Self Storage Newbee - please help

[Daniel Eley]

Hello, and thank you in advance for reading this!  I am a dentist, looking to get into self-storage as an owner/operator.  I own two dental offices, so I have business experience, but no self storage experience.  My goal is to put some work in up front in order to end up with a passive income stream that runs itself with minimal babysitting on my part (bringing in enough money for me to hire people to deal with the inevitable headaches).  The following is my general plan, and some assumptions that I have, based on reading other posts/threads.  Anyone with self storage knowledge, please let me know your thoughts (feel free to be blunt), and let me know if my assumptions are wrong.  Thank you!

      I am considering buying a large piece of land (14 acres) adjacent to the highway in Florida (flat land), and building it out in phases.  Phase 1 would be 1 acre of storage units, along with boat/RV storage.  As those units fill up, I would then build out the next acre, and so on and so on.  The asking price for the land is $1.6 million.  I have read that single story storage units will have roughly 40% rentable square footage from the total raw square footage (if all 14 acres were built out it would be 244,000 rentable square feet), and that construction costs will run in the $50/sq ft range.  I am ballparking that Phase 1 ( the land, to build out 1 acre of self storage, add a large gravel area for RV and boat storage, and fence all of that in) will be around $2.5 million.  I would need to finance the bulk of that.  I am assuming 20% down payment will be needed, and that the rate for an investment loan will be in the 5 - 6.5% range.  I'm sure that there are companies that analyze an area, and let you know whether there is adequate demand for a new self storage facility.  Do you all have any recommendations for this type of service?  Also, I saw on a different post that Scott Meyers has good workshops for beginners.  Do you have any recommendations for which workshops are most beneficial?  I looked at his website, and there are quite a few to choose from.  Thank you for taking the time to read all of this!