Indoor Adventure Park Takes Part of Former NJ Sears
The entertainment venue is leasing 59,000 square feet.
NRG Adventure Park has inked a lease for 59,000 square feet on the upper level of the former Sears space at 700 Paramus Park, a part of Paramus Park South, a shopping center in Paramus, N.J. Heidenberg Properties Group, which specializes in open-air retail in the Northeast, is the landlord.
The lower level is occupied by a 100,000-square-foot Stew Leonard’s supermarket. Paramus Park South is attached to and has direct access to Paramus Park Mall, which is owned by Brookfield and contains over 60 retailers.
A joint venture led by Heidenberg, and also including Red Starr Investments, Norse Realty Group and DAG Paramus, paid $38 million for the property in 2025. A 21,934-square-foot Atlantic Health Systems facility is also a tenant.
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Slated to open in 2027, NRG Adventure Park is an indoor entertainment venue featuring trampolines, ropes courses, climbing attractions, virtual-reality experiences and party facilities geared toward families and groups. There are currently two operating NRG Adventure Parks, one in Springfield, N.J., and one in Fargo, N.D., but the brand is expanding nationally.
Paramus Park South is on a 14-acre site with frontage along New Jersey Route 17, as well as direct exposure to the Garden State Parkway. The asset is about 20 miles outside Midtown Manhattan.
TSCG Senior Vice President Jamie Sackeim represented ownership in the lease, while Welco Realty President Jerry Welkis and Associate Broker Stephan Miller represented NRG.
New uses for old boxes
The deal is part of a wider trend of repurposing shuttered big box, large retail locations, and more particularly, Sears and other department store assets. Options for redevelopment include razing the old, but also re-tenanting.
Anchors in single-story malls or smaller centers tend to re-morph into retail because the retail fundamentals are better than for indoor, multi-level mall anchors, Scott Schnuckel, CBRE managing director of Americas, previously told Commercial Property Executive.
“There’s less vacancy in the open air, strip center sector, and they often have wide enough frontage that splitting up the box is achievable to bring in multiple tenants,” Schnuckel said.
Smaller retail boxes, as well as fitness and grocery concepts—plus occasional entertainment venues—are backfilling department-store anchors. Some mall owners are separating upper and lower department-store spaces for different retailers, such as the divided former Sears at Paramus Park South.
Another example isn’t far away, at Newport Centre in Jersey City, N.J., where Primark took the upper floor of a former department store, while Dick’s House of Sport took the lower floor.
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