Friday, January 31, 2025
Bucks County office park adjacent to Sesame Place sells for $16M
By Ryan Sharrow – Editor in Chief, Philadelphia Business Journal
A Bucks County medical office park adjacent to the Oxford Valley Mall and Sesame Place has traded hands for more than double the price it sold for in 2015.
Aventura, Florida-based ESJ Capital Partners paid $16 million for the 152,310-square-foot nine-building Oxford Court portfolio in Langhorne. The seller, SkyREM of Philadelphia and New York, paid $7.82 million for the buildings in August 2015, according to Bucks County property records. SkyREM completed a renovation of the portfolio in 2016.
The buildings are more than 70% leased to tenants including Quest Diagnostics, DaVita, LabCorp, and the American Red Cross.
Full story: http://tiny.cc/lod8001
Thursday, January 30, 2025
Surfside maker Stateside Vodka searches for new distillery, office space
By Emma Dooling – Reporter, Philadelphia Business Journal
After a year of explosive growth for its Surfside brand, Stateside Vodka is searching for a new office space and distillery to support its expanding operations.
The Philadelphia distiller's hunt for new space comes after scrapping its plans to open an "all encompassing" headquarters housing its manufacturing, distribution and corporate operations at 13000 McNulty Road in Northeast Philadelphia, co-founder Matt Quigley told the Business Journal. Stateside, known for its namesake vodka and ready-to-drink canned cocktails, is still set to move into that facility later this month, but it will now only serve as a distribution center.
The company's goal now is to find office and manufacturing space in Northeast Philadelphia nearby, CEO and co-founder Clement Pappas said, but he's not ruling out other locations around the city. Stateside is looking for up to 100,000 square feet of space for the distillery. It did not disclose a target size for the office space.
Stateside is using a temporary 10,000-square-foot office building in Trevose while it searches for a permanent space.
The Business Journal reported in April on Stateside's plans to move into the 40,000-square-foot McNulty Road facility, a move that will allow it to increase its operations 900%. That would have included about 12,000 square feet of office space and a distillery producing about 1 million cases annually.
It would have marked a departure from Stateside's original headquarters at 1700 N. Hancock St. in the Olde Kensington neighborhood. Pappas previously told the Business Journal that the company plans to maintain ownership of that property and keep the on-site tasting room in operation.
Stateside is now changing its approach following the rapid growth of its wildly popular Surfside brand of iced tea and vodka ready-to-drink cocktails. Last year, Stateside more than tripled its production of Surfside to 4.925 million cases and expanded its distribution to all 50 states, necessitating more distribution space.
With that expansion, Stateside grew its employee base, hiring 51 people since Sept. 1 alone, 21 of whom are based in Philadelphia. It is currently looking to fill another 20 positions, five of whom will be in Philadelphia. The company has a around 200 employees, with 80 in Philadelphia.
That growth forced a change in plans for Stateside's Northeast Philadelphia facility, where housing every local employee would have been difficult, according to Pappas.
“Between that and the space we need for distribution and everything, it just wasn't going to work,” Pappas said.
The change in its real estate strategy comes as as the brand continues seeing huge growth.
Pappas and Quigley founded Stateside in 2013 with their brothers Zach Pappas and Bryan Quigley. In 2022, they launched the Surfside brand, offering a four-pack of the traditional iced tea and vodka, producing 200,000 cases. In 2023, Stateside upped its production volume of Surfside to 1.3 million cases. The company further grew the brand in 2024 by more than tripling its production to 4.925 million cases, Pappas said.
Full story: http://tiny.cc/3c88001
Tractor Supply is in growth mode; More stores may come to New Jersey
By Mateusz Wnek CoStar Analytics
Tractor Supply, a chain that bills itself as the country's largest rural lifestyle retailer, updated investors in December on its long-term outlook, which includes aggressively expanding its brick-and-mortar footprint.
Central to its expansion plans has been the company’s sale-leaseback strategy. Launched in 2023, the strategy calls for the company to sell and lease back its 117 existing legacy retail locations at a pace of around 15 stores over the next seven to 10 years.
Accordingly, proceeds from the sales will fund the company's new store growth, starting with 90 new stores in 2025. The latest count shows the company operating more than 2,200 stores in 49 states, including 31 in New Jersey.
The Garden State is an attractive destination due to its population density, above-average household incomes and expansive highway network. Over the years, Tractor Supply has targeted the state's suburban and rural areas, particularly its farming communities in the rural Northwest and South Jersey.
CoStar recently explored the company’s existing footprint, proximity to its biggest competitors and availability of suitable retail space to surmise where it could hypothetically open new stores as part of its national expansion strategy.
To do this, a simple optimization model was run to maximize the number of potential store openings given a defined set of competitive, demographic and geographic constraints. Using CoStar’s dataset of current available retail space in New Jersey as a starting point, the constraints included:
- Minimum of six miles from an existing Tractor Supply location
- Minimum of 0.3 miles from the nearest competitor (Home Depot or Lowe’s)
- Available retail space between 15,000 square feet and 25,000 square feet
- Available retail space is located in a city with at least 3% population growth since 2020
