Tips and Tricks for When You Are Designing a Self-Storage Facility!!!

As you are designing your self-storage conversion, you need to keep in mind who will be using your facility, how to keep them safe and comfortable, what are the requirements for handicapped accessible units, how will you bring in your clientele, and how you want to collect payments.

The first thing you need to consider when designing your self-storage conversion is who will be using your facility, your target audience, not the price range or the geographical area, but who will be actually coming to your self-storage facility? Sure, men come to self-storage facilities too, but more often than not, you are going to have women at your facility. Are they comfortable? They are in a big building by themselves carrying precious belongings. They need to feel safe.

How hard is it for these women to carry their belongings to their unit? Do you have a dolly to help them if it is a long walk? Leave a few dollies by each door to make it easy for people to use them when they come to your self-storage facility. Do you have enough elevators in your self-storage facility to make it easy to find an elevator?

How is the lighting? Is it easy to find your way or are there dark corners everywhere? Again, you want people to feel safe. You don’t have to have lights on all the time, you just need to have timers and motion sensors that will make sure that the lights turn on only when people need them. Bright lights will help people feel safer. When possible, put a window at the end of a hallway to let in some natural light too.

As you design your self-storage facility, the climate is also something that you need to consider. In the summer self-storage buildings get hot and in the winter they get cold. You need to climate control your hallways so that your tenants can access their belongings comfortably.

When you make your self-storage facility plans, plan for a few handicapped accessible units. If you need to, you can buy a conversion kit. If you do not have a few kits available or a few units available, you might open yourself up to internet trolls who are just looking for someone to sue. If they call you and you say that you don’t have any accessible units available, you are opening yourself up to a lawsuit. Instead, make sure you find out what the requirements are for your size building and then make that many units handicapped accessible.

There are ways to entice people to rent with you. One idea is to offer someone the first month rent free if they sign a long-term contract or offer a reduce rent 3 months contract. Most people are not going to move their belongings out after three months. Those items are nicely tucked away and out of sight. They don’t want to go move them again just because their three month special is over. Most people don’t think they will need the storage for more than a few months, but those few months can drag into years.

Always have your clients pay their self-storage bill with a credit or debit card that is set up on automatic payments. If you can just debit the card each month and they don’t have to do anything or think about it, it streamlines the experience for both of you. They don’t have to think about the actual value of what they are storing, and you get your money like clockwork.

There are so many moving parts in a new project but the important things to remember are that it needs to make sense. It needs to be profitable in the long run. Enjoy designing and converting your next project. As always, happy investing.