Investment, Redevelopment have Brought New Life to Piscataway Office Market

“Sooner or later, everything old is new again,” wrote Stephen King in “The Colorado Kid.”

Brokers and developers squeezed for office options in the crowded northern New Jersey and New York metropolitan market are starting to expand their search back into the suburban office markets that, just a few years ago, were thought to be in danger of becoming ghost towns and albatrosses around the necks of suburban towns trying to redevelop themselves.

In Piscataway, part of the Interstate 287 South submarket, office rents are rising, partly because vacancy rates have tightened in surrounding submarkets like Woodbridge, Metropark and Edison, but also because outdated office inventory has left the market. In some cases, developers have invested in multimillion-dollar upgrades at older buildings, while others have razed the obsolete campuses and redeveloped the sites as industrial space.