Veris Lands Large Lease in Jersey City

Harborside. Image courtesy of Veris Residential

Collectors Holdings has signed a long-term lease for 130,000 square feet of office space at Harborside 3 in Jersey City, N.J., Harborside’s owner, Veris Residential Inc., announced on Wednesday.

Collectors Holdings is the parent company of Professional Sports Authenticator, the world’s largest authentication and grading company, which is expanding these services for trading cards, tickets, autographs and more.

The collectibles industry reportedly is growing rapidly, and this East Coast location will complement PSA’s headquarters in Santa Ana, Calif.

The lease reportedly is the largest for office space in Jersey City since September 2020.

In a prepared statement, Nat Turner, CEO & executive chairman of Collectors Holdings, noted that this location in metro New York City both offers access to a top-tier talent pool and will be a convenient option for collectors in the Northeast to drop off and pick up submissions.

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Harborside 3 is a 10-story, Class A building with about 750,000 rentable square feet of office space. It’s part of the 3.2 million-square-foot Harborside campus, which features such on-site amenities as a large atrium with seating and event space, a food hall, retail concourse, Whole Foods Market, daycare center, bank, urgent- and primary-care medical office, two parking garages, and 3,000 residential units.

The campus’s outdoor areas include a pedestrian plaza, a boardwalk along the Hudson River and, from April through October, Smorgasburg, the nation’s largest weekly open-air food market.

Harborside is adjacent to the Exchange Place PATH station and offers an on-campus NJ Transit Light Rail station, on-campus New York Waterway Ferry terminal, and easy access to NJ Transit’s Hoboken terminal and Newark Airport.

Collectors Holdings will have a small number of staff at the new location this year and expects its authentication and grading services at the site to be fully operational in 2023. PSA’s existing East Coast office, in Woodbridge, N.J., will eventually be merged into the Jersey City facility.

Zev Holzman and Christopher Marx of Savills represented Collectors Holdings in the transaction, while CBRE represented Veris Residential.

Steady improvement

Direct and sublease availability in the New Jersey office market are at their highest since 2005, totaling 18.6 percent, according to a fourth-quarter report from Avison Young. The sublease market is an ongoing issue, as it’s at a record 9.0 million square feet, or 17.2 percent all available space.

However, as in many places, economic conditions in New Jersey are generally trending upward, with unemployment falling from 16.6 percent in May 2020 to 5.5 percent this past October. And helpfully, 68.5 percent of the state’s population is fully vaccinated.

New Jersey’s Hudson River waterfront has been active in recent years. Just more than a year ago, the LeFrak Organization sold 545 Washington Blvd., in Jersey City, to Global Harbor Group for $372 million.