One of New Jersey’s busiest housing developers is building a new home in the heart of Bergen County, where it’s already involved in two major mall redevelopment projects.
Currently based in Carlstadt, Russo Development LLC broke ground recently on a three-story, 45,000-sqaure-foot corporate headquarters on From Road in Paramus. The building is rising just north of the Paramus Park mall, where Russo is almost done with a 360-apartment housing and retail project.
The Vermella Paramus is scheduled to open its first section in April. Construction on Russo’s new headquarters should be complete this fall.
“We’re very excited to be moving to Paramus,” CEO Ed Russo said in an interview. “It’s a great community and a great workspace compared to the space we’re in now.”
“The opportunity to move into a modern building that’s built to be a collaborative environment for our team is going to be an amazing improvement,” added the CEO, whose company has about 250 employees.
Russo Development was founded 60 years ago by his father, Lawrence. The business focused on industrial and warehouse projects until the late 1990s, when it began building data centers at the start of the internet era. It was a small part of the real estate market at the time.
“It wasn’t a big property type like it is today,” Russo said, noting the proliferation of artificial-intelligence data centers.
Ten years ago, the company’s focus shifted again, this time toward mixed-use development — typically apartment complexes with ground-floor stores.
Today, mixed-use development makes up 30% to 50% of Russo Development’s business. The sector is on the cusp of a building boom, with towns across New Jersey approving big projects to meet state-mandated affordable housing goals for the next decade.
The company has built over 7,000 apartments across the state and has added more than 1,000 units a year in recent times, Russo said. Its developments, many under the Vermella brand, can be found in urban areas like South Orange and Hackensack as well as suburban communities like Woodbridge and Paramus.
“We’re not waterfront developers. We don’t really build high-rise buildings,” he said. “Most of our projects are close to transit in communities where we’re building what we would consider high-quality housing but at a moderate price.”
Locally, the company is working on two Paramus projects next to shopping malls. In addition to Vermella Paramus, Russo is a partner in the 426-unit Bergen Chapters development next to Bergen Town Center on Route 4. That project, which will also have ground-floor shopping, is expected to be finished in 2027.
Russo Development also recently started demolition for a housing and retail venture in Woodcliff Lake on a portion of the old BMW corporate headquarters on Chestnut Ridge Road. Built with Woodmont Properties, it will have about 300 apartments and 47 townhouse units when complete, Russo said.
Russo previously lived in Paramus for about five years. He always thought the borough was a “great community and such a convenient place for people to commute to,” he said. The family business, based in Hackensack for almost 30 years, has been in Carlstadt for the last 15 in a multi-tenant building.
“Paramus to us was always a vibrant office market,” Russo said. “It took us a while to find a site that we thought could be a good fit for us to build our own building.”
Russo Development mostly works in the northern part of the state, where the CEO sees a shortage of new, quality housing, especially affordable options.
“Even moderately priced, market-rate housing is still very much in demand,” Russo said. “The flip side of that, though, is there’s a lot of projects that have been approved in the course of the last several years as a result of a lot of the rezoning communities have gone through as part of their master plan updates and affordable housing process.”
“I think the market is healthy currently,” he continued. “There really hasn’t been much rent growth over the last couple of years coming out of COVID, when we were experiencing inflation at levels we hadn’t seen for many years. There was rent growth that was happening that was higher than years prior, but now for the last couple of years, rent has been flat in a number of places.”
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The most recent round of state affordable housing requirements have produced “a meaningful amount of new zoning for housing,” he said, but little has been built yet.
“If you look at the data, construction was down last year in terms of new for-sale housing and new apartment housing in New Jersey,” Russo said. “That was a trend across the country, too. It’ll be interesting to see if the pace of construction increases now over the next year or two, or stays steady even with all the zoning. The financial barriers to getting projects built are still there; costs are still high.”
This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: Russo Development moves headquarters to Paramus NJ



















