Walker & Dunlop, Inc. announced today that it arranged for the $21,000,000 sale of 212 Rome Street, the 65,539 square-foot, build-to-suit headquarters of AeroFarms, a sustainable urban agricultural company located in Newark, New Jersey. The company’s industrial facility at 212 Rome Street is home to one of the largest and most productive indoor vertical farms globally and features a unique combination of traditional Class A warehouse and distribution space, a state-of-the-art research and development center, as well as acutely climate-controlled areas for produce cultivation.
Walker & Dunlop’s Thomas Walsh and Joseph Garibaldi were retained exclusively to arrange the sale on behalf of RBH Group to Cabot Properties. “212 Rome Street, already home to one of the largest indoor vertical farms in the world, is projected to grow its capacity even further – to over 20 million pounds annually upon completion of Phase II,” Mr. Walsh stated. “While the property is an urban in-fill industrial asset, it was also a strong ESG investment in sustainable and clean farming. 212 Rome Street is a self-contained production and distribution center, which makes for a low carbon footprint and reduces supply chain liabilities.”
The property is positioned in northern New Jersey’s Port submarket, one of the most desirable industrial submarkets in the nation. As one of the most recently completed and highest quality industrial assets within the Port, 212 Rome Street employs an aeroponic growing system, which enables local production of pesticide-free greens without soil or sun and uses 95% less water than traditional farming. Serving one of the most densely populated markets in the U.S., this system can produce greater than 100 times as many crops per square foot as compared to a traditional field farm.
Walker & Dunlop is a leader in property sales, having completed $4.74 billion in property sales volume in the first half of 2021. The firm is also the #4 provider of capital to the overall commercial real estate market, delivering a total transaction volume of $41 billion in 2020.