HORSHAM, PA-The MRA Group has sold TEK Park, an 840,000-square-foot complex in Breinigsville, PA, to a private New York investment group for more than $50 million.
MRA had purchased the nine-building property, originally built as the world headquarters for AT&T Optoelectronics, for $9.3 million in 2005, in the wake of the “dot com” industry contraction.
The 137-acre campus, which cost an estimated $300 million to construct, had been on the market for two years at that point. “It was cold, and empty,” Lawrence J. Stuardi, MRA Group CEO tells GlobeSt.com. “Standing in a hallway in winter, you could see your breath.”
"We saw something there that others didn't," says Stuardi. "We approached the project with a sense of frontier spirit and knew we could make it work." Working closely with local public officials, MRA converted the buildings for multi-tenant use.
“The idea was that the property could offer technically superior facilities to smaller and medium-size companies in the mid-Atlantic region that otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford the maintenance and other costs of such infrastructure,” Stuardi says. Tech firms including CyOptics, Buckeye Pipeline and Aesculup quickly began buying into that opportunity.
Also, Kutztown University established the Kutztown University Innovation Center at the complex. “The campus setting, with five interconnected buildings at the center, a common cafeteria, and lots of space to mingle, was ideal for encouraging collaboration between tech companies and the university,” Stuardi notes.
Today more than 1,000 people work at the TEK Park, in what Stuardi says is a “lively, collegial environment.” The campus is 90% occupied and houses the region's largest data center.
“It was actually kind of bittersweet,” to accomplish the sale of the property by Hamilton TEK Partners, an MRA subsidiary, Stuardi adds. The New York-based buyers formed a limited liability corporation, Hamilton 9999 Associates, to make the transaction, and have not been further identified.
Before the TEK Park project, MRA had operated primarily as a healthcare real estate firm, developing single-tenant sites of 100,000 square feet or less. Now, the MRA chief tells GlobeSt.com, the company is already at work on a couple of other multi-tenant projects in the Northeast. “We are going to try to replicate the experience of turning around the TEK Park,” he says.
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