All Forum Posts by: Michael Wagner

I'm biased because it's been so good to me but I'd recommend you take a hard look at self storage. I've helped two high volume house flippers parlay their skill sets into the storage World. Using the same skills that allowed them to flip 20-40 houses per year, they've each bought 3-6 storage properties in the last 16 months. They both cited residual income as the reason they "made the switch".

 Yes, quite similar!  Start at the oldest blog posts as there is one from several years ago that will walk you through it!

You might find my blog here on BP to be a good starting place. Give it a read and let me know how I can help. Storage is the best!

https://www.biggerpockets.com/...

I also use ESS and would stay AWAY from PTI. Poor customer service and tech support that you have to pay for after purchase!!!

Yes, all three of the above can provide you with the kits.  I just did one from Janus and though they were a bit of a PIA to deal with, the price was right.  Roughly $7-8 per rentalble square foot.  That was the installed price.  But you should expect to pay a good bit more as there's an economy of scale that won't kick in for you at that price.  Your most cost effective option will be to just stick build the walls and then line the walls with 3' corrugated sheet metal.  I did that on a small 12 unit conversion and it worked quite well.  We had two units with traditional overhead doors and the rest were traditional walk through man doors.  Think my total cost was about $10 per square foot (including a furnace and duct work to heat the space).  I did all labor myself. 

You got great advice above. Also be sure to check that the underside of the roof is insulated with some sort of condensation barrier. Walk the roof.

Though I will say you can absolutely just replace the springs on most overhead roll up doors.  As @Zach Quick said, it can be done for $75-100 by any standard overhead door company...$100 for one offs....and $75 per if you can get them to come out and do a bunch all at once.

You'll find there are a bunch of us here on BP that LOVE storage!  You might find some value in this blog I post here on BP...probably best to start in the beginning and skim through until you find something that is helpful:

https://www.biggerpockets.com/member-blogs/3915-all-things-self-storage/blog_posts

Hey Buddy , see a couple quick notes below each question.

1. Unit Mix/Dimensions are a mess. Ideally I'd like to make all the units in buildings A and B 5x5sf (instead of current 6.5x6.5), but existing building structure is solid and already fitted to these weird dimensions. Should I just bite the bullet and totally redo buildings A and B with the proper unit sizes or just go the cheaper route of just fixing the inside partitions and keep the weird dimensions. *We plan to split the 10x12sf units in building D into 6x10sf units, which will add an additional 16 units. 

NO, do not change size just so it "fits the norm"....people are renting a space to put their stuff. That's what you have! Leave it as is and charge a bit more than people who rent 5 x 5's...or charge the same initially and use the 20% more space free in your marketing.  

2. Expansion, the back acre: I know the goal is expansion so I'll need to clear the back acre. My thought was to clear the back acre, cover it with gravel (or millings) and offer machine/equipment storage until the proper time to build the expansion. I got some initial estimates of around $60-75K to clear the land, top soil and cover it with gravel.

That seems a bit high, I'd bet you can do it for closer to $40-50K....McCollum Trucking in Monroe NC might make the trip.  They did my forest property in NC.

I guess my main struggle is figuring out which path to take. *This project will be privately financed

1. Initially go cheap as possible. Just acquire land and existing facilities, rehab them as cheap as possible (keep existing unit sizes), don't touch the back acre and bring project to stabilization. At that point (around 12 months) take a look at options. This would probably be around $100K give or take some.

2. Raise enough to acquire land and existing facilities, rehab to fix dimensions and maximize efficiency of unit mix, clear away the back acre and bring the facility to stabilization (while adding machine/equipment storage). This could push the project cost to roughly $200-$250K and adds time/risk and capital raising.

If the town allows it, i'd probably lean toward clearing the lot, laying gravel and fencing it all in.  Leave the buildings layed out as they are.  Once you get close to full, You'll be able to pop up more building in your newly created lot. 

Crunching the numbers I'd like to get it to 12-15K sf rentable as soon as possible because right now with only 6,600 sf a lot of the potential profit is being eaten away by the expenses. Any thoughts, feedback or new ideas anyone has is greatly appreciated. Thanks.

I'd suggest those "grass roots" ideas are good ideas but I've never gotten the ROI I was hoping for. Instead, i find my best ROI is on money spent online. Use Sparefoot.com, Google Business Pages (with lots of reviews) , Google PPC and Facebook ads. You should be looking to spend 6-8% of gross potential rent on marketing...perhaps more during ramp up. Hope that helps some! If you just took over, I'd also look at something like yext.com for directory management. I have a friend who specializes in this stuff if you'd like an intro shoot me a PM.

https://www.biggerpockets.com/member-blogs/3915/86452-how-to-fund-your-first-self-storage-deal