Normandy has acquired three class A New Jersey office properties totaling just more than 500,000 sf from the Bedminster-based Advance. The buyer and seller both declined to reveal the sale price.

Largest of them is Park Place, a four-building, 352,000-sf campus just off Route 24 at the intersection of Park Ave. and Columbia Turnpike in Florham Park. The foursome is made up of the 155,000-sf 200 Park Ave., the 55,000-sf 210 Park Ave., the 65,000-sf 220 Park Ave. and the 65,519-sf 230 Park Ave. The buildings are currently 93% occupied.

The second property is 310 Madison Ave., a three-story 59,061-sf medical office building near Morristown Memorial Hospital in Morris Township, currently 65% occupied. The third is Branchburg Centre, a two-story, 89,355-sf office building on Route 22 West in Branchburg. Its tenants include Hewlett-Packard and Johnson & Johnson.

"These acquisitions are consistent with our strategy of acquiring well-located properties with strong growth potential," says David Welsh, Normandy's founding managing principal. "As a privately negotiated transaction, we were able to manage the complexity of the deal while satisfying the investment objectives of both Normandy and Advance."

Advance president and CEO Peter Cocoziello says that "having achieved our investment objectives, and with strong market demand for stabilized office assets, we determined that this was the most opportunistic time to dispose of these assets. This is an important time in our history, with more than $2 billion worth of development and redevelopment projects. Our strategy is to redeploy the capital into those projects."

Among those projects is Picatinny Applied Research Campus, a 1.1 million-sf R&D park at the US Army's Picatinny Arsenal in Morris County. Advance is also doing Harrison MetroCentre, a $1-billion mixed-use redevelopment on the riverfront in Harrison, which will have a 25,000-seat stadium the Major League Soccer's New York Red Bulls as a centerpiece.

And Advance recently completed the redevelopment of Advance @ Southgate, a three-story 320,000-sf formerly single-tenant building, converting it to multi-tenant use.