By Joshua Burd
A massive distribution center in Cranbury that was long home to Pearson Education is finding new life after a lease by LVMH Group, the owner of brands such as Louis Vuitton and Tiffany.
The luxury goods giant recently took 886,826 square feet at the property, located at 258 Prospect Plains Road, to mark New Jersey’s largest industrial deal of the second quarter and one of the largest in recent years in the Exit 8A submarket. The deal came more than a year after the sprawling warehouse hit the market, helping to push up vacancy in Central Jersey as the asset class grappled with more normalized demand.
Built in 2001 by Rockefeller Group, the facility had served as the Northeast distribution hub for Pearson, once a prolific textbook manufacturer. It has changed hands several times over the past two decades, including 2013, when Exeter Property Group sold the 58-acre property to an institutional investor for $98 million.
Newmark’s Thomas Carragher, Craig Engelhardt, Gervais Attong, Christopher Carragher, Adam Petrillo and Alfonso Petrillo arranged the new lease on the tenant’s behalf, according to a recent LinkedIn post. LVMH’s exact plans for the facility were not immediately clear, although it fueled a second-quarter surge in industrial leasing by wholesale and retail users.
According to CBRE, S&S Activewear LLC accounted for the second-largest industrial deal of Q2 with a 480,425-square-foot renewal at 16 Applegate Drive in Robbinsville. Wholesale and retail users accounted for 41 percent of leasing volume in the quarter, while third-party logistics firms represented 25 percent of activity.
