now seeking a tenant as it prepares to go vertical at 1075 Secaucus Road, where it will look
to stand out in an area dominated by older buildings with low ceiling heights and footprints that are far less efficient.
“We feel we’re in a very good position because of the market and the location,” said Dean Brody, a broker and executive managing director with JLL, who leads the leasing team at the site.
Slated for completion in spring 2024, the facility will span 490,429 square feet with 40-foot clear ceiling heights and a location less than a mile from Route 1&9. Plans also
call for 49 dock doors and one
drive-door, along with parking for 445 cars and 40 trailers on a nearly 40-acre site.
Equally important: The property can draw from a labor pool in a region that includes the most densely populated cities in the country.
“We’ve got to make sure that, if we build a building, we’re able
to put people in it,” said Francis Walsh, CEO of Lyndhurst-based NRS, echoing a mantra from the company’s past development projects. “What’s great about this property is we have a great labor force in the area — Jersey City,
Union City, West New York and Secaucus, obviously. And for any tenant looking for a strike point to New York City (from a new facility), you can’t get any closer to the Lincoln Tunnel.”
It will be the newest piece of a
site that was once a destination
for dredged material from New York Harbor, under a massive federal project meant to deepen the waterway from 2004 to 2016. NRS purchased the 100-acre site from Rockefeller Group around 2007 and, some eight years later, sold roughly half the site to Scannell Properties for the development of
By Joshua Burd
Photo by Aaron Houston for Real Estate NJ