Insiders point to one glaring challenge in the early going — industrial space has never been harder to find in the Garden State, creating an added hurdle for the manufacturing and cultivation businesses that regulators conditionally approved in late March. It only complicates a market that, for now, is limited to less than a third of New Jersey municipalities.
“The demand is huge,” said Jack Fersko, a Roseland-based attorney with Greenbaum Rowe Smith & Davis LLP, who chairs the firm’s real estate department and cannabis industry practice, noting that conditional licensees have 120 days to secure a location.
“They really need to get space locked up and the landlords know it,” he added. “And there’s not a lot of negotiation taking place.”
To that end, Fersko in late March was representing at least four different property owners that were weighing leases with cannabis tenants. When a deal fell through at one of the buildings, there were “eight people in line who keep calling, wanting the property.”