Speaking to a Business Council of Westchester audience in White Plains, developer Joseph Simone offered a simple explanation of his work and success in commercial real estate: “fulfilling a need.”
“It”™s that simple,” said Simone, president of Simone Development Cos. in the Bronx, whose Simone Healthcare Development Group in recent years has been especially active in Westchester in the redevelopment and construction of office buildings for medical uses. His company four years ago relocated its headquarters from New Rochelle to its flagship Hutchinson Metro Center in the Bronx, a 42-acre, nearly 2 million-square-foot Class A office campus that recently added a Marriott hotel, the first Marriott to open in the borough.
“If you fulfill people”™s needs, you will be successful,” Simone said in an interview June 22 with Business Council of Westchester President and CEO Marsha Gordon at 42 Restaurant & Events in the Business Council”™s Leadership Conversations Series sponsored by First Niagara Bank. “I fulfill a need. It”™s all about fulfilling a need.”
Hailed as a “visionary” by Gordon, Simone about 14 years ago saw a need for Class A office space among professionals working in the Bronx, many of whom occupied illegal office space in two-family and three-family homes, he said. Simone, whose Westchester properties include the recently expanded Purchase Professional Park, said he had an idea to create “a suburban office park in an urban area” that would attract tenants associated with the borough”™s nearby medical institutions, which include Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Montefiore Medical Center, Jacobi Medical Center and Calvary Hospital.
“There was a void,” he said, with only about 2 million square feet of Class A space in the Bronx office market in 2001, when the Simone company acquired the closed site of a state psychiatric hospital for its planned Hutchinson Metro Center.
“People are under the misconception that people in the lower economic class don’t want nice things ”“ and that”™s not true,” said Simone, whose development locations serve the increasingly patient-centered focus of health care. The Hutchinson Metro Center”™s first completed building “stood out like a diamond,” he said.
In Yonkers, Simone Development this month held a ceremonial groundbreaking at its Boyce Thompson Center, a $35 million mixed-use redevelopment of one of the city”™s long-vacant architectural relics, the Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research. Nearby St. John”™s Riverside Hospital, the development”™s first announced tenant, will lease a new 15,000-square-foot building on the North Broadway site for medical offices.
Simone said the city planning and approval process from the time his company was awarded the Boyce Thompson redevelopment project to “putting a shovel in the ground” was “extremely fast.” The administration of Yonkers Mayor Mike Spano “is very pro-development,” he said. “That means a lot. You have to want it. The municipality has to be very pro-development.”
Yonkers and “all of lower Westchester” are emerging markets for commercial developers and tenants, Simone said. “The outer boroughs are exploding and there”™s nowhere to go,” he said. “You”™re seeing the overflow coming finally to Westchester.”
Simone said the conversion of office space for medical-related uses along Westchester”™s Platinum Mile office park corridor on Interstate 287 will continue as health care institutions seek convenient locations in a more “patient-centric” health care delivery system. “I don”™t see it stopping for a while.”
Asked for his outlook on the New York metro office market, he said, “I think the outer boroughs will be very popular. I think the suburbs will be repurposed for other higher and better uses.”
