MRA Group Sells 800 KSF Pennsylvania Tech Park

By Barbra Murray, Contributing Editor

“Opportunity,” Brian Sundermeir, a vice president with MRA Group, responded to Commercial Property Executive. That was the reason why MRA Group decided to sell TEK Park, an 800,000-square-foot technology campus in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley. The real estate company’s affiliated entity, Hamilton TEK Partners L.P., has bid adieu to the asset, handing the property over to a New York-based investment group and walking away with more than $50 million on the deal.

TEK Park’s location in Breinigsville places it within 65 miles of Philadelphia and at the center of the Mid-Atlantic region, where it has become one of the top technology centers since its transformation from a headquarters campus to a multi-tenant destination. MRA began the conversion of the former home of AT&T Optoelectronics in 2005, after acquiring the nine-building property from TriQuint Semiconductor Inc. for $9.3 million.

“There was a lot of investment in sweat equity, in getting the place leased up from somewhere around 15 percent up to 90 percent,” said Sundermeir. “There was a lot of effort that can’t be quantified in real dollars.”

The transformation of the 137-acre compound, the first building of which originally debuted in 1988,marked MRA’s first foray into multi-tenant, tech center development, after having spent years of building mostly smaller, single-tenant, healthcare-related properties. Today, TEK Park offers more than 500,000 square feet of premier office space, clean-room and laboratory accommodations and R&D space, as well as an approximately 250,000-square-foot data center that holds the distinction of being the largest such facility in the region. Additional offerings at the business park include a fitness center, a 1.5-mile hiking and walking trail, a 5,000-square-foot daycare center and an on-site helipad providing seven-minute access to Lehigh Valley International Airport.

Investors took notice when TEK Park hit the market. “Considering the number of people who would have interest in a property of this type, we had very good response,” Sundermeir noted.