A new office and innovation campus is taking shape in East Hanover, with sweeping exterior upgrades now complete and additional updates underway as New Vernon Equities breathes new life into a piece of a legacy pharmaceutical campus. — All images courtesy: NVE / JLL
By Joshua Burd
It was imperative to create “a sense of arrival” at the newly minted Arena campus in East Hanover, as Peter Gilpatric explained during a recent tour of the Route 10 property.
That meant far more than new curb cuts and monument signs. Look no further than the eight-acre green space that welcomes visitors to the budding office and innovation park — complete with an amphitheater, firepits and an expansive lawn area, along with a winding walking trail and new padel, pickleball and bocce courts.
“What we want to do is make this place special,” said Gilpatric, a co-founder of New Vernon Equities, the property’s owner. “It’s a business campus — we need to cater to 2026 businesses, which are different from the way I grew up. … So we need energy. We need people.”
It’s a sign of what’s to come at Arena, which spans more than 40 acres and will ultimately span some 600,000 square feet of office, research and development, technology and light manufacturing space across six buildings. That includes two existing Class A office properties totaling 350,000 square feet, which serve as the focal point of New Vernon Equities’ plan to reposition the campus into a modern, amenity-rich workplace destination that is distinct from the legacy pharmaceutical campus directly to its west.
NVE has committed more than $20 million to the project in the past year alone — all of it speculatively — and many of those updates are already on display. Others will take shape in the months ahead as it looks to fill the vacant office space at 20 and 40 Arena Way, working with an accomplished brokerage team from JLL.
“It is rare in today’s office market to see a developer invest this aggressively on a speculative basis,” said JLL’s Tim Greiner, who spearheads the leasing team alongside fellow Executive Managing Director Blake Goodman and Executive Vice President Colleen Maguire. “New Vernon Equities is delivering infrastructure, sustainability and amenity upgrades that position Arena to compete at the highest level for life sciences, pharmaceutical and innovation-driven users.”
NVE, which was founded in 2019, comes to the project with decades of experience in development, construction and finance. Along with Gilpatric, a former principal with LCOR, its founders include Michael Petillo, who built one of the region’s largest site contractors, and Michael Mackessy, a Wall Street veteran whose resume includes Salomon Smith Barney, Citi and Intercontinental Exchange.
Ironically, Gilpatric said the campus began with a single project that was meant as a one-off rather than a piece of larger assemblage. That came around six years ago, when NVE acquired a site at 30 Farinella Drive that it would go on to develop as a 75,000-square-foot GMP manufacturing facility for GenScript, a global biotechnology firm. The developer then acquired a neighboring building that came on the market, 31 Farinella Drive, which it razed and redeveloped as nearly 49,000 square feet of tech and flex space that is currently the subject of lease negotiations.
By 2023, NVE sought to add a third asset — namely, a 150,000-square-foot property at 135 Route 10 — but that plan grew when the seller and owner of the adjacent life sciences campus said the deal would have to include the twin office buildings now known as 20 and 40 Arena Way. The firm would spend the next two or so years securing the township’s approval to both subdivide the overall property and redevelop 135 Route 10 as a 120,000-square-foot flex building, which it expects to begin this spring.
The completed acquisition, announced in late 2024, also includes a roughly 1,000-space parking garage, supporting a location at the busy junction of Route 10 and Ridgedale Avenue and minutes from Route 24 and Interstate 287.
“We’re very flexible, we’re very reactive,” Gilpatric said. “We don’t have a cookie-cutter formula, and to do this sort of work in the old days would have been tough because you have institution upon institution upon institution.”
SLIDESHOW: Arena in East Hanover
The office buildings are the type of blank canvas that would entice well-heeled, entrepreneurial investors like NVE — with top-tier design, construction and infrastructure that the firm can enhance and leverage through strategic upgrades. The existing structures have floor-to-ceiling windows and full-height, five-story atrium lobbies with marble floors and other high-end finishes, while the office levels have 18-inch raised floors that house ductwork and IT equipment. Each floor, meantime, has a dedicated break room.
The buildings also have existing amenities that the firm plans to update and activate, from a 10,000-square-foot cafeteria and a gym with locker rooms to a 100-seat auditorium, a boardroom and multiple conference spaces, expanding upon the outdoor amenities that it has largely completed off Route 10.
“It’s a big statement for them to be making,” Goodman said of NVE’s plan to upgrade the campus on spec, with no debt on the property. “They have the vision and they’re creating it and putting their money where their mouth is, whereas a lot of landlords try to wait for a deal and then figure it out. They’re creating the environment today so that someone can jump into it immediately.”
Morristown-based NVE has already replaced and modernized the site’s HVAC and building management systems and. It has also converted the property to all-electric operations, aligning it with the global corporate renewable energy initiative known as RE100, adding to credentials that already include Gold certification on the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design scale.
It’s now finalizing designs for new interior common areas such as an expanded café area that will flow into the lobby of 40 Arena Way and potentially double as a bar, pending ownership’s purchase of a liquor license, as well as an adjacent “library” section that will provide quiet common space during the day. Other plans call for infusing both atria with plants and seating, complementing new outdoor seating and landscaping, as well as a boutique fitness center, a game room and the prospect of a production studio and coworking space to help activate the buildings.
“I think this is the future,” Gilpatric said of the all-inclusive, hospitality-rich campus environment, pointing to The Park in Berkeley Heights and Bell Works in Holmdel as “good examples of this type of thinking.”
“And when they were each done, they were kind of forward-thinking. This can be Morris County’s version of that — all different interpretations, because they’re all different facilities, but it’s what we’re doing.”
NVE, working alongside designers with Mancini Duffy, expects to complete its renovations this summer. But the landlord and its JLL leasing team have already piqued the interest of tenants ranging from around 30,000 to 300,000 square feet, Gilpatric said, having hosted multiple tours in recent months.
“There have been some whales,” he said. “Part of what you do is whale hunting, but I do want to activate the coworking because I think there is a market of smaller tenancies that are probably being ignored that are high-quality.”
Greiner added that the leasing team has been “fortunate that we’ve seen every deal … that’s flowed through Parsippany and Morris County.” But he said “getting somebody to be the first one in a building of this scale is a challenge. It’s why we’re really focused on coworking and getting that going and activated and then getting the amenities done so that it feels more vibrant even before somebody moves in.”
The updates at 20 and 40 Arena Way come alongside campus-wide improvements, including the construction of new roadways to establish independent site access and further separate it from the neighboring pharma property. It has also completed standalone utility infrastructure, replacing a previously shared campus-wide central plant facility.
Those upgrades and many others the NVE is planning will benefit the balance of the Arena site, which include the GenScript facility 30 Farinella Drive and the 48,835-square-foot flex space at 31 Farinella Drive. That also includes what was formerly 135 Route 10 and is now 80 Arena Way, the planned 120,000-square-foot flex building that will soon break ground.
At full build-out, Gilpatric expects Arena to support a diverse mix of tenants as well as those outside the property. He expects the legacy corporate user next door to be among those using the new common spaces, creating the type of synergy that it hopes to have with other businesses in East Hanover and the broader community.
“We think of Arena as a campus, not just as an office building or two office buildings,” he said. “It has a bigger story, and if it works, it will make everything around us better.”
