Speed Bay's shallow-bay ramp hits three million square feet

Speed Bay Warehouse Solutions announced three shallow-bay industrial properties totaling 595,705 square feet, with two Orlando assets—Silver Star Commerce Center, eight buildings and 254,915 square feet, and 429 Business Center, seven and 259,378—accounting for about 86% of the area, while Garden Brook, a two-building, 81,412-square-foot property in Farmers Branch, Texas, makes up the remainder.

The strategy is narrow by design: Speed Bay was built to own small-bay, multitenant buildings in infill locations, where the tenant roster is a long list of small businesses and rents are set by local vacancy rather than by the national industrial index. The platform launched in June 2026 and has completed roughly three million square feet of acquisitions to date, about two million of that in 2026 alone, leaving about a million square feet the announcement does not tie to any entity or year.

Michael Moriarty, Speed Bay's head of acquisitions, described how the deals fit the thesis: "Across multiple markets and locales, these three acquisitions all support our core strategy of investing in shallow-bay assets situated in infill areas that benefit from growing populations, strong economic fundamentals and robust demand from a diversified tenant base comprised of small businesses in a variety of industries."

The case for shallow bay rests on frictions—fragmented ownership, parcels too small for institutional developers, and land that competing uses will pay more to hold—that keep new supply from arriving, and Moriarty has made the data center version of that argument, telling IREI that competition for infill land from data center developers reinforces shallow-bay rents. As this publication argued earlier this month, the scarcity that supports those rents is also the ceiling on how much of the product a single buyer can accumulate.

Two million square feet in the year to date is a fast clip for a segment whose assets trade one building at a time, and the geography here—Orlando taking the large majority of the square footage, DFW entering the portfolio through a single 81,412-square-foot property—is a concentrated bet on one metro's infill supply rather than a diversified industrial allocation. Shallow bay's rent case is stronger than its deal flow: Speed Bay's binding constraint is acquisition supply, not tenant demand or capital. Watch Farmers Branch: a second DFW acquisition inside two quarters makes this a platform with a pipeline, and if the single asset stays single, the thesis has run into a supply problem it cannot underwrite away.