McMorgan carving a niche in Bedminster with office purchase.

McMorgan & Company, the California-based pension fund advisor, has acquired The Offices at Bedminster from The Offices at Bedminster, LLC for an undisclosed price, announced Cushman & Wakefield, Inc. The firm's Metropolitan Area Capital Markets Group, based in East Rutherford, N.J., represented the seller and procured the buyer in the transaction.

According to Andrew Merin, who heads the Metropolitan Area Capital Markets Group and orchestrated the sale with David Bernhaut, Gary Gabriel and Jose Cruz, his team conducted more than 30 tours of the 190,000-square-foot, Class A campus. "The Offices at Bedminster is recognized as one of the highest-quality office developments in the prestigious 1-78 Corridor," he said. "Its offering drew significant interest from the investment community."

Constructed in 1989, The Offices at Bedminster includes two separate, identically designed buildings with Endicott brick-clad exteriors and fine interior finishes. Strategically located at the intersection of I-78 and I-287, the 14-acre site fronts on Route 202/ 206 at the intersection of Hills Drive.

The property sits directly across from The Village at Bedminster, a 111,000-square-foot shopping center, at the entrance to The Hills, a master-planned community with 5,200 residential units. Corporate neighbors include AT&T, sanofi-aventis, Pfizer, Dendrite, Verizon Wireless and others.

Within this setting, The Offices at Bedminster is 86 percent leased to nine tenants. Approximately 69 percent of the rentable area is occupied by NYSE-listed, blue-chip companies, including Abbott Laboratories, AGL Resources, Celanese, EDS and Sprint.

"The Offices at Bedminster has outperformed its competition by maintaining a 90 percent average occupancy rate over the past four years," Merin noted. "The current dip in that rate presents McMorgan & Company with a great opportunity to drive value by leasing the balance of the space."

The Metropolitan Area Capital Markets Group, based in Cushman & Wakefield's East Rutherford office, specializes exclusively in real estate sales, joint ventures and financing in northern New Jersey; Fairfield County, Conn.; and Long Island and Westchester County, N.Y. The team has completed more than $11 billion worth of transactions during the past decade. For the past three years, this included more than $2 billion in transactions annually.