Skyline Industrial REIT has fully leased the Bayers Lake Industrial Centre in Halifax, a process that went from a trickle of interest upon its completion to a deluge of demand, its president Mike Bonneveld said.

“It’s really within six months we went from zero to 100,” he said in an interview with RENX.

The two-building, 400,688-square-foot property located on 125 and 265 Julius Blvd. was leased to three tenants. The first contract was inked February, with the last one signed approximately two weeks ago.

The leases for Bayers Lake Industrial Centre, which is one of the biggest industrial parks in Atlantic Canada, include the single-largest industrial speculative lease on record in Halifax, Skyline said in a release, and made up the majority of total industrial space leased year-to-date in the region.

Skyline Industrial REIT is a fund of Skyline Group of Companies, a Guelph, Ont.-based capital management company focused on real estate and renewable energy infrastructure.

Businesses find 'certainty to the uncertainty'

The centre, which is part of the 582-acre Bayers Lake Business Park, was co-developed by Skyline with Lindsay Construction and Secure Capital. Construction on the property began in the spring of 2023 and was finished December 2024.

After construction, there was a lull in activity throughout most of 2025, Bonneveld said, joining a nationwide trend where new industrial project leasing slowed to a crawl. But then interest in the centre picked up in late 2025.

The Canadian real estate industry began to find its footing after a rocky 2025 impacted by a trade war with the U.S. and geopolitical uncertainty, Bonneveld said, which gave potential tenants “cause for pause.”

Now, businesses are coming to the conclusion “there’s certainty to the uncertainty,” recognizing that investment has to take place regardless of the challenges of the new normal.

Additionally, federal government programs and incentives, such as investment into infrastructure, are boosting the local real estate market, Bonneveld said.

A unique building in Halifax

The 230,235-square-foot Building A of the centre has been 100 per cent leased to ID Logistics, a France-based company. The tenant for two-thirds of the 113,547-square-foot Building B is an undisclosed Canadian warehouse, distributor and logistics group. The remaining 57,345 square feet of Building B is leased to F3 Group Inc., a local construction and development firm.

The rapid leasing of the Bayers Lake Industrial Centre, in a narrow time frame, “is a tell-tale sign of the quality of the asset,” Bonneveld said.

The industrial property is adjacent to fast-growing communities, with easy access to four major highways, rail routes and two major ports. Building B has a 40-foot clear height, which few buildings in the area can compete with, Bonneveld said.

Bolstering its sustainability credentials, the property is designed under the Canada Green Building Council's Zero Carbon Building Design Standard. It is the only zero-carbon building of its scale in market, Bonneveld said, equipped with features such as radiant in-floor heating, solar panels and heat recovery ventilation.

The building is fairly unique within the context of the Halifax market, he said.

Halifax industrial market to tighten, Bonneveld predicts

The Halifax industrial market, CBRE said in its Q2 report, had availability drop 80 basis points quarter-over-quarter to 7.8 per cent.

A large part of that was the result of 138,000 square feet of positive net absorption in Q2, the highest amount of quarterly net absorption recorded since Q3 2024.

CBRE identified the leasing of approximately 59,000 square feet in The Bayers Lake Business Park in Q2 as responsible for a significant amount of the absorption.

There have been few new industrial builds over the last three to five years in Halifax, Bonneveld said, as a result, he forecasts the market will tighten due to constricted inventory following a period of high activity in Q3 to Q4.

CBRE found a narrow industrial development pipeline in Halifax, identifying only 16,000 square feet under construction, as of publication of its Q2 report.

Prospective tenants that could not secure a spot at Skyline’s Halifax industrial park will “go somewhere elsewhere,” Bonneveld said. “I think you’re going to see that market tighten up fairly reasonably over that next six to nine months.”

Skyline plans to continue to invest in the Maritimes, Bonneveld said, particularly Halifax and Dartmouth in Nova Scotia, and Moncton in New Brunswick.