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Hekemian feels ES4 project will fill a need in Bergen County

Joshua Burd//August 17, 2015//

Hekemian feels ES4 project will fill a need in Bergen County

Joshua Burd//August 17, 2015//

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Peter Hekemian sees a hole in the office market when he looks around Bergen County — one that his development firm is trying to fill with its newest project at the site known as Englewood South.

“The concept really is that we’re looking to target medium-sized users that just don’t have an opportunity right now to locate their businesses in newer, higher-end buildings,” said Hekemian, senior managing director of the S. Hekemian Group. “If we just build it within Bergen County, given all the businesses and all the operators and all the wealth … there’s got to be a couple users out there that really would like this sort of office.”

The firm will start raising steel this week for the project, a 46,000-square-foot office and retail building known as ES4. Company executives joined city officials in June for a groundbreaking ceremony, where they touted it as Bergen County’s first new office building in more than five years.

Bringing the ‘cool’ of the city to the suburbs

For ES4, S. Hekemian Group’s new 46,000-square-foot office and retail building in Englewood, the concept was simple: create an environment that you’d find in SoHo, Tribeca or San Francisco.

The Paramus-based firm hopes to achieve that with a design that includes classic masonry and tenant spaces with oversized ceiling heights and loft-like, open-plan build-outs and exposed ceilings and ductwork.

“The basic concept is that you build a cool building and it doesn’t sort of reek of the suburbs, in terms of looking like your standard office building built in the ’70s and the ’80s,” said Peter Hekemian, the firm’s senior managing director. “And, in essence, it sort of feels more like a building that you expect to find in an urban location, in loft, warehouse-type office buildings.”

But they also were celebrating the latest piece of SHG’s Englewood South project, an in-progress $500 million redevelopment of eight industrial properties along Route 4 that calls for nearly 2 million square feet of buildings.

“We’re excited about it because it rounds out that whole vision of a mixture of uses with the office and the retail and residential,” Hekemian said. “It really starts to take on the feeling of more of a neighborhood versus just your standard subdivision, where you have a little piece of multifamily and a little piece of retail on the highway.

“It really has some energy and hopefully creates some value for residents and office workers and retailers.”

What’s next

The boutique, midsized commercial building known as ES4 will bring the first office space to S. Hekemian Group’s mixed-use site known as Englewood South, and it could give way to a much larger office building and a broader corporate campus.

On another nearby parcel, the firm envisions an office building of about 200,000 square feet, one that would be targeted to one large corporate build-to-suit user. It would be one of two remaining parcels at Englewood South, with the other calling for a hotel.

The developer is now preparing to shift its focus to those last two sections, after having started construction on ES4 and an adjacent 195-unit apartment component.

“You can’t build everything at the same time necessarily,” said Peter Hekemian, senior managing director of S. Hekemian Group. “You have to sort of phase it, so with the commencement of construction of 195 units and ES4, now we’re starting to focus on those last two parcels in the back.”

Along with the office and retail building, for which March Associates Construction is serving as general contractor, work is well underway at an adjacent parcel on what will be 195 apartments. The Paramus-based firm expects to deliver the office and retail portion by early next year, but is already seeing demand from commercial tenants seeking to prelease space.

SHG has signed leases with two office tenants that would occupy 18,000 square feet, while it’s finalizing a deal with another for 7,000 square feet and is negotiating with a fourth that would fill the remaining office space, Hekemian said. Overall, he thinks the building will appeal to such tenants and other “boutique, upper-end sort of users that have an intelligent workforce and just care about the image they’re projecting in terms of the building that they’re in.”

Meantime, the ground-floor retail space of about 10,000 square feet has been all but filled with tenants such as Panera Bread and Anthony’s Coal Fired Pizza.

For Hekemian, the interest at the site is advancing the larger concept behind Englewood South. Once the commercial space is filled and the new apartments are completed, “you’re going to have office workers during the day that adds to the population and the energy there.”

“And I think that as long as people can also use their car to get to that place, I think … most people prefer that versus just being in a standard suburban office series of buildings,” he said. “If you have the option, I think you’d rather live in that more dynamic, mixed-use environment.”

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