2020 New Jersey Guide_Site Selection

AMAZON
FULFILLMENT
& SORTATION
CENTERS IN
NEW JERSEY
LOGAN
TOWNSHIP
CARNEY’S
POINT
78
80
CRANBERRY
TOWNSHIP
BURLINGTON
WEST DEPTFORD
287
TETERBORO
AVENEL
FLORENCE
EDISON
ROBBINSVILLE
Amazon currently operates 15 fulfillment and sortation centers across 10
sites in the state, including a new 1,000-job fulfillment and sortation site just
launched in Cranbury Township. An 800-job fulfillment center in Carneys
Point, two new sortation centers in Burlington and a new sortation center in
Edison will further add to the company’s New Jersey portfolio.
95
CATERET
turnpike, like Exit 8 or 8A, historically were
always heavy industrial, but nobody went south
of there.” Now warehouse and logistics projects
are popping up around exits 7 and 6, even all
the way down to exit 4, he says. “And the rents
are following suit.”
But they keep coming. Among the projects
Sudler has helped come to fruition is a new
North American headquarters, distribution
center and artist studio space in Piscataway for
Colart, the artist materials company founded
300 years ago in London.
“We are planning on redeveloping 10
Corporate Place South, right next door,” Sudler
says. “It’s an old 1980s office building — we
are going to completely raze that building
and build a 65,000-sq.-ft. warehouse. We’re
confident it will pre-lease. Somebody will want
that whole building for themselves. Piscataway
became a very hot area overnight.”
In fact, it’s the only other New Jersey area
besides Fort Lee on the nation’s Top 100 most
congested list. That’s because of its location at
the confluence of major thoroughfares, with
entrances to the New Jersey Turnpike and
Garden State Parkway just down the road.
Hale says the company has had good
success turning former office space locations
into industrial properties, most recently
completing a project in Cranbury Township.
He says outmoded office space and regional
retail centers are both “getting hard looks right
now” for potential industrial repurposing. In
the meantime, it may not be too far in the
future when warehouses start to go up higher
instead of out farther, much as has happened
in Europe.
“I see that happening,” says Hale. “It’s going
to have to happen, because most requirements
have pushed out to real limitations outside of
the market.”
and investment in New Jersey with a new
fulfillment center in Carneys Point Township
that will serve our customers across the
state,” said Alicia Boler Davis, Amazon’s
vice president of global customer fulfillment.
“For more than a decade, New Jersey and its
incredible workforce have been vital to our
ability to provide great selection, competitive
prices and the Prime services we know our
customers love.”
The project follows another new Amazon
fulfillment center and sortation center in
Cranbury, creating more than 1,000 new jobs,
and three additional sortation centers across
the state throughout the month of October
— two in Burlington and one in Edison —
creating hundreds of full- and part-time jobs.
The new employees will join more than 34,000
full- and part-time Amazonians already
working across the state, the company says.
“Since 2010, Amazon has invested $14.5+ billion
across New Jersey, including infrastructure
and compensation to its employees, which
has contributed $14.7+ billion to the state’s
economy and helped create more than 30,000
indirect jobs on top of Amazon’s direct hires
— from jobs in construction and logistics to
professional services,” Amazon stated.
AMONG OTHER PROJECTS:
South Korea’s LG Electronics USA signed
a seven-year, 925,000-sq.-ft. lease with Crow
Holdings Industrial for a nearly completed
building in Franklin Township. Later in 2020,
Crow sold the building to BentallGreenOak,
on behalf of an institutional investor, for $164
million. Not bad for Crow’s first foray in the
Northeast from its Texas base.
“While the pandemic has brought most
investment activity to a standstill, there is
still tremendous demand for state-of the-art
logistics properties,” said Clark Machemer,
senior managing director of Crow Holdings
Industrial’s Northeast region. “With
collaboration from the municipality and
our key partners on this project, we were
able to acquire, build and lease the property
in less than 18 months, leveraging our
extensive market knowledge and an expedited
construction timeline to bring much-needed
industrial space to Central New Jersey.”
In Piscataway in 2019, New York–based
global beauty company Kiss Products
purchased a 469,600-sq.-ft. distribution
building at the 2.2-million-sq.-ft. Rockefeller
Group Logistics Center for $65.7 million. “Kiss
is excited to be relocating its distribution center
to Piscataway and consolidating our four Long
Island distribution locations at Rockefeller
Group Logistics Center,” said Richard Kim,
CFO of Kiss Products, Inc. “Piscataway’s
proximity to the port of Newark/Elizabeth
makes it an attractive location for reaching our
customers nationally.”
Talk about repurposing: The entire logistics
center site was a former Union Carbide
industrial manufacturing campus. Building on
a roster of tenants that includes not only Kiss,
but also Best Buy, Fujitsu General and global
logistics giant Kuehne + Nagel, Rockefeller
broke ground for another 400,000-sq.-ft.
building at the site in September 2020.
sq. ft. of industrial space was leased and
vacancy was lowered to 3.2%. With that result,
New Jersey exceeded 10 million square feet in
annual absorption for five years in a row, for a
total of more than 67 million sq. ft.
TAKE IT TO THE LIMIT
The demand, of course, comes from being
in a region with 9 million people nearby and
between 30 million and 40 million within a
truck turn.
“E-commerce has gone through the roof,”
Sudler says. “Locations in New Jersey along the
PROJECT WATCH
The chart here presents some of the dozens
of corporate end user logistics projects tracked
by Conway Data, publisher of Site Selection
magazine, since the beginning of 2019. At the
top of the list — as they are in many states
today — is Amazon, which in October 2020
announced a new 800-job fulfillment center in
Carneys Point in Salem County would join
the company’s 15 other fulfillment and
sortation centers across the state in Avenel,
Burlington, Carteret, Cranbury Township,
Edison, Florence, Logan Township,
Robbinsville, Teterboro and West Deptford.
“We are proud to continue our growth
72 NEW JERSEY: THE STATE OF INNOVATION NEW JERSEY: THE STATE OF INNOVATION 73