How Many Units of Self-Storage Can I Put on an Acre of Land?

When you are looking at a piece of property trying to determine if it is a good investment for your self-storage project, you need to be able to roughly estimate how many units you can put on that piece of land. The first step is to estimate the amount of square footage that you can build for a single story facility.

In our last blog, we talked about how to estimate the number of square feet you can get in a single story facility on one acre of land. You take roughly 39% of 43,560 sq. ft. which is the square footage of an acre. This is to allow for roads, and setbacks and building sizes etc. You may be in an area with smaller setbacks, or you may be in an area with larger setbacks, this percentage is just an estimate. For every acre of land that you have, you can build approximately 16,989 sq. ft. in a single story self-storage facility. Now that you have that number, you can estimate the number of units you can build.

The most popular size unit is a 10x10. This means that many of your units will be this size. You will have smaller units and larger units but for our calculations we are going to assume that they offset each other. If you are planning on putting in more smaller units then this estimate will be low. If you are going to put in more larger units than this estimate will be high. Because you are looking you will be putting in units of various sizes you should use 110 square feet for your average unit size.

If you take 16,989 sq. ft. and divide that by 110 sq ft you can put in approximately 154 units on a single story facility for every acre of land. Remember that this number is an estimate, but it gives you somewhere to start so that you can estimate what your potential income is going to be for a single story facility.

If you are building a climate controlled multi-story facility, then your numbers will change. You need to anticipate that 25% of your square footage will go to hallways and staircases and elevators. You will need to reduce the number of units by 25%. That means that you can get approximately 115 units on each floor in a climate controlled self-storage facility.

Have fun looking for potential lots that you can build on and as always, happy investing.