Twin New Jersey Office Buildings Command $150M

Warren Corporate Center. Image courtesy of JLL Capital Markets

Rubenstein Partners LP and Vision Real Estate Partners have sold the Warren Corporate Center 100 and 200 office buildings in Warren, N.J., in a transaction valued at just over $150 million. With the assistance of JLL Capital Markets, the joint venture found new ownership for the two properties, which total approximately 315,000 square feet of Class A space, in a partnership of Exan Capital and Mirabaud Group.

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Warren Corporate 100 and 200, carrying the respective addresses of 287 and 291 King George Road and encompassing roughly 157,500 square feet each, occupy 68 acres within the 176-acre Warren Corporate Center office park in Northern New Jersey, approximately 35 miles west of Manhattan. Rubenstein and Vision’s disposition of the assets comes five years after their $136 million purchase of the entire five-building, 820,000-square-foot Warren Corporate Center complex, which originally debuted in 1996 as the headquarters of Lucent Technologies.

At the time of the March 2016 acquisition, Rubenstein and Vision had pledged to transform the property, then a single-tenant corporate campus that was 81 percent leased to Citibank, by improving its appeal while increasing and diversifying its occupancy. The sale finds the partners having completed their goal—the recently renovated Warren Corporate 100 and 200 have been leased in their entirety to Everest Reinsurance since the summer of 2019, and the campus has been taken to new heights with the addition of Warren Hill, a 20,000-square-foot, standalone amenity center.

Investors’ radar still alerted to office

In marketing Warren Corporate 100 and 200, JLL Capital Markets welcomed a notable amount of attention from the investment community, a response that is in line with the current temperature of the investment climate. “Investors are still generally avoiding risk, with long-term leased assets of newer vintage with credit tenancy continuing to generate the most interest,” according to a first quarter 2021 report by JLL.

Kevin O’Hearn, a senior managing director with JLL Capital Markets, joined colleagues Jaime Fink and Jose Cruz in representing the Rubenstein-Vision joint venture in the sale and said in a prepared statement that the Warren Corporate Center buildings generated tremendous investor interest given the high demand for single-tenant credit properties from both domestic and foreign buyers.

Lenders looking lively, too

In addition to securing a buyer for Warren Corporate 100 and 200 on behalf of Rubenstein and Vision, JLL Capital Markets also orchestrated financing for buyers Exan and Mirabaud. JLL Capital Markets’ Lucas Borges, Michael Johnson and Matthew Pizzolato secured approximately $100.6 million in the form of a five-year, fixed-rate acquisition loan through New York Life Real Estate Investors.

And like their colleagues on the sales side, the JLL Capital Markets financing team found that the Warren Corporate Center buildings elicited a strong response in the lending market. A substantial pool of lenders on a quest to fund high-quality, investment-grade caliber, mission critical corporate campuses pursued the opportunity.