Will Whitehouse Station -- Once Vacated -- Have To Be Completely Repurposed -- Via A Gut Job?

[Editor's Note: corrections throughout, as suggessted by my many cogent anonymous commenters, below. With gratitude!] We have been following the mostly down- (but now up- again) fortunes of the former Schering-Plough HQ at Kenilworth since mid 2009. That puzzle palace was the vessel of a monument to CEO Fred Hassan's vanity. Gaudy even by excessive early 2000s sensibilities, that property was never likely to find a buyer in this post-halcyon days market for New Jersey based branded pharma-manufacturers. So I suppose it should not have been surprising when -- after initially selecting the legacy Ciba-Geigy Organon USA facility at Summit as Merck's new HQ -- Mr. Frazier recently switched horses and selected Kenilworth.

At least he knows he has a reasonable shot of repurposing and selling most of Summit off; the same cannot be said of Kenilworth.

Even so, as we last mentioned just after New Years 2014, Merck will have some significant trouble marketing the Readington/Whitehouse Station facility it is vacating shortly. It is just too big, too specialized and frankly, outdated for today's nimble, small, cost and environmental foot-print savvy (tech-driven) Millennials-led businesses to want to occupy -- even as start up space. Today -- by way of confirmation of that fact, we read of a series of local government town-halls around Whitehouse Station, where it is openly being asked whether the facility needs to be abandoned; stripped clean, and restarted nearly from scratch, in order to get large chunks of it back on the paying tax rolls.

See this, from NJ.com:

. . . .And the Readington session will focus on the “Future of our Corporate Campuses.” With Merck & Co. leaving its world headquarters here by next year, the huge building just north of Route 22 will be vacant. Real estate experts have talked about how difficult it will be to fill the 900,000 square-foot main building as well as others later constructed. Merck originally said it was moving headquarters to Summit, but then last year decided to be based in Kenilworth.

While it would be great to find one company to take over the entire building, the questions include “but is that a reasonable expectation, what else can we look at?” Dziamara noted.

“How to repurpose those sites” is among the items to be discussed in Readington, she said. . . .

[And, Ed. Note: from the link to the "town-halls":]

"[Millennials] are a tech-savvy generation wanting to live in higher-density activity environments, and they do not find one-dimensional office campuses particularly attractive." So said James Hughes, dean of the Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University, during his presentation at a July 12 conference on Reinventing New Jersey’s Obsolete Suburban Office Campus. . . .

We will keep an eye on this -- but (if he had so studied, I guess) Mr. Hassan might have learned that "pride," the good book says "goeth before the fall. . . ." He simply over-promised and then under-delivered overbuilt.