Educational Publisher Signs 890,000-SF Lease

CRANBURY, NJ-Coming rapidly on the heels of Volkswagen of North America’s deal to lease nearly a million sf of warehousing/distribution space from Cabot Industrial in this Middlesex County community, Pearson Education Inc. has signed a lease for 890,000 sf at Rockefeller Group Development’s new 150-acre business park. These and other recent transactions have clearly stamped the New Jersey Turnpike Exit 8A submarket as among the country’s hottest in the industrial category.

Pearson is the first tenant in the developer’s Rockefeller Group Foreign Trade Zone/8A, as the business park is called. Altogether, the project will offer some two million sf, all of it build-to-suit space, as is the warehouse/distribution building Pearson is taking. Federally designated foreign-trade zone status enables companies to bring imported goods into the site for assembly, processing and storage on a duty-free basis until those products actually enter the marketplace.

“After a prolonged search, we selected this site based on a number of factors, including its location and the build-to-suit opportunity,” according to Bill Brooks, vice president of facilities for Pearson. The project will add some 400 jobs in New Jersey, where Pearson already has more than 1,800 employees.