Self-Storage Facility as First Solely Investment Piece?

[Elijah Miller]

Good evening, everyone.  

  Last year, I purchased a house for myself with 3 additional rooms to rent.  So far, this has been going very well.  I have two vacancies coming up soon that have me a little worried, but this certainly won't be a show stopper.  

Now, I've been on the look out for some good deals with everything that is going on; mainly for my dad or girlfriend to get some additional streams of income flowing.  This led to finding some potential foreclosure opportunities, maybe tax liens, but also a storage facility.

The storage facility has 34 units, and a 700 sqft office space.  It's currently bringing in about $1900/mo, and the owner is considering selling at $160k.  This seems like a pretty solid deal to me at first glance considering it's at 90% capacity, he's done no advertising, and the office space is currently sitting simply unused.  We have ideas on ways to capitalize on the space and encourage timely payment compliance from the renters, which he did note has been an issue.

A restaurant right near it has just changed hands for no less than $220k.

My question to you guys is two fold: What else would you be looking at/for? Would this be a good group-venture and first real estate asset with the sole intention of investment? 

And if so, how would you go about financing it?  I believe we should be able to scrape together about 32k, which is what I'm imagining the down payment requirement will be, but if there was a way to make it less so that we could diversify- that would be awesome too.

We all currently hold LLC's in our state of operation. One of them is turning hefty profits if this helps.

Thanks in advance!  I look forward to the creativity!