Office space may be at a premium in Halifax with many businesses looking to expand and move — but Bermuda companies with back office operations based in the capital of Nova Scotia are just happy to stay put and not outsource any more jobs there.

A report from Canadian publication The Globe and Mail, entitled 'Halifax caught in a Class A squeeze', revealed that Flagstone Reinsurance Holdings Ltd.'s workforce at its 15,000-square-foot data management centre at Scotia Square in downtown Halifax had grown from 15 employees to more than 100 since it moved there four years ago and if it keeps expanding at the same rate it will soon run out of room.

"If we continue to grow like we have, we could come to the extent of our facility by the end of the year," it quotes Brent Slade, media relations manager at Flagstone, as saying.

But Mr. Slade told The Royal Gazette that Flagstone has no plans to expand its Halifax operation any further.

"We have grown pretty significantly from a single office, but we are pretty happy where we are and we don't actually want to move," he said.

"If we were to grow then we would think about it, but we don't have any plans to grow or move."

Mr. Slade said that Flagstone had invested a lot of time, effort and money into building up its office in Halifax, including increasing its bandwidth and installing a secondary generator in the event of a power failure to keep the data centre running, as well as implementing new cooling equipment for the data centre.

A spokesperson for Butterfield Fulcrum Group, which also has an office in Halifax and has 400 employees world-wide following the merger between Butterfield Fund Services and Fulcrum Group, said the company was actually looking to sublet some of its space.

"Halifax is a very important production centre for Butterfield Fulcrum Group's global business and we are fully committed to our presence there," they said.

"We have an excellent office in a prime location. We expect to grow the office and even with this growth, the current office has significant capacity beyond our foreseeable requirements. Therefore we are looking to sublet a proportion of our space."

The wider issue centres around a lack of available office space in Halifax being at a historic low in the downtown area, with research firm Colliers International pegging the vacancy rate for Class A space at 1.3 percent, or effectively zero, and some industry insiders worried about the city's ability to do business being stifled, according to The Globe and Mail.

Their main concerns focused on being unable to accommodate more growth when the economy recovers from the global downturn.

Many Bermuda-based firms have set up offices in Halifax in the past, with the benefit of tapping into a pool of highly-educated workers and students from three local universities, as well as information technology infrastructure and the geographical proximity between the two locations, offering a reasonable cost of travel and being in the same time zone.

Among those which have made the move in recent years are Marsh and BF&M.