180 Park Ave. in Florham Park — Courtesy: Transwestern
By Joshua Burd
Transwestern is closing its New Jersey office next month, a company representative said, in a move that comes a decade after the commercial real estate services firm entered the market.
Kim Croley, the Houston-based firm’s executive vice president for national marketing, confirmed the move in response to an email inquiry Tuesday.
“After careful consideration, we have determined that the NJ market does not meet our strategic market criteria,” Croley wrote. “We will be closing the office on April 2.”
Transwestern’s New Jersey office is located in Florham Park. It was not immediately clear how many employees would be impacted by the decision, although the firm has had as many as several dozen brokers, project managers and other personnel working in the state.
The privately held company planted a flag in New Jersey in 2011 with the hiring of Jim Postell, a veteran broker who has served as its market leader. The team earned widespread praise for helping spearhead the renovation of 300 Kimball Drive, a 400,000-square-foot former State Farm Insurance office building in Parsippany, to transition it to a multitenant property.
It was among the first high-profile suburban office buildings in New Jersey to be repositioned after the 2008 downturn, giving way to dozens of other similar projects. The property also served as Transwestern’s home in the state until it relocated in 2018 to Florham Park.
More recently, the New Jersey team helped reposition and represent ownership at a two-building office campus at 170 and 180 Park Ave. in Florham Park. The former is now a 147,215-square-foot headquarters and life sciences building occupied by the biotechnology firm Celularity Inc., which signed a full-building lease in one of the state’s largest office deals of 2019.
The latter building has been home to Transwestern’s New Jersey office since it moved from Parsippany.
How 300 Kimball set the tone in suburban office redevelopment (PHOTOS)
