306. $350K/Year Cash Flow from Our FIRST Self Storage Development (How We Did It)

Self Storage Income

AJ Osborne

How To, Investing, Business, Entrepreneurship, Education

4.9 • 591 Ratings

🗓️ 22 July 2025

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What goes into a self storage development deal? You’re about to find out! Today, we’re breaking down the first self storage facility we ever built—everything from the property’s financials and the construction timeline to how we ultimately turned a $4.3-million project into a $13-million self storage business that generates over $350,000 in annual cash flow!

In this episode, AJ and George will show you how to take an initial concept and turn it into a fully stabilized self storage facility, step by step. The truth is that many developers approach self storage from the wrong angle, so we’ll show you what to focus on before getting started—like narrowing down your target customer and building with them in mind to the dangers of cutting corners on quality and focusing more on upfront costs than revenue potential.

But that’s not all. We’ll also share some of the things we wish we knew before building our first facility and the biggest lessons learned that saved us thousands on future projects. Whether you’re curious about the development side of the self storage industry or seriously considering your own development project, you don’t want to miss this one!

What you’ll learn in today’s show:

The step-by-step process of developing a self storage facility from scratch
How we turned a $4.3M facility into a $13M+ business
A complete breakdown of the self storage development timeline
How to build a self storage facility that attracts premium customers
Creating a competitive edge without low rent prices or cheap construction
Why investing more money upfront leads to higher rents and less risk

Helpful Articles:

🌳 Work with someone experienced in self storage loans at Live Oak Bank! We seriously love them. https://www.liveoakbank.com/business-loans/self-storage/

Transcript

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0:00.0	What is this cash flowing for a month? What's the income? What's this look like?
0:03.3	On an annualized basis, 350,000 net after everything. So that's all included.
0:11.0	If you have to do a little more work, spend the time up front to do the work,
0:15.0	build a good product in an area that has high demand and good tenants, and your risk is
0:20.6	dramatically lower.
0:22.4	And your odds of being successful are not only higher, but the amount of success you'll have is way,
0:28.5	way more. So we filled up the facility in less than three months.
0:32.7	Totally filled, occupied, and we started raising rents.
0:34.8	We were the only person in a five mile radius that had that
0:38.6	product time. So we got 100% of that demand, 100% of it.
0:48.8	What's up, guys? We are here at a storage facility that I developed and we are going through this development
0:57.8	and giving you the numbers.
0:59.1	So what did it look like?
1:00.5	How did we get in?
1:01.6	How much did it cost?
1:02.6	How much does it cash flow and everything in between?
1:06.2	Now we've done this one, which is a stabilized facility that we have owned, and we also have
1:11.7	other developments that we have done and are currently doing.
1:14.8	So we want to kind of look at this and how you approach a development.
1:18.8	What does that look like?
1:20.5	And how does it play out?
1:21.8	Like, what did the actual numbers turn out?
	...

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