A mystery tenant has signed the biggest New York City industrial lease of the year at Innovo Property Group and Square Mile Capital's massive multistory development in the Bronx.

The landlords have signed a 568K SF lease with an unnamed tenant at 2505 Bruckner Blvd., the 1M SF logistics center they speculatively developed in the Bronx, Bisnow has learned.

A JLL team led by Rob Kossar and Leslie Lanne served as the leasing agents. The building, which has indoor and outdoor parking space, electric vehicle chargers and direct loading, still has nearly 500K SF available. The facility is next to five of the region’s busiest highways, including the Cross-Bronx Expressway, the Bruckner Expressway and Hutchinson River Parkway.

The site was previously the Whitestone Cinemas complex, which shuttered in 2013 and sold to Extell Development in 2015 for $41M, The Real Deal reported. Records filed with the city show Innovo acquired the land two years later for $75M.

The developers scored a $305M construction loan for their planned logistics facility in April 2020 in a deal structured by Bank OZK and EverWest Real Estate Investors, New York YIMBY reported.

Innovo and Square Mile finished construction on the space earlier this year, which raised Class-A industrial availability in New York City by 9.8% when it opened, according to CBRE data cited by Crain's New York Business.

There has been fierce competition among industrial tenants looking for extremely limited space in NYC in recent years. In all of 2021, tenants led by Amazon leased more than 1.6M SF. The industrial vacancy rate in the Tri-State Area is hovering around the 2.5% mark, experts said at a Bisnow event last week.

Northern New Jersey had the third-lowest vacancy rate in the country during Q3 2022, according to research from Savills, with Pennsylvania’s Interstate 81/78 corridor not far behind. Rent for industrial spaces in the two hot spots has grown by 40% in the past year, according to Savills.