Atkins Companies Receives Urban Land Institute Northern New Jersey’s NNJ Excellence Award in Healthcare/Medical Category
West Orange, N.J. (May 20, 2022) – Atkins Companies announces that they have been named a winner of the 2022 Urban Land Institute Northern New Jersey Excellence Award in the Healthcare/Medical category at the Urban Land Institute Northern New Jersey’s (ULI NNJ) Excellence Awards program on May 5, 2022, at the Westmount Country Club in Woodland Park, N.J. Celebrated annually, ULI NNJ’s Excellence Awards salute the highest caliber of projects and people across the northern New Jersey real estate industry.
Atkins Companies was recognized for its creative repositioning of the Bridgewater Medical Building, a 95,000-square-foot office building at 1125 Route 22, into a 100 percent healthcare usage site.
At the time of Atkins’ 2017 acquisition, the building stood at a crossroads with 37,000 square feet of space serving as a regional headquarters for a bank that had steadily decreased its office space footprint and was planning to leave entirely. The remaining space was occupied by Hunterdon Healthcare, a hospital system serving northern New Jersey. Recognizing the strong demand for medical office space in the market and the weakness of the regional traditional office market, Atkins quickly realized that the building was an ideal candidate to be strategically repositioned for 100 percent healthcare usage.
Atkins subsequently negotiated a long-term lease for the former bank space with Atlantic Health System (AHS), one of the State’s premier healthcare systems. Looking to house a variety of specialty groups such as orthopedics, oncology, and OBGYN in the space, Atkins’ development team worked closely with AHS on creating a custom, built-to-suit floorplan and buildout that would meet their needs and enable them to expand its growing relationship and shared services with the building’s other tenant, Hunterdon Healthcare.
To bring the building up to Class A medical office standards, Atkins also invested in multiple capital improvements to the building’s mechanical systems as well as various exterior building and site improvements.
The Bridgewater Medical Building project allowed Atkins Companies to capitalize on a tremendous untapped opportunity to transform a hybrid office/medical building into a Class A healthcare hub. Atkins leveraged its decades of value-add experience to deploy a repositioning strategy that reinvented the building’s purpose, successfully creating a stabilized, modern medical building for two of the region’s premier healthcare systems. The project dramatically improved the delivery of important healthcare services in the Somerset County area, making it one of the region’s most unique and transformative healthcare real estate projects in recent years.
“We take great pride in collaborating with the medical community to create spaces that best serve their specific needs in the local community,” said Bob Atkins, Managing Principal at Akins Companies. “Our Bridgewater Medical Building project is emblematic of our focus on developing spaces that support the highest levels of care and increased patient outcomes. We are both humbled and deeply honored to be recognized alongside many of the industry’s premier projects and people as we celebrate this award.”
