Steve Hall said he welcomes recent signs that industrial leasing is gaining ground in the Wilmington area.

“We’re excited about the industrial sector starting to move again,” said Hall, a broker with Maus, Warwick, Matthews & Co.

Hall represented Battery Systems, a California-based company, in its lease of 12,000 square feet of space on Raleigh Street off Carolina Beach Road. It’s the company’s first East Coast location, Hall said.

The Battery Systems Wilmington location is on the same street where Vertex Rail Technologies, a Massachusetts-based company, has leased the former Terex Crane facility to build rail cars. That property includes 500,000 square feet of space on about 68 acres.

In North Kerr Industrial Park at 3317 Kitty Hawk Road, Hall represented the landlord in the lease of 15,000 square feet to Majestic Marble & Glass, a local company that wanted to expand, Hall said.

Leasing had been sluggish in the industrial sector earlier this year, Hall said. But he isn't the only one seeing signs of business picking up. According to CoStar, a company that keeps track of real estate transactions and releases quarterly reports, vacancy rates in the Wilmington-area industrial market decreased from about 19 percent at the end of the second quarter to 18.5 percent in the third quarter.

A couple of the largest transactions in 2014 in the industrial market were the lease of nearly 52,000 square feet by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers at 69 Darlington Ave. and a 10,000-square-foot lease by AMS International at 1805 Blue Clay Road, according to CoStar.

In September, Peerless Overland Specialists, a company that customizes off-road vehicles, leased an 11,000-square-foot warehouse at 1551 Point Harbor Road in Wilmington in a transaction brokered by Garry Silivanch of Eastern Carolinas Commercial Real Estate.

Check back later for more information on recent industrial leasing activity in the Wilmington area.