Avaya Occupies 352,000-sf Former AT&T Space

MIDDLETOWN, NJ-Avaya Inc. has fully occupied the 352,000-sf 307 Middletown-Lincroft Rd. here, a class A office/lab facility, subleasing the complex from AT&T. The latter had vacated the building earlier this year, moving the site’s functions to existing locations elsewhere in this Monmouth County township in Central New Jersey, and in Parsippany, NJ, as part of the telecom giant’s restructuring.

In the sublease transaction, Bill Brown of Cushman & Wakefield of New Jersey’s Parsippany office represented Avaya. Marc Rosenberg, a C&W executive vice president in the same office, represented AT&T.

The terms of the sublease haven’t been fully disclosed, although AT&T is known to have had 10 years remaining on its direct lease with the owner of the sprawling complex, a partnership between local developer William Schaffel and principals of the Westfield, NJ-based construction firm, Torcon Inc. “Avaya did take the entire 10 years that AT&T had remaining on its lease,” Brown confirms.

The facility, a combination of offices and laboratories, was built in 1982 to house AT&T’s Bell Labs operations, most of which were spun off a number of years ago and now form Lucent Technologies. Lucent itself spun Avaya off as a separate company almost three years ago, with the latter continuing to occupy a 400,000-sf chunk of space at Lucent’s two million-sf campus in nearby Holmdel, NJ, paying its former parent rent for the space.

Prior to taking the space at 307 Middletown-Lincroft, a move designed to “brand” itself and separate it from its former parent, according to officials, Avaya carried out “extensive upgrades to the communications infrastructure,” Brown tells GlobeSt.com. Avaya will continue to maintain its headquarters in Basking Ridge, NJ, and will use the Middletown facility as its regional research and development operation.

Avaya, a communications systems and software provider, offers voice, converged voice and data, customer relationship management, messaging, multi-service networking and structured cabling products and services. The company’s customer base includes businesses, government agencies and other organizations.