Self-storage companies add units in Chesterfield
November 5, 2009 by Richard Foster
Americans need more room for their stuff. And that means more self-storage businesses in Chesterfield.
Storage units tend to range from the size of walk-in closets to rooms large enough to hold all the belongings in a four-bedroom home.
In the last two years, as the economy worsened, the number of self-storage businesses in Chesterfield grew from 31 to 35 facilities, an increase of 13 percent.
There are about 1,060 self-storage facilities across Virginia; Henrico and Hanover counties have about 30 and 25 self-storage facilities, respectively.
And the local storage industry is holding steady or growing slightly because as people leave foreclosed homes, they need a place to put their stuff.
“With some of the way the housing market’s going, we have some tenants who are downsizing from a three-bedroom home to a one-bedroom apartment,” said John Poss, a manager at Space Mart Self Storage, which opened this year at 5300 Commonwealth Centre Parkway.
The self-storage business has moved beyond the garage-units and added bells and whistles in order to draw a variety of customers, including businesses.
“This industry started 40 years ago with barbed wire and a field, and now you have a standalone industry that is very sophisticated,” said Timothy Dietz, a vice president of communications for the Alexandria-based National Self Storage Association. Dietz said there are about 52,000 self-storage facilities in the United States, or about five times as many as the whole rest of the world combined.
The new Uncle Bob’s in Midlothian looks more like an extended-stay hotel or an office park than the garage-like facilities of old. It offers storage spaces with climate control and dehumidification process, which combats mold, mildew and corrosion.
The vast majority of business at the Uncle Bob’s chain is from homeowners.
“[It’s] empty nesters who are maybe downsizing and don’t want to get rid of their stuff,” or people who need temporary or longer-term storage while they’re in between residences, said Diane Piegza, a spokeswoman for Sovran Self Storage.
At Space Mart Self Storage, customers can get climate-controlled facilities and coded 24- hour secure access to their belongings, which are protected by motion-controlled cameras, Poss said. Space Mart also offers free use of a 15-foot moving truck, as well as storage facilities with indoor access, reducing bugs, pollen and other pollutants that could dirty one’s belongings.
Like Uncle Bob’s, Space Mart’s customers are mostly residential customers; however, commercial businesses are a growing clientele for the self-storage industry. In recent years, insurance companies, federal laws and industry regulations have called for stricter auditing and record-keeping procedures. Therefore, Poss makes sales calls to local businesses such as medical and legal offices, offering secure record storage on a high-security third floor accessible by an elevator with individual code entries, which tracks entrances and exits.
“That’s another thing that’s changed in the world of storage, my role as a facility manager,” Poss said. “It helps to go out there and market your facility.” For instance, as the Christmas shopping season nears, Poss is visiting with retail stores, offering his storage facilities for inventory overruns.
Still, nationally about 70 to 85 percent of self-storage customers are residential.
At Uncle Bob’s, “Probably 30 percent of our customers are commercial, and they range from record and document storage to landscapers and fencing companies and small contractors who keep their equipment in storage, rather than Joe the Plumber … keeping his stuff in the garage so that he and his wife can’t get their cars in, he rents a storage space,” Piegza said.
Space Mart hosts some Internet-based home businesses that use the storage space as warehouses to cut down on the overhead of office space, Poss said.
Offering roughly 1.3 million square feet of storage space, the county’s self-storage facilities offer 4.63 square feet of storage per county citizen.
That’s not too far away from the national average. “Every man, woman and child in the country could have about 7 feet of storage space,” Dietz said.
“If we could get under those roofs when it was raining, we’d all be dry.”
More reading: A phenomenal article in the New York Times entitled, The Self-Storage Self
This story first ran in the Chesterfield Observer, which is an RBS news partner.
That the self storage market in the Richmond metro area is “overbuilt,” as was mentioned in the original article, is a bit of an understatement. It is companies such as Space Mart Self Storage and Uncle Bob’s that do not do their due diligence in assessing the demand in a market that has caused oversaturation in this business. It is reckless to believe it is good news to report that “as the economy worsened, the number of self storage facilities in Chesterfield County grew … 13 percent. Supplying more space does not mean there’s a demand for more space. As new facilities open and undercut current market pricing, everyone’s physical occupancy drops as the current demand just adjusts and spreads itself out among all competitors. Then comes the decline in economic occupancy as prices have to fall in order for everyone to compete. This economy also doesn’t create the need for more storage space. The reasons customers use self storage hasn’t changed. As some find a new need because of downsizing or foreclosures due to the economy, current storage customers, also due to the economy, reassess their need and find free room in an attic, basement or garage or decide they don’t really need to keep all they’ve been storing in the first place. It bears repeating that we, in the self storage industry, do not create demand simply by creating more supply.