New Jersey Campus's New Purpose Showcases Biomanufacturing Site Bull Market
A massive repositioning of an office campus in New Jersey tells a larger story about the rush for biomanufacturing real estate across the country.
MetLife Investment Management recently tapped JLL to reposition and sell a nearly 1M SF former AT&T campus in Bedminster, believing the best way to move the 197-acre site is to target biomanufacturing and advanced manufacturing clients.
Located 40 minutes from New York City, the site offers what brokers call turnkey potential, a rare and important commodity as GLP-1 weight loss drugs and Big Pharma investments drive up the need for biomanufacturing sites.
Eli Lilly just announced a record $5.3B to expand biomanufacturing in Indiana to meet demand for weight loss drugs. Compared to traditional lab space, which is suffering from a glut of supply and much lower leasing and transaction volumes, manufacturing spaces remain in high demand.
“This is really where we would envision the land being the most valuable asset here,” JLL New Jersey Office Vice Chairman Dan Loughlin said.
Now being marketed as the Bedminster Technology Center, the site has the utility hookups, zoning, port and logistics connections and strategic location for a new owner to develop their own manufacturing platform on the site. Lots of industrial land in New Jersey has been turned into warehouse and logistics sites, so a site like this is in short supply. Loughlin sees reshoring and domestic investment in such plants as a durable trend that they can tap to sell this property.
“Instead of just producing in the cheapest alternative location they can find, companies are looking for highly secure, sophisticated labor,” he said.
The large investment costs and slow, multiyear construction timelines for such massive and complicated factory spaces make any turnkey or shuttered biomanufacturing site a hot commodity.
The region has seen big deals for biotech in recent years. Life sciences has played an outsized role in New Jersey’s office market. Pharmaceutical and life sciences tenants accounted for 20% of the state’s signed leases in 2023, including two of the five largest deals, according to JLL research. In 2021, Chinese biomanufacturing firm BeiGene purchased a 42-acre biotech campus in Princeton set to open by the end of the year, a development that Loughlin helped broker and expects to cost $1B by the time production starts.
“That's our case study, that's our proof point that we think New Jersey can compete with, you know, the southeast markets that are generally thought of as cheaper alternatives,” Loughlin said, in reference to Research Triangle Park in North Carolina.
