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That opened the door for offshore
3PLs to plant a fl ag in New Jersey
in 2024, according to JLL, when the
group accounted for some 8 million
square feet or 41.6 percent of all
Class A industrial leasing in the
state. Admittedly, that pace slowed
in the fi rst half of 2025 — with
Asia-based fi rms leasing around 1.7
million square feet through midyear
— yet JLL notes that they’re still
among the most active tenants,
accounting for about 22 percent of
all Class A deals in Q2, thanks in
part to a renewed push to secure
space.
“It’s picked up again, and obviously
a lot of that has
to do with the
tariffs and the
uncertainty,”
said David
Knee, a vice
chair of JLL’s
Northeast
industrial
David Knee
practice. “A
lot of things are uncertain at the
moment, so people are trying to get
as many goods as they can to the
marketplace before something were
to transpire from the tariff side.”
Notable deals this year have
included a 480,844-square-foot
sublease by Elogistek and a
332,635-square-foot commitment
by HYTX Logistics, both at the 4
million-square-foot Linden Logistics
Center developed by Advance
Realty Investors and Greek Real
Estate Partners. Those followed
deals by Weida Freight System and
YunExpress at 400 Salt Meadow
Road in Carteret, where they
occupy a combined 334,000 square
feet at the new 1.2 million-square-
foot project by Crow Holdings
Development, among several others.
That demand has bolstered a
region that has seen preleasing
plummet, with new construction
fl ooding the market and with
many companies now balking at
large capital investments in new
facilities. To that end, New Jersey
had 9.6 million square feet of new
industrial space under construction
at midyear, according to Knee, but
just 26 percent of it was preleased.
That’s down from roughly 80
percent around two years ago,
when the construction pipeline was
signifi cantly higher, with deliveries
now expected to tail off as landlords
work off the excess supply.
“We’ve been seeing these proposals
for probably
over three
years at this
point,” said
David Greek,
managing
partner of
Greek Real
Estate Partners,
David Greek
referring to
Asia-based 3PLs. “But they really
haven’t hit the comp sheets until
last year because not many of them
were actually able to lease space
when the market was a lot tighter.”
According to Knee, Burlington
County was among the fi rst
submarkets to attract the offshore
operators in earnest, with its larger
blocks of vacant space and more
modest rents than northern New
Jersey. The fi rms then moved up
the New Jersey Turnpike after the
segment had established itself and
as buildings became available, he
said, and “the landlords started to
take a second look at the viability of
doing business with them,” leading
to deals in more port-proximate
submarkets such as Carteret and
Linden.
That’s allowed landlords to
better understand their business
models, which they say have many
similarities to U.S.- and European-
based 3PLs. One major difference,
Machemer said, is that the operators
seem more willing to take space
speculatively without having a
contract in place. “And in some
cases that’s because they have to
demonstrate to the manufacturer
in Asia that they have the space to
move the product into.”
There’s also diversity in the
operating models, which is on
display at the Crow Holdings at
Carteret campus. Of the fi rm’s two
tenants at 400 Salt Meadow Road,
one is “more of a fulfi llment or last-
mile” operation, Machemer said,
while the other is a more traditional
service that brings product into the
country and handles logistics for
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