Self-Storage Seminar
Through the generosity of a fellow investor, I was able to attend 3-day a Self-storage seminar for free in Salt Lake City last week.
The seminar was at an actual self-storage facility called King Arthur Self-Storage, where apparently the customer is king!. I was amazed at the quality of the facility. It had grade-A commercial offices built into it and a phenomenally plush conference room. I learnt all about the different aspects of starting a self-storage from raising capital,finding land, hiring good help, installing security systems, commercial lending and marketing it. One thing I didn’t get enough of was the actual numbers, but I’m a number cruncher so I’ll do that myself. I also found out that the self-storage industry has trade-shows and I plan to attend one soon. If you have the land, it costs about 2 million to set up a self-storage complex and you need about $500k cash.
I also met some great investors there and learnt a lot of new things. One of the investors owns 50 businesses [with no debt] and is planning on opening a bank catering towards gocery stores! There was a programmer, a nurse, a builder, an ex-FBI agent, a general contractor and a bunch of other interesting characters. There was also a civil engineer employed by the city of Los Angeles whose Ebay jewellery store did 80-90k in revenue every month! Meeting investors and creating relationships is half the value of these seminars.
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November 10th, 2005 at 7:33 am
I have just started exploring self-storage as a real estate investment. More specifically, self-storage on leasehold land (I’m not sure if that term is used in the USA, but it refers to land that cannot be bought, only leased/rented for an agreed term).
As the building costs are relatively low for storage facilities and the land has no up-front cost, it makes leasehold an inexpensive approach to playing the self-storage game. If the land is in the right location (and that is a reasonably big ‘if’), the returns can be very impressive.
There are some downsides, of course. The biggest ones are the limit to capital growth (as the lease period draws to a close, the value can actually drop) and the drain on cash flow resulting from the lease payments. You also have to be careful of not buying a business – real estate investors like real estate because it is passive. The last thing we want to do is find 200 clients to store their wares.
I am still crunching the numbers, so I can’t say I am going ahead. Ultimately, I need to source suitable (i.e. financially viable) expressions of interest from potential tenants (self storage companies). Perhaps I am procrastinating – this will be only my second commercial real estate deal.
As an aside, the idea of developing storage on leasehold land came to me from the aircraft hangar complex we are building right now. The entire airport is leasehold only and there is a LOT of vacant land non-airside (so you can’t easily move aircraft from non-airside to airside).
Can you tell me more about that self-storage seminar in Salt Lake City. Is there a website?
Also, you may be interested in checking out guides like these: http://www.ebc.com.au/product/product.asp?loc=1,27,12&admin= (I am sure they exist in the States).
Cheers, jp
June 14th, 2007 at 3:14 am
very good site and useful information. Actually I was interested in self-storage after I had a class in college and was looking for information in Internet. And this site explained me a lot. Thank you
June 27th, 2007 at 4:00 am
Thank you for information. I am just curious about competition on this market. I know that self storage becomes more and more popular and competition is very high. Is it possible to open new business with minimum expenses?
June 28th, 2007 at 4:09 pm
starting a new self-storage from scratch has a dis-advantage. it takes about 18-24 months to fill it up.
this means you need to be well capitalized to pay the loan and expenses for nearly 2 years while its getting filled up.
if you have deep pockets, this is a good way to go. or you can buy poorly run existing ones and upgrade them.