The New Jersey-based developer of 11 Times Square, the city’s largest speculative building when it broke ground in the summer of 2007, is moving its executive offices to the Crossroads of the World as it looks to expand its footprint in New York City.
SJP Properties, the family run business that has been headquartered in Parsippany, N.J. since its inception in 1981, is moving an executive team of about 10 to 12 people in September into 5,000 square feet the company has taken in the 40-story office tower.
“We want to really raise our focus on New York,” SJP Executive Vice President Jeffrey Schotz told The Real Deal. “We want to be in the middle of the action, as opposed to being perceived as a New Jersey developer.”
Schotz said a team of five executives and a small group of support staff will make their way across the Hudson as the company looks to pursue development and investment options in the city, particularly rentals in Brooklyn.
About 75 employees will remain in New Jersey where the company will continue to work on projects like the Modern, the pair of 450-unit luxury rental towers across the George Washington Bridge in Fort Lee that will begin leasing in the fall.
“We’re not leaving New Jersey,” Schotz added. “We’re going to keep doing as much as we’ve developed in the past.”
SJP’s entry into Manhattan’s Class A office market was seen as a bold move by an outsider when it acquired the development site in 2006, but the timing could not have been worse as construction began in the summer of 2007, months before the bottom of the commercial leasing market fell out.
Unlike some other developers who lost control of their projects, SJP held on and in 2010 they signed anchor tenant Proskauer Rose to 400,000 square feet.