250,000-SF Industrial Building Trades for $12M

CRANBURY, NJ-Multi-Employer Property Trust has sold its 250,499-sf Gateway Business Center here for $12.3 million, which amounts to about $49 per sf. The transaction was arranged by Paul Torosian and Karen Iman of the Princeton, NJ office of Trammell Crow Co.

The buyer was NovaGen Pharmaceuticals, an affiliate of Aurobindo Pharma Ltd. of India, an R&D company focusing on APIs and generic formulations. The building itself is currently 40% leased to multiple tenants, and NovaGen will use the remaining space for a combination of manufacturing and distribution.

“The sale was the result of an unsolicited offer,” according to a spokesperson for MEPT. “The building was developed in 1989, and we forecast challenges in marketing the building to distribution or warehouse tenants, since it suffers from some obsolescence when compared to the new, state-of-the-art industrial buildings in the market. The final price was $5 per sf, or 10%, higher than the asset’s most recent appraisal.”

MEPT is an open-ended commercial equity real estate fund with more than $3 billion in net assets. Organized in 1982 and based in Washington, DC, the trust is maintained by Riggs Bank NA.