4810 Belmar Blvd. in Wall Township — Courtesy: Sheldon Gross Realty
By Joshua Burd
The family of the late Sheldon Gross has sold an office building in Wall Township, the final piece of a 300-acre tract that the well-known real estate executive had developed or sold in phases during six decades of ownership.
According to Sheldon Gross Realty, which arranged the sale, CTC Holdings LLC paid $5.2 million for the nearly 24,000-square-foot structure at 4810 Belmar Blvd. Located just east of Route 34, the roughly four-acre property is part of a site that Solomon Gross, the grandfather of Sheldon and Peter Gross, gifted to the brothers in the mid-1960s, providing a large development opportunity in what the family admits was an unproven location.
“That was in 1964, when there wasn’t much in Wall Township, so my father was undecided about how to use the land,” said Sheldon Gross Realty President Marcy Gross, Sheldon’s daughter. “Ultimately, after buying out Peter, he took a wait-and-see approach.”
Sheldon Gross Realty noted that, by that time, Solomon had already subdivided it into many small lots, expecting that they’d be bought up by people anxious to build vacation bungalows. As a result, the land was an extremely irregular shape with multiple gaps throughout, the firm said, while the streets between the residential lots existed only on paper.
“It took quite a while to reassemble that property and make it whole again,” said Jonathan Gross, senior vice president of the West Orange-based firm. “I helped my father during his ongoing negotiations with the town.”
Sheldon Gross, with support from Executive Vice President Jonathan Glick, was able to reassemble a large, contiguous tract for development and in 2007 delivered an office building with room for multiple tenants, including and Sheldon Gross Realty’s Wall Township office. He also built a 60,000-square-foot flex structure on Belmar Boulevard that he sold a short time after.
“Sheldon actually gifted some of the property to Wall Township,” Glick said. “And as for those small residential lots, we bought quite a few of them back. This made sense from a business perspective — but it was a challenge, since much of the formal paperwork was inaccurate or had been lost.”
The transition from development to sales has been underway for about a decade, the brokerage firm said. In 2016, it sold the remaining 42 acres of open land, while Sheldon Gross died in 2022 at age 94 as the agency worked in earnest to part with the final remnants of the Wall Township property.
That process concluded with the sale of 4810 Belmar Blvd., which was arranged by Glick and Jonathan and Marcy Gross.
“It’s certainly bittersweet,” Marcy Gross said. “That property might have presented challenges through the years, but it always reminded me of my father … and now the last bit of it is gone.
“That said, my father always looked toward the positive, so that’s what I’m trying to do. He’d be extremely proud that when the time came to part ways with the property, it was his own family that sold it. Now, it’s up to other people and other families to take advantage of the opportunities tied to that section of Wall Township.”
Longtime broker Sheldon Gross, New Jersey commercial real estate mainstay, dies at 94
