Novartis Working with Cushman & Wakefield to Sell New York Campus
August 6, 2014
By Krystle Vermes, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
Pharmaceutical company Novartis has decided to close its Suffern campus in New York. This news comes shortly after Novartis unveiled its plan to reduce its workforce in an effort to shift its drug development processes in July.
On Monday, Cushman & Wakefield of New Jersey announced that Novartis had decided to work with the company to sell the Suffern property. The campus spans across 162 acres in Rockland County. Novartis is one of Rockland’s largest taxpayers and employers.
The Suffern campus marks one of the top 10 pharmaceutical manufacturing and packaging plants in the country. Novartis will be giving up a location that is capable of creating billions of capsules each year.
Within the 162 acres of land, there is a 55,000-square-foot office building, conference rooms and laboratories. There is also a 74,000-square-foot receiving/warehouse building and a 425,000-square-foot production facility. The existing Novartis buildings only consume approximately 50 acres of land. This leaves potential buyers with more than 100 acres to use freely.
“Rockland County is excited to work closely with Cushman & Wakefield on securing the best occupant for the Novartis site,” County Executive Ed Day told the Rockland Times. “The sprawling campus offers many amenities in an ideal location for a new tenant to grow and expand in the Hudson Valley. My administration looks forward to partnering with the Metropolitan Area Capital Markets Group and officials in Ramapo to make certain economic conditions are as favorable as possible.”
Andrew Merin of Cushman & Wakefield told The Journal News that the property should be extremely attractive to other pharmaceutical companies in the area. He claims that there is a large amount of equipment still on site, and it is operable. In turn, this would require less set-up for the next company that moves in.
“Currently, there are no operational facilities like this one available in the tri-state area,” Merin told the news source. “The cost to construct a similar campus would likely exceed $400 million.”
Merin goes on to say that the real estate company is already seeing significant offers as it crafts its marketing plan for the property, specifically from international businesses.
Novartis is operating in more than 140 countries around the world, and it was ranked number two among the top pharmaceutical companies for revenue in 2013. About half of its employees are located within its pharmaceuticals division.
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