The roughly six-acre property that once held Eisele's Nursery & Garden Center at 232 Oradell Ave. in Paramus sold for $14.5 million on Sept. 9, clearing the way for an affordable housing development on land the Eisele family had owned and operated for generations. The deal closes the book on an 80-year run for the nursery, which shut its doors for good before the 2026 spring season.
According to NJ.com, the sale did not come with many of the usual details reporters chase down after a big real estate transaction. The release behind the announcement did not identify the buyer, specify how many housing units are planned, or say when construction might begin. Glenn Bartlett of Coldwell Banker Realty represented both sides of the transaction, with Curich Weiss Amplify representing the brokerage, per the release.
Eisele's property is described by the outlet as one of the last large, undeveloped parcels left in one of Bergen County's busiest commercial corridors — a notable distinction given how much of the surrounding Route 17 and Paramus Avenue area has already filled in with big-box retail and strip centers over the decades.
A Final Auction Closed Out 80 Years of Business
Before the land itself changed hands, Eisele's had already wound down its operations. The nursery held a liquidation auction in late April to sell off its remaining inventory and equipment, including trucks, a wood chipper and bulk landscaping supplies, the same report notes. A.J. Willner Auctions ran the sale as a timed, online event, describing it as featuring assets used in the day-to-day operation of a professional nursery and landscape supply business, according to the auction's own listing, which included Freightliner and International dump trucks among the lots.
Eisele's own website had broken the news to longtime customers months earlier, announcing the business was closing after 80 years and would not reopen for the 2026 growing season. The nursery told patrons its liquidation auction would close on April 28 and asked anyone holding gift certificates to request a refund by May 15.
Residents Pushed Back Against Paving Over the Land
The closure did not go unnoticed by neighbors. It drew pushback from some residents, and an online petition urged Paramus not to let the land be paved over. The land's fate had effectively been set years earlier, however: a 2019 zoning ordinance designated Eisele's and several other local nursery sites as areas in need of rehabilitation, opening the door to residential redevelopment long before the auction gavel ever fell.
Paramus has already approved other affordable housing projects nearby, part of a broader pattern in which several of the borough's remaining nurseries have been targeted for housing in recent years, per the same NJ.com account. Among them is a 65-unit, 100%-affordable complex at the former Oster site on Route 17, which the Paramus Planning Board signed off on earlier this year.
Borough's Affordable Housing Obligations Have Shifted
Paramus maintains a formal affordable housing program, administered through the borough's affordable housing office, intended to serve low- and moderate-income families, individuals and seniors, according to Paramus Borough. The scale of that obligation has been the subject of some dispute: a 2025 report from northjersey.com found Paramus had cut its state-mandated affordable housing obligation, once the highest in Bergen County, from 1,000 units down to 316, though that figure comes from a separate analysis and was not addressed in the NJ.com report on the Eisele's sale.
For now, what happens next on the Oradell Avenue lot remains an open question. No buyer has been named, no unit count released, and no construction timeline set — leaving neighbors who watched an 80-year-old nursery disappear to wait and see what rises in its place.
