‘Building it to the extreme’: 490K sq. ft. warehouse on 40-acre site in Jersey City breaks ground — to be ready in 2024

A nearly 500,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art warehouse that aims to be ready in the first quarter of 2024 is under construction in Jersey City — and it’s still available.

Francis Walsh, CEO of NRS Logistics in Lyndhurst, the developer of the project, doesn’t think that will be the case for long. While the need for warehousing has cooled in some areas of the country, Walsh is confident it remains hot in New Jersey.

“We don’t ever get affected (by national trends) because we have so much volume and density,” he said. “And it is interesting when a 40-acre site comes up, that’s never been developed, and you suddenly have a warehouse going up five miles outside of New York City. It’s very exciting.”

Francis Walsh.

Walsh said NRS is looking for a single tenant, but the company is open to division for multiple tenants.

JLL, with a team led by Rob Kossar, Dean Brody and Doug Rodenstein, will handle leasing. It appears it will have plenty of offers.

Located at 1075 Secaucus Road, the 490,429-square-foot building is highly accessible to all major highways and mass transit. It offers direct access to Exit 16E of the New Jersey Turnpike, Route 1 & 9, and Route 3. It is the closest logistics facility to the Lincoln Tunnel currently under construction.

Other features of the building, which broke ground earlier this month, include:

  • 49 exterior doors;
  • 443 spaces for cars;
  • 40 spaces for trailer parking;
  • High-bay LED light fixtures;
  • Unreinforced 8” thick concrete slab on grade.

NRS, which owns a logistics site right across the street, knows the fluidity of the area, Walsh said.

“Trucks are able to get in and out of the location very easily, which is appealing to a tenant that might have a lot of trucks leaving at one time — think UPS,” he said. “The area experiences very little to no delay because of the access to so many different thoroughfares.

The property also has toll-free access to Port Newark/Elizabeth (11 miles) and Global Terminal (13.6 miles).

“We’re 13 miles from the Port,” Walsh said. “The property can receive products very quickly and can distribute quickly. Plus, this is a little bit sexier of a property because it is going to have more pallet racking higher up and utilize more air space.”

That “little bit sexier” feature makes it 11% more appealing than a typical warehouse, Walsh said.

Normally, facilities such as this are constructed to 36 feet, but NRS is building this property at 40 feet, which is just slightly over 11% higher than a typical warehouse. Walsh said this will offer a tenant more pallet racking and more storage, proving the location ideal for those companies that need to serve the business-to-business and business-to-consumer demands of the area.

“We built this to maximize rafting space for a particular customer that needs dense pallet space close to New York City, because we’re so close to both the Holland Tunnel, Lincoln Tunnel, as well as George Washington Bridge,” he said.

When asked why the building wasn’t refrigerated in order to serve a potential cold-storage tenant, Walsh said that Jersey City has strict requirements on the height of buildings with refrigeration on top, and it was decided early on that NRS would forego a refrigerated building due to the height restrictions and just make the interior taller so it would be more palatable for a customer.

“It will give us a broader network by just making the ceilings higher rather than just somebody looking for food or cold storage,” he said.

Walsh said he’s confident the warehouse will have huge interest from a variety of potential tenants.

“We are building it to the extreme,” he said. “We wanted the biggest piece of property with the most car parking spots, with the most truck parking. And you couldn’t really ask for anything more.”