(Our first ever New Jersey Real Estate Networking Breakfasttakes place June 5 at The Newark Club. Click here for more information.)

NEWARK-The planned transformation of the 472-acre Bell Labs sitein Holmdel into a mixed-use Town Center is still in the cocoonafter four years. The first two residential buildings recentlyopened at Westmont Station, a 70-acre mixed-use village project inWood-Ridge, after six years of effort to launch. At the Glassworksproject in Aberdeen, says Somerset Development’sRalph Zucker, “We’ve been on the site for sevenyears. We're now a few weeks away from beginning the site-plansubmission process."

The long stall of development in the Garden State, and theopportunities that are at last arising, will be key topics ofconversation at the upcoming RealShare NJ conference on June 5. Zucker, oneof the featured speakers at the highly anticipated event, says hiscompany has been wrestling some big-vision projects out of theground, and the process has taken enormous amounts of time in thehigh-barrier-to-entry state.