New lease fills spec office building in Hauppauge

It’s been said that fortune favors the bold. And that could apply to Craig Padover, who took a big risk in developing Long Island’s first speculative office building in more than a dozen years. 

Despite a challenging market, the office space at 410 Motor Parkway in Hauppauge is now fully occupied, just six months after it was completed. 

National Life Insurance Company leased the 10,325-square-foot second floor of the 35,000-square-foot building joining tenants Hanover Bank and Bus Patrol at the newly minted Class A property. 

Padover’s Aresco Management, which also occupies some space in the building, purchased a one-story, 40,000-square-foot industrial building, one of the first ever built at the development formerly known as the Hauppauge Industrial Park, in Oct. 2015. With the help of some economic incentives from the Suffolk County Industrial Development Agency, the company invested more than $15 million to build a unique, four-story office building on the 3-acre site. 

Aresco Management’s Craig Padover and Jeffrey Cohen during construction at 410 Motor Parkway in Hauppauge. / Photo by Judy Walker

One of the first new mixed-use buildings in the renamed Long Island Innovation Park at Hauppauge, 410 Motor Parkway features food businesses on its ground level and three floors of office space above. Designed by John Seifert of Huntington-based WSJS Architects, the project was the first to be developed under the Town of Smithtown’s overlay zoning aimed to promote economic growth in the country’s second-largest industrial park. 

The new Hauppauge office building is the first on Long Island to use electronically controlled “smart glass” that allows its windows to transition from light to dark. Though the product costs about 35 percent more to install than run-of-the-mill commercial windows, it reduces lighting, heating and cooling costs by as much as 20 percent, blocking more than 90 percent of solar radiation without blinds or shades. 

Amid increasing office vacancies and continued office-market uncertainty surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic and its resulting remote-work environment, some industry observers were skeptical that the speculative development would succeed. But Padover remained confident. 

“I thought by building something unique and more current there would be demand for that,” Padover told LIBN. “And it worked out according to plan.” 

While all the office space is occupied, the building still has 4,000 square feet of ground-floor restaurant space available. Mógū Modern Chinese Kitchen is already open at the building and will soon be joined by a Jersey Mike’s Subs shop. 

Gerry Krush of Real Estate Strategies represented National Life Insurance, while landlord Aresco Management was self-represented in the lease transaction.