The future of the former Toys R Us corporate headquarters is still to be determined in New Jersey, a state that's been ground zero nationally for the redevelopment of such large, isolated and what some call outdated suburban workplace campuses. But when its fate is decided, the outcome could help write the next chapter for America's office parks.

For years, before its bankruptcy and liquidation in 2018, retailer Toys R Us occupied a 193-acre property in Wayne, a bucolic site on the waterfront of a reservoir. The campus was anchored by two connected office buildings totaling about 621,000 square feet at 1 Geoffrey Way. The property was sold in 2019 for $19 million and now sits mostly vacant.

A consulting firm, BRS of Medford Lakes, New Jersey, presented a market study on Thursday it did on the area where the campus is located, detailing its demographics and vacancy rates for different property categories. After months conducting that research and receiving input from residents, BRS said it will release its final report with recommendations for the best ways to repurpose the Toys R Us buildings, transitioning them to mixed use, by the end of the month. Those possible options include research and development space, shops, restaurants, and a performance hall.

"Based on our surveys ... a lot of people have said that in addition to use for recreation bringing them to the site, there was a lot of interest in entertainment activities and dining and children's activities, as well as festivals and shopping," Alisa Goren, a BRS planner, said during the presentation. "So it looks like a lot of things that would bring you to the site are also things that would be appropriate and attractive to the market as a whole."

The process playing out in New Jersey is part of a commercial real estate discussion taking part across the country. The national challenge of finding ways to repurpose and revitalize office properties isn't going to go away, as even more companies rethink their workplace needs because of the pandemic and the work-from-home trend it accelerated. That's led to some firms downsizing their footprints.

The former home of Toys R Us isn't the first large corporate campus to be reimagined in the Garden State. New Jersey has seen more than its fair share of the redevelopment of former one-tenant suburban office complexes, dubbed "stranded assets," some of which had been vacant for years. That's because during roughly the past decade a number of companies exited their headquarters in the Garden State in the wake of mergers and acquisitions, belt-tightening, an effort to escape New Jersey's high taxes, or in strategic moves. The repurposing of some of those sites is complete, offering a model for developers in other parts of the nation.

Bell Laboratories, a former 2 million-square-foot research facility in Holmdel, New Jersey, has been reinvented as Bell Works. The name coined for the site is "metroburb," with the overall property now featuring not only office and housing but eateries, stores, and so-called experiential offerings to create an urban downtown environment in suburbs. That redevelopment strategy is already being duplicated in the Chicago suburbs and has been mentioned as a model for the Toys R Us site.

The former corporate campus of pharmaceutical giant Hoffmann-La Roche has been transformed into ON3, a bustling center anchored by a new medical school, with a diversified tenant roster ranging from apparel maker Ralph Lauren to Japanese drug firm Eisai. A dual-branded hotel, a national grocer, restaurants, retailers, and hundreds of units of housing are coming to the campus, which straddles Nutley and Clifton.

New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy's administration has been actively trying to spark the adaptive reuse of vacant or underutilized office and retail complexes, which are a burden to municipalities in not only the Garden State but across the country. Those types of properties end up creating a loss of jobs and tax-producing property in a town, often reducing the amount of local taxes that can be levied against a landlord. And there's a ripple effect on the local economy and businesses when office parks sit empty, because it means fewer patrons for nearby eateries and services, for example.

In September last year, the New Jersey Economic Development Authority awarded Passaic County, the township of Wayne, the William Paterson Small Business Development Center, Point View Wayne Properties, which owns the Toys R Us site, and Dobco, the developer that is collaborating with the landlord on the repurposing, a $50,000 grant to study the best new use for the existing office buildings. That money was used to retain BRS.

The consulting firm's update during a Zoom call with the public Thursday was its second one regarding the Toys R Us site, with the first held in May. Goren stressed that her firm's task is to just make recommendations about the future use of the large office buildings, not the rest of the site or plans for housing on it.

During the call, Christopher Kok, Wayne's municipal planner, explained that under a settlement the township reached with fair-share-housing officials in New Jersey, up to 1,360 residential units, with at least 272 of them designated as affordable, can be built on the Toys R Us campus.

"Negotiations with the property owner are still ongoing, so really nothing has been settled as of this point, other than those numbers I just mentioned," Kok said.

The BRS study found that North Jersey, where Wayne is located, has a relatively high office vacancy rate, over 20%, with the demand for flexible space and research and development sites looking like promising opportunities for the Toys R Us campus, according to the study's author, Sonia Martin. The area has a relatively high income level, but the site's proximity to public transportation and seaports is low, the study found. That may prove a drawback to the relatively secluded Toys R Us site's ability to attract tenants and business.

Ralph Zucker knows that Bell Works, his company's reinvention of a former Bell Labs facility, is often held up as a model for the successful adaptive reuse of a large office property, not just locally in New Jersey but nationally.

"We hear it all the time, 'This is going to be the next Bell Works,' from around the country," said Zucker, CEO and founder of Inspired by Somerset Development in Holmdel.

The original Bell Labs building, constructed between 1962 and 1964 and designed by world-renowned architect Eero Saarinen, over its lifespan as a research facility had housed seven Nobel Prize winners, including those who conceived theories related to the laser and the Big Bang. The building has a glass-encased facade and an open-atrium that spans a quarter-mile

It took years for Inspired to win local approval for its redevelopment plan and to finally start leasing, according to Zucker. Inspired sold part of the site to Toll Brothers, which constructed several hundred homes at the site. The repurposed lab building now has 1.2 million square feet of office space and from 60,000 to 70,000 square feet of retail, and is 97% leased, Zucker said.

Zucker has duplicated the metroburb concept in Hoffman Estates, Illinois, after he said local officials there approached him about a sprawling, vacant AT&T campus. He took on the $200 million redevelopment of that campus, Bell Works Chicagoland, creating a walkable, open environment at the site's main building and taking advantage of the complex's atriums.

Bell Works is a good prototype for the repurposing of a former one-tenant office complex but is not a one-size-fits-all solution, according to Zucker. The properties being reimagined can't be typical office buildings with small lobbies with elevator banks leading up to the floors. At the two Bell Works properties the developer essentially created indoor streetscapes, surrounding their open-atrium areas with retail. And both buildings are near major highways, according to Zucker.

He stressed that he was only talking about office development in general, not the Toys R Us campus specifically, when he outlined the characteristics needed for a campus to be transformed into a metroburb.

"The building has to have a certain typology and a lot of buildings don’t have it," Zucker said. "Most suburban office buildings don’t have it. Second of all, the location at the end of the day can't be too far from the beaten path. There’s a lot of large vacant corporate campuses dotting the landscape of New Jersey that are either too difficult to get to, too far away from the major roadways. They’re just not conducive ... [to] thousands of people coming in every day.”

Nonetheless David DeConde, Dobco's business development manager, during the May Zoom meeting on the Toys R Us site said Bell Works was "a very nice conversion, something that could possibly be seen here at 1 Geoffrey Way."

Hoffmann-La Roche's former headquarters is located on Route 3, a busy commercial corridor, and had research labs, a landmark office tower, proximity to Manhattan, and various public transit options going for it to facilitate its successful repurposing, according to Ed Cohen, a principal at Prism Capital Partners, which redeveloped the campus into mixed-use ON3.

The site, now home to the Hackensack Meridian School of Medicine and a variety of other tenants, has 1.5 million square feet of space occupied, with a dual-branded hotel and retail coming, Cohen said. Prism also plans to eventually add housing to the site.

"This is the true live-work-play environment," Cohen said.

He didn't want to discuss the Toys R Us campus specifically, but noted that the former Hoffmann-La Roche site was in a densely populated area with a lot of commercial business, not a suburban site surrounded by residential properties.

James Hughes, dean emeritus of the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University, described the former Toys R Us headquarters as "a grand campus," adding, "I guess Bell Works is the best example of what could be done."

The Toys R Us office buildings don't have the same open space, the open atrium, that the Bell Labs facility had, he said. Still, Hughes said, "There is great potential."