205,000-SF Office Building Trades for $24M

OLD BRIDGE, NJ-Normandy Real Estate Partners, based in Morristown, has picked up the five-story, class A office building at 90 Matawan Rd. here for $23.5 million. The 205,000-sf building traded for just under $115 per sf in a deal that was negotiated and completed in just one week, according to David Welsh, Normandy’s managing partner.

The relatively low sale price owes mostly to the fact that the three-year-old building is largely vacant. It was developed as a build-to-suit for the world headquarters operations of Globespan Virata, a communications products company. But after Globespan had spent $35 million on the building, the company itself was acquired early this year by Conexant Systems Inc., a rival modem chipset producer based in nearby Red Bank, leaving the asset as surplus property. Conexant was the seller in the latest transaction.

“Because of its quality, visibility and access, 90 Matawan Rd. presented us with an entrée to a market that is in the path of growth,” says Welsh. “It has easy access to a large labor pool and executive housing.”

The building sits on a nearly 10-acre site just off Exit 120 of the Garden State Parkway on this city’s border with Aberdeen Township. The precast and glass facility features a two-story atrium and sheltered parking.

“It is the newest office building in Monmouth County, and with 160,000 sf currently unoccupied, it provides the county’s largest block of contiguous class A available space,” Welsh says.

The acquisition was also the second in less than a month for Normandy, which has been on a buying spree. In September, the firm picked up the 650,000-sf Continental Plaza in Downtown Hackensack for $110 million.

“The pace of our recent activity signals the real estate marketplace that our acquisition program has moved into high gear, and that we are positioned to pursue high-quality investment opportunities,” Welsh says. “We also have the ability to close transactions in an extremely quick time frame.”

Normandy is a real estate investment firm owned and managed by Welsh and co-founder Finn Wentworth. Since its inception in early 2002, the company has assembled a portfolio valued at $500 million, totaling more than two million sf in the New York/New Jersey and Washington, DC metro area.