A nearly one-acre former office property in Verona, New Jersey has changed hands for $1.85 million, according to Real Estate NJ, with entitlements already secured for a 10-unit luxury townhome community. The buyer, an LLC managed by construction executive Mohannad Abbasi, acquired the parcels at 21 and 25 Grove Avenue from sellers Jaime Weiss and Jonathan Goldstein, who had purchased the two-building office site in 2021 with residential redevelopment in mind. Weiss Realty, based in Moonachie, represented the sellers; Bruce Elia Jr. of Keller Williams Realty‘s Fort Lee office represented the buyer. Abbasi’s team worked through the township’s zoning board across multiple iterations before obtaining approvals prior to closing, positioning the project to move directly into the construction phase.
ParkPoint Perspective
This transaction illustrates a pattern worth monitoring in Essex County’s established suburbs: office-to-residential conversion of small, infill parcels where entitlement risk is absorbed before the land trades. Buyers effectively pay a premium for certainty, compressing the development timeline but also reflecting constrained supply of shovel-ready residential sites. For investors, the willingness to work through a multi-iteration zoning process suggests that demand for quality townhome product in these markets is sufficient to justify the effort — a signal that suburban infill, even at modest scale, remains a competitive asset class in supply-restricted Essex County communities.
Source: Real Estate NJ