How A 33K SF Warehouse Addition Won Over A Skeptical South Jersey Community
A South Jersey landlord will help keep about 40 manufacturing jobs in Burlington Township by building a new warehouse for its tenant — despite misgivings from neighbors about the massive amount of industrial construction encroaching on the region’s farmland, the players involved exclusively told Bisnow.
Specified Technologies Inc. Firestop, which produces flame-resistant urethane construction materials out of its 50K SF space at 1208 Columbus Road, has seen demand for its proprietary wares surge, requiring additional space to expand the manufacturing process, Vice President Gabe DiMarino told Bisnow. Its products are often placed in the walls of factories and hospitals to prevent flames from engulfing an entire building in case of a fire.
The company wanted to stay near its current workers, who mostly live in and around Burlington, but couldn’t find any suitable spaces for rent nearby.
Enter Bala Cynwyd-based Velocity Venture Partners, which has owned STI's current site since 2022. Velocity agreed to construct a new 33K SF warehouse in exchange for a 10-year lease that will commence when STI moves in.
“We were going to have to move,” DiMarino said. “Putting this warehouse in there definitely negated us having to do that.”
Work on the new structure is expected to begin early next year and wrap up in the middle of 2025, Velocity Founding Partner Tony Grelli said. He expects to spend between $5M and $6M on the project. That budget will also include a new roof and a fresh coat of paint for the existing building.
The warehouse with 26-foot clear heights will function as a storage area so STI can put more manufacturing equipment in its current space. It will take over a large empty field behind the existing building.
“It’s a run-of-the-mill warehouse,” Grelli said of the project. “A big rectangular box.”
That doesn’t mean the project was a simple feat for Velocity.
The hard part was getting the community on board. The Burlington facility is in the middle of a residential neighborhood. It was built there in the 1960s before the subdivision sprouted up around it in the decades that followed, Grelli said.
In recent years, Burlington has been surrounded by much larger e-commerce and third-party logistics warehouses, which have swallowed up vast tracts of picturesque South Jersey farmland.
The trend is a sore point for many residents. Grelli, who grew up on a 300-acre farm in nearby Gloucester County, isn’t a fan, either.
“There’s been a massive onslaught of new product coming online since Covid,” he said. “This county in particular has had a lot of farmland gobbled up… Too much was built too fast.”
Burlington County saw more than 730K SF of completions in the industrial sector last quarter, according to a CBRE report. There’s also nearly 2.4M SF of new space in the county’s pipeline.
Grelli knew many of STI’s neighbors would be skeptical of yet another industrial project, so Velocity set up a series of town halls for the community before pursuing approvals from the municipality.
That’s how the design came to include several large windows and improved landscaping, which are meant to help the hulking structure blend with the surrounding neighborhood.
Residents were also anxious about the additional truck traffic that often comes with new industrial projects, but Velocity was receptive to those concerns.
“We worked with [the community] to set parameters around how the business needs to operate,” Grelli said.
That means loud trucks destined for STI’s new warehouse won’t be meandering through the neighborhood late at night.
Grelli isn’t sure how long it would take Velocity to make their money back, but he said he was happy to play a part in keeping a business in Burlington.
“By getting this done, we’re keeping a lot of high-paying manufacturing jobs here,” he said.
