260. Building Storage Units for Beginners: What Experts Know That You Don’t w/Forge Building Company
Self Storage Income
AJ Osborne
4.9 • 591 Ratings
🗓️ 3 September 2024
⏱️ 61 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Building storage units is not easy, but if you listen to this episode, you’ll be more educated on the self storage development process than most investors out there. If you’re thinking of building a storage facility, this information is essential for you to make the best design decisions and avoid financial pitfalls that could sink your project before it even gets off the ground.
Hamish Bell and Melissa Anderson from Forge Building Company join Conner today to talk about the self storage industry and what’s happening with development in 2024. With interest rates still high, more projects are being abandoned, but does that make now a bad time to build self storage facilities? What happens when the supply gets taken up due to all the delayed and canceled projects from today? We’re sharing our thoughts on this episode.
Plus, we’ll be getting into the details of building storage facilities, from prices to designing and planning, getting the city on board before you break ground, pitfalls to avoid, and the process you must go through to begin, whether you’re a new investor or someone with previous development experience.
What you’ll learn in today’s show:
- Self storage development 101 and why building storage is so different than other asset types
- Why more self storage development deals are being abandoned in 2024
- Construction costs and calculating the price to build your next facility
- Conversions vs. new build development and which is a better bet in 2024
- Design and planning, plus the one thing you should do BEFORE you begin to build
- Advice for brand new investors to get started with their first new build facility
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Email Forge: sales@forgebuildings.com
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | If I'm starting out, I'm looking at developing today, what would be some good resources for me to really start getting an understanding of what my cost per square foot's going to be? |
| 0:08.0 | I think that that's probably the number one question that we get. |
| 0:12.0 | If you don't know what you're doing, you're just going to start throwing money everywhere. |
| 0:16.0 | And it's not going to be organized. |
| 0:18.0 | When you get to a point where you're real serious about it and we're going to design, let's do it. Let's get your layout put together. Welcome back, everybody, to the self-storage |
| 0:32.5 | income podcast. Today, we have a couple incredible guests hanging out with us today Melissa Hamish thanks so |
| 0:39.3 | much for joining us again you guys are with the forge building company fantastic |
| 0:43.5 | company fantastic products that you guys put out we've done several project with you |
| 0:48.5 | guys couldn't be more excited to have you guys here to talk about cell storage |
| 0:52.1 | development not only as it relates to our projects but what you're seeing in the market give us a really good understanding of the pulse you guys here to talk about cell storage development, not only as it relates to our projects, |
| 0:54.4 | but what you're seeing in the market, give us a really good understanding of the pulse you guys |
| 0:58.5 | see, just being in this every single day, developing facilities, working with owners. |
| 1:03.6 | Really, really excited to have you guys here today. So with that said, you guys want to just |
| 1:07.5 | introduce yourselves a little bit, give a little bit of background for some of our new listeners. |
| 1:11.5 | I'm Hamish Bell. I'm the president of Forge Building Company. Forge building company specializes in building self-storage facilities. |
| 1:20.2 | Fantastic. I'm Melissa Anderson and I'm an account executive at Forge Building Company. And like Hamish said, we are the steel building experts. We've been doing |
| 1:28.0 | this for over 15 years. We have built over 60 million square feet of self-storage on over 500 |
| 1:35.2 | projects in those 15 years. That's incredible. And you guys are all over the country. You're not |
| 1:40.4 | just specific to one area. All over the country. We've built in Hawaii and Alaska. Wow. That's amazing. I bet that Hawaiian was a doozy. That was probably a project. It took a lot of logistics. Holy moly. Yeah, that's something else. Everything goes on a boat. Yeah, exactly. That's incredible. That's incredible. Well, that said, let's kick things off. You guys are |
| 2:01.6 | talking about, I mean, 60 million square feet, insane amount of storage being built. A lot. |
| 2:07.5 | What are you guys seeing today in the development world and storage as it is? I know last few |
| 2:13.6 | years it's been kind of hit and miss. You know, we had the COVID era, then we had all the time |
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