Warren Corporate Center in Warren — File photo
By Joshua Burd
Insurance giant MetLife is headed to Warren Corporate Center in Somerset County, where it will lease nearly 181,000 square feet of office space alongside several other blue-chip tenants.
Multiple market reports say the company will occupy 400 Warren Corporate Center in a direct lease at the five-building, 820,000-square-foot complex just south of Interstate 78. The deal at the Warren property, most of which is owned by Vision Real Estate Partners and Rubenstein Partners LP, was New Jersey’s largest of the first quarter and helps fill a space that was slated to house PTC Therapeutics before the company amended its lease late last year.
Parties involved in the MetLife transaction did not return requests for comment on details such as an estimated move-in date, the number of employees involved or the names of any brokers involved, although the campus’ website lists Cushman & Wakefield’s Robert Donnelly Jr., Paul Giannone and Todd Elfand as the leasing team for the property. Meantime, a report by CBRE noted that the deal contributed to 462,000 square feet of new leasing activity in central New Jersey in Q1, fueling a 43 percent increase from the previous quarter.
The 180,859-square-foot lease also brings another major user to Warren Corporate Center, where MetLife will join the likes of Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc., PTC Therapeutics and Everest Reinsurance Co. Vision and Rubenstein have built the tenant roster since acquiring the 176-acre campus in 2016, setting out to reposition the former Lucent Technologies and Citigroup property under a plan that largely centered on constructing a new standalone, 19,000-square-foot amenity building with a long list of perks for tenants.
Everest Reinsurance committed to the property in 2019, giving way to PTC’s lease in 2022. The latter initially agreed to occupy buildings 400 and 500 for a combined 360,000 square feet, but later sought to amend its lease so that it would occupy just half of its original space.
Regeneron leased some 127,000 square feet last spring to bring the campus to more than 95 percent occupied at the time. Warren Corporate Center’s website now lists just 29,279 square feet available at Building 300.
