Vermella Harrison at 1100 Frank E. Rodgers Blvd. in Harrison — Courtesy: Walker & Dunlop
By Joshua Burd
Russo Development is seeking a buyer for a nearly 400-unit luxury apartment property in Harrison, under a newly launched offering by Walker & Dunlop.
The brokerage team noted that Vermella Harrison, located at 1100 Frank E. Rodgers Blvd., was completed in 2015 and was the town’s first multifamily project south of the PATH station. The 398-unit, five-story complex, which occupies a three-acre city block just west of Red Bull Arena, is also among the first to be placed on the market during a development boom in the municipality that now goes back more than a decade.
“An opportunity to acquire an institutional-caliber investment in Harrison is extremely rare as more than 3,000 units have been added during the last decade with no substantial sales,” said Thomas Walsh, a managing director with Walker & Dunlop’s investment sales team in the region. “Harrison’s $280 million PATH Station renovation combined with Manhattan’s reopening has been driving recent lease trade-out reports to levels unseen in northern New Jersey for the last several years, which will add to an investor’s yield.”
Walsh is marketing the property alongside W&D’s Joseph Garibaldi, Katelyn Borovsky and Nick Vanderslice, with Jonathan Schwartz serving as debt adviser on the assignment. In their offering, the team said the collection of upscale studio, one-bedroom and two-bedroom homes has an average unit size of 717 square feet, with amenities such as a pool, a fitness center with a yoga studio, on-site electric car charging stations and a rooftop lounge with views of Manhattan, downtown Newark and New York Harbor.
They added that Harrison, once mainly known as an industrial and manufacturing hub along the Passaic River, is now a fast-growing cluster of high-end apartments across from Newark and seven miles west of Manhattan. The municipality’s waterfront redevelopment plan has designated some 275 acres, roughly 35 percent of its area, to such projects and has yielded 13 large-scale multifamily developments totaling 4,000 units over the past 10 years or so.
Development in the town has also included a 138-key hotel, the 25,000-seat Red Bull Arena, eateries, a waterfront promenade and the improved PATH station, with more projects still to come. Residents and businesses benefit from Harrison’s proximity to the rail station, which is within walking distance, and to Interstate 280 and the New Jersey Turnpike.
