Michael,
AJ Osborne and Mark Helm are the best in the business. I see Mike Wagner in this. He also knows his stuff a lot!
We put an LOI in on a facility up on 31 in Clay. It was 5 years old but only had 35% occupancy... not vacancy, occupancy! The owner had zero idea what he was doing and let a fertilizer store set up shop in the store front in exchange to manage the facility. Needless to say they were doing a terrible job but we saw massive potential. Later we discovered upon further research that the building construction was very poor ( 2-3 inch wide cracks in the foundation that went that length of the building after only 5 years of being built) and that there was 100k square feet of climate controlled self storage being built at the mall right across the street!
With all that said, we dropped our offer by half. Someone else paid double of what we offered. We were not willing to take the risk on as Syracuse is very saturated with storage at this time with more facilities being built (you can look this up on Radius+). B&C has been around for a while, they are great and they own a majority of the market share in this area.
I saw all of this to caution you. If you plan to build you will want what is called a "feasibility report" , that will tell you if there is demand enough to build and what square foot per capita is needed.
I hope this helps!
