Zoetis signs 12-year lease for Parsippany office building owned by Normandy

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Zoetis, the animal health company spun off from Pfizer in 2013, will relocate its global headquarters to Parsippany from Florham Park in a deal with Normandy Real Estate Partners.The life sciences company has signed a 12-year lease to fully occupy 10 Sylvan Way, a 125,445-square-foot office building that is being stripped to its steel frame and rebuilt by the Morristown-based developer, according to sources familiar with the deal. The project is slated to be complete by fall 2016.

The building, which Normandy acquired in 2012, sits among the headquarters for other major corporate tenants in Parsippany, including The Medicines Co. and Wyndham Worldwide. For months, the developer has been marketing its plans to gut the property and redevelop it into a state-of-the-art commercial property.

The deal comes two months after Zoetis said it would cut about 165 jobs by the end of next year, part of a comprehensive program announced May 5 to simplify Zoetis’ operations worldwide, improve its cost structure and better allocate resources to key growth opportunities.

The company will relocate from a multitenant building at 100 Campus Drive in Florham Park.

For Normandy, it’s the second major headquarters deal in just a few months involving a prominent life sciences company in New Jersey, a feather in its cap at a time when the needs of Big Pharma have changed dramatically. In June, the firm announced a 144,000-square-foot lease in Warren with the new consumer health care venture formed by GlaxoSmithKline and Novartis.

The deal calls for GSK Consumer Healthcare to establish its new U.S. headquarters at 184 Liberty Corner Road, known as Center 78, as part of a consolidation of existing sites in Pittsburgh and two offices in Parsippany. Employees will begin to move next March to the building, which is owned by Normandy and Greenfield Partners LLC and was also modernized through a gut rehabilitation project by the firm.

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