How Many Self-Storage Units Can I Put on This Vacant Lot?

Have you ever looked at a vacant lot and wondered how many self-storage units you could put on that lot? You may be able to imagine your self-storage facility on that lot, but that doesn’t mean that you can run the numbers in your head. Here are some formulas to help you run numbers when you are staring at a vacant lot trying to decide if you can make your dream a reality on that lot.

First of all, you should always look at lots that are about three acres. Obviously, this is not true in dense cities where everything goes up. An acre of land is 43,560 square feet. However, you can typically only build on about 39% of that land. This means that you can only build 16,988 square feet per acre. If you are looking at a three acre parcel, then you can build a 50,965 square foot facility.

Unless you are in an area that has some difficult or different requirements, you can assume that every three acres of land will yield 50,965 square feet of building space. Now you need to look at your market, is there a demand for climate controlled square footage? If there is, then you will want to divide your facility accordingly. If there isn’t a huge demand, then you may do a smaller percentage of the building as climate controlled and the rest as non-climate controlled.

Now we need to talk about the size of your units. There are some people who just want a small 5x5 unit and there are other people who need 10x30 units. However, the nice thing about the demand for units is that they make a nice bell curve with the majority of people wanting a 10x10. Remember when you are making this estimate, that it is an estimate. You are just trying to get an idea if this lot will work for you. You want to know if you can pay what they are asking for the property. Because of this bell curve, you can divide the square footage by 110 to determine how many units you can put in your facility.

If you are going to do 100% non-climate controlled properties. Then you would take 50,965 and divide that by 110. You can put 463 non-climate controlled units every 3 acres.

Climate controlled properties are a little different. You are going to have staircases and hallways and elevators. Because of that, you have to reduce your usable square footage by 25%. This means that instead of starting with 50,965 square feet, you are going to start with 38,223 square feet of usable square footage. (50,965*.75)

Now that you know how much square footage you have, you can use the same formula as before. We are going to divide by 110 to come up with 347 climate controlled units every 3 acres. The nice thing is now that you know how many units you can put on a lot, you can divide it up into whatever proportions you want.

So if you wanted to do 30% climate controlled and 70% non-climate controlled. Then you would divide each of those numbers accordingly and that would give you your total number of units. For example, you would take 463 non-climate controlled and multiply that by 70%. This gives you 324 units. Then you would take 347 and multiply by 30%. This gives you 104 units. So your facility will have 438 units total.

Hopefully this helps you with determining if you can make your self-storage facility fit on the property you are looking at. You will get a more definite number for your area after you have met with the architect, but this will get you started. As always, happy investing.