There is a long and meticulous process to building a storage facility. It’s just not about purchasing land, which in itself is something people already struggle with. And, it’s very important that you understand land before you build a brand new storage facility. Join Stacy Rossetti as she breaks down the whole storage building process from land zoning, getting land permits, getting a feasibility study, talking to lenders, and much more. It’s a long process so you don’t want to miss a single word in today’s episode. Also, learn about some of her properties that they’re going to be adding more units onto. So get ready and start looking to build your own storage facility!

—

Watch the episode here

 

Listen to the podcast here

 

How To Build A New Storage Facility

How is everybody doing? Somebody is in Austin. I’m in Austin. Who’s in Austin? Anybody in Austin is awesome because I’m originally from Austin. That’s why I love Austin people. Ethan Bates is from Austin. I’m going to be speaking at the Austin Commercial Real Estate Investing group. I’m not 100% sure. It’s at the Casa Chapala on Burnet and 183. If you want to come to hang out with me, I would love to meet you or anybody in the Central Texas area. I spoke at an event in the Waco area and ended up meeting this guy. His name is Ken Harris, if anybody knows him in the Austin area.

He happens to run this commercial real estate meeting. What he does is syndication. That’s all he does. He’s an older guy that does syndications and stuff. He asked me to come and speak at his Commercial Real Estate Investing group. It’s a networking session. It’s lunch networking. I’m going to get up and maybe talk for a few minutes. If anybody doesn’t know me, I live in an RV.

We travel full-time. We’re headed to New Mexico. We’re going to spend some time in New Mexico, which I’m excited about because New Mexico is one of those states where it’s never on the top of your mind like, “I want to go visit this place.” The more I started looking into New Mexico, it has so many awesome national parks and there’s so much history there. We’re going to take Lillian, travel through New Mexico and go to all the national parks. I’m going to teach her about Native Americans, where our country came from and stuff. We’re a huge proponent.

We road school and homeschool. I’m the type of person that said, “Instead of reading a book, let’s go there.” That’s what I told Lillian. I was like, “You’re going to go and learn about our country, where we came from, the Native Americans and all this stuff.” She’s excited about that too. She loves going to national parks and learning about history. She loves dinosaurs. Her main thing is dinosaurs. All over the Southwest, there are so many dinosaur things to go look at. We’re going to go to the Petrified National Forest, go check that out and stuff like that.

I’m excited. I love visiting Austin because I’m originally from Austin. All my high school friends and my family is here and stuff. I love coming and hanging out here. We’re going to go travel and hang out for 2023. I appreciate you coming and hanging out with me. It’s a little relaxed because we have a lot going on. Here’s what I wanted to talk to before I get started on everything. The goal of this is about building a storage facility. I personally have never built a storage facility from the ground up, but we will get into two projects that we are looking to do additions on.

 

I did my coaching calls on Mondays with all my students. I talked to a student. For her very first deal, she wants to build a new one. It’s going to be 300 units or something. It’s a bigger size. She’s gung-ho and ready to build this thing. She has a friend that did the same thing. She’s like, “If she can do it, I can do it,” which is awesome. I love that mentality. I started thinking, “I talked about new construction a lot here.” I figured we would go over all the steps on what you need to do to build your facility. With building your facility, you got to have a strong stomach.

That’s what I always say because it’s a lot of work. It’s very time-consuming. You have to be a good manager. That’s what you have to do because you got to stay on top of things. If you don’t stay on top of it, then it drags on and on. We will get into that too. We’ve got Austin, Oklahoma, Allentown, Pennsylvania and Arlington, Texas, “Somebody is building.” Lucer is one of the students. He’s building. He wants to build. I know about that. New Hampshire is here and North Carolina, “We built a conversion. It’s under construction for a facility where we want to build and do boat and RV storage.” That’s Tim Hancock. Thank you for hanging out.

For anybody that does not know who I am, I’m Stacy Rossetti. I’ve been investing in self-storage for years. We own eleven facilities. I’ve been teaching and coaching for a couple of years as well. I love teaching and talking about storage. I’m a storage nerd. The coaching program is called StorageNerds. If you want to be a storage nerd, make sure that you check out StorageNerds.com. That’s where all of us and the community hangs out. We talk shop, help each other and try to even do deals together and all kinds of stuff.

The next webinar I’m doing is the Self Storage Fund of America. If anybody is interested in learning about the fund, that comes on right after this. Usually, this time block is for me teaching to anybody that wants to hear me and then the next time block is going to be the fund and me pitching the fund and going over the phone. Whether or not you have the money to invest or not, come hear me out because then you could see how pitches go and stuff. The truth is this is the first fund I’ve ever pitched. I’m doing the best I can as well too.

Understanding Land

I tell my team this, too, “We need to get this going because the more momentum that you have, the more you’re going to create and be able to do.” I’m a person that’s like, “Let’s take action and go. It’s not 100%, but I’m going to get out there, do the best I possibly can and figure it out as I go.” That’s how it is. What I wanted to do first is to show you a couple of storage facilities that we’re thinking about adding onto and we’re looking to add onto. We will go over the process of new construction, “If I’m interested in building, what should I do?”

The more momentum that you have, the more you're going to create, the more you can be able to do. Share on X

First of all, I wanted to show you some ways that you can find land as well and the websites that I looked up. What happened was I talked to one of my students. She wants to build a storage facility and she’s like, “I’ve been talking to this realtor about these properties for sale.” She’s in the Greensboro, North Carolina area. She talked to her realtor in the area. It’s within a ten-mile radius of where she lives. She is like, “I’m going to build a storage facility where I live.” She lives outside the city. She went in a little bit and talked to the realtor. The realtor said that the best piece of land that she can find online is 3 acres for $225,000. That seems like an expensive land.

I get that the United States is getting more expensive, but the truth is that when you go directly to the owner, you will get a much better deal. On top of that, you can also try to convince the owner that they can owner finance the land. She had two options. One of them was to go a little bit towards the city, be closer to the city, and buy 3 for $225,000 or go a little more North this way or outside more North of where she was. It’s along the highway but not right on the highway. The area is growing and expanding.

She has an acquaintance. Somebody introduced her to this person that had 23 acres for $275,000, a little bit more North or the $225,000 more towards the city. This is how our conversation started, “What do you think about that? Would you like to be more towards the city with the 3 acres for $225,000 or would you like to be a little bit more North and have 23 acres with $275,000?” For me, I would want the 23 acres for $275,000. The good thing was that the owner is open to owner financing because I said, “Ask the owner if they’re open to owner financing.”

For all of my students that are here, you have access to the million-dollar offer letter. That’s the new offer letter I came up with. I love the name million-dollar offer letter. On that offer letter, essentially, what you’re doing is four different offers. One offer is your cash offer and the other three are owner financing offers. Anybody can do that, but my students have access to the one that we use. You can use that for storage and any type of property, including land. When you make an offer, you should make a couple of different offers.

You don’t want to just make one offer because the doors are closed if they don’t want that offer. That’s why I love to make owner financing offers because it plants the seed and opens up the mind of the owner. Maybe they think, “I could do an owner finance offer. My cash offer was a little bit too low and maybe we have to come up.” It gets their wheels turning. What I told her was, “Take that offer letter and make four different to the landowner. Do the same thing that you would do for storage if it was a storage facility, but do it for land instead and try to get the owner to finance.”

 

This is what we talked about. I wanted to share that with you because you can do the same thing as well. I wanted to point out that she had somebody that introduced her to somebody that she knew who had 20 acres for sale. If you don’t know anybody and say, “I want to build and I don’t know any place to get land,” you can go to a real estate agent specializing in land. You can do that and go onto the MLS. You can hire them and they can search all the land for you. I feel that you can get way better deals on land if you go directly to the owner.

That’s why I wanted to show you that website. You could look up land for sale and any state that you want. If you wanted to be in North Carolina and see Lakeway, North Carolina, you could do that or do it nationwide and keep an eye on what’s coming up like LandWatch. It’s Land For Sale Near Me. There’s Lands of America. Typing in land for sale either generically or putting in the areas you’re interested in would be a great way to start looking for properties for sale to get an idea of some things. These things like Lands of Texas, Lands of America and LandWatch are all most likely wholesalers.

These are all people that are sending out letters and doing all the work for you. They will sell you the property. A lot of times, they will even owner finance the property as well. That’s one way that you could do it. If you know for sure that you want to buy like, “I want to build in Greensboro,” like this student, then you could buy a land list and mail out the letters yourself, which is the same way that all these people that we saw from the websites are doing. It’s not that difficult to do that. The truth is if you mail out a letter, it’s very easy to get people to call you for land because I’ve done this and focused on land. For a while, I did this.

People are always wanting to sell their land. Nobody wants to sell their houses, but a lot of people want to sell their land. You will get a lot of phone calls if you buy a list and then mail it to landowners. The hardest part about land is comping the land because there are not a lot of good ways to comp land. You could look online and stuff like that. You will find 20 acres here that sold for $1 million and 20 acres right next to what I sold for $200,000. Sometimes I’m like, “I don’t know why that is, but it is what it is.” Probably one person used a realtor and one person didn’t use a realtor.

Valuing Your Land

I want to get into the land part because if you’re going to be building new construction, whether if you have a facility and you’re adding more units on and value-adding the property or purchasing a property itself and then building on. You would need to understand the land and what the appraised value of the land is. We talked to an owner over here in Texas and the Austin area up here where I was. When we were driving for storage, we found an owner that wanted to sell his boat and RV storage. He had a five-acre lot and about 75 boat and RV parking lanes.

When buying land, if you go directly to the owner, you will get a much better deal. Share on X

It’s covered but open parking. It wasn’t completely enclosed or anything like that. He wanted to sell. When we called and talked to him, he was like, “I’m selling. Make me an offer.” We said, “We’re going to go out there and take a look at it.” We took a look and he has one row of boats and RVs. He was making around $72,000 a year on his boat and RV parking. When I viewed that, he had 5 acres of land and then he was taking around 2.5 acres for the boat. Remember, boats and RVs take up a lot of space. Especially, he had big lanes that had huge RV spots and stuff.

Those things could get up to 60 feet sometimes. It takes a lot of space to move in. Now it’s truck parking or something. He had maybe 75 spaces on one half and then nothing on the other. There’s a free open area on the other. When we looked at this property for $72,000 a year, we valued the property at $600,000. I said, “When I look at our property, there’s storage on it, it’s an income-producing property and it’s earning this much money, that means it’s worth X amount of dollars.” I don’t account for the value of the land.

The owner of the property, in his mind, thought that this land was worth a lot of money. It’s in the Austin area but on the outskirts. It’s in a little town called Liberty Hill. It’s almost where the Metro Austin area is starting to bump up to it but not quite. It was the end of the secondary and the beginning of the tertiary market. That’s essentially what it is. In his mind, he thought these 5 acres were worth a gazillion bazillion dollars. I called him up and I was like, “You’re only making $72,000. It’s only valued for $600,000 or something like this.”

He’s like, “I want $2.4 million for this property.” I was like, “Nobody is going to buy this thing for $2.4 million.” There’s a storage facility right around the corner from it. It’s real storage with enclosed units. It was a huge property with 300 units on this property of 5 acres. It was a weird shape. It could only fit maybe 300 units on it. He’s like, “That property sold for $2 million.” The owner, in his mind, had no idea how to value his property. He was like, “The neighbor over there sold his property for $2 million. Mine is worth $2 million.”

I had to tell him, “That is not how commercial real estate works. Essentially, commercial real estate means if you buy that piece of land and you know you’re going to do something with it as a business, the value of the business is the value of that property. If you had extra 5 acres, 10 acres or 20 acres of land, we could value that. You have 2 acres of land that we could put another maybe 75 units on. Maybe I could pay a little bit of money for it, but I’m not going to pay $2 million for it. That’s for sure.” He did not understand that concept at all.

 

My point is that some owners do not know the value of their property or land. They’re just going off what happens next to them, so they get these numbers in their minds. It’s your job to educate them, let them know and show them that the property is only worth a certain amount of money. I explained it to him and said, “First of all, there’s no bank that’s going to finance that because a bank essentially looks at the income of the property.” They’re not going to be like, “It’s 5 acres and it’s making $75,000. There are another 2 acres there. That’s worth $2 million.” No bank or lender is going to do that.

I said, “I seriously doubt anybody is going to pay $2 million for it.” He was like, “I’m going to hold out and see. I don’t need to sell this thing. If somebody wants to give me $2 million, I’ll sell it.” That’s so funny because there are a lot of owners that I talked to and they were like, “It’s $2 million.” It’s some random number that they pulled out of their butt. I’ve had that several times. I’m not sure where that comes from, but maybe that’s a number he has. You want to make sure that if you’re buying a facility that has land on it and the facility has a lot of land, it’s going to be valued as something. If it has a little bit of extra land on it, it’s not valued that much.

That is land in itself. Another thing I wanted to point out too was that you could also join Facebook groups like land for sale. I’m doing this as well because I want to buy some land. I’m following Lands for sale in Georgia. You can put the state here as well. See, “Land for sale in Texas by owner and land for sale near me.” I’m from Texas, so it comes up. Here’s South Carolina. I’m a member of Farms, Land and Houses group. I like to join these groups. I set it on highlights. Whenever there’s a lot of engagement, it will pop up on my feed.

I like to see what’s for sale in what areas and what’s happening in the world. That’s what keeps me up to date on land for sale or property for sale in certain areas that I’m interested in. I’m always aware of what the market looks like. You should be joining groups. This is the Facebook Marketplace and there’s always stuff for sale here. You can always look in here and keep an eye out for properties that are for sale. I go to groups on land for sale and I’ll join whatever groups like San Antonio Land For Sale or something if I’m interested in that area. Here’s Texas For Sale By Owner.

More On Our Properties

I join these groups. They will pop up on my feed. If I’m sitting in the middle of the night when I can’t sleep, sometimes I’ll get up, scroll on Facebook, look around and see what’s out there in the world. That’s what I do. I keep myself up to date on lands for sale across the country. I’m open to purchasing anywhere in the country. I’m like, “Let me see what’s out there and keep up to date on it.” That’s the land portion. I wanted to share a couple of properties that we are going to be adding to. This is our website, MsLillians.com. You can come to check it out.

Nobody wants to sell their houses right now, but a lot of people want to sell their land. Share on X

Let’s do Georgia. I pulled up the Newnan location in Georgia. It’s the one that we’re going to do something with. We’re not 100% sure if we’re going to do storage or parking. The property goes to where these trees are. There’s this whole section right here. There are two buildings. You could see there’s boat parking, RV parking and then boat and RV parking. It’s this weird shape. I don’t know why the owner did that. Essentially, our idea is either to make this into more boat and RV parking because our boat and RV parking for this area is always full.

We may fence this in and make it into boat and RV parking. That means that we would have to pave the whole thing and make this all match. We would make this all asphalt or we could get rid of all this, put more buildings and not put RV and boat parking here. We could get rid of that because, honestly, you could put an L-shaped building here and a lot of units. This is a total of 3 acres. We have 60 units and 15 parking spaces. The parking spaces do take up a lot of room. That’s the one thing with parking, especially with boat and RV parking, because they need to get in and out.

That’s why these spaces were a little bit bigger over here because the owner was thinking, “Maybe I could park some bigger ones back over here.” We’re figuring that out and trying to figure out what we would do. It doesn’t look like a lot, but this is about, including the boat and RV, 2 acres of land. You could fit around 50 larger boats and RV stuff or maybe up to 75 smaller slots. RVs are getting a lot bigger nowadays. You need a lot more room. It’s 50 more parking spaces here. We would have to fence this in, asphalt this, put new lanes everywhere, and reline the whole thing.

We could do that. It’s already fenced in here. I got a fence quote on another facility a while back. It was a 2-acre lot and it was going to cost $25,000. It’s expensive to put a fence up. Does anybody who’s putting a fence up know what the square footage is? Essentially, it’s still a lot of money. I’m guessing it would take $20,000 to fence this whole thing because we have to redo a little bit right here and stuff. We re-asphalted another one of our facilities and did about an acre of asphalt. It cost us about $30,000. It was expensive.

It’s going to cost $50,000 to asphalt this and maybe $20,000 to fence that in. Let’s say it’s a good $70,000 to do that. We could put more units in. To put more units costs around $40 a square foot. Also, with the boat and RV storage, essentially, these are all open. These are not covered at all. The area doesn’t call for covered. We could do covered boat and RV parking. I remember before COVID, it used to cost $15 a square foot. It is up to about $20 a square foot now. They’re not completely enclosed or anything but the covered parking for boat and RV is about $20 a square foot to build.

 

Storage facilities are about $40 a square foot. That should be including a lot, honestly. I have a student that’s building maybe 40 or 50 units. It’s not a big thing. He says it’s about $40 a square foot. That includes not clearing the land but prepping the land, grading the land, putting the asphalt and building the units as well. Also, that includes the company managing the whole project because they do charge a management fee if you want them to manage it. You can manage it yourself and save money. He’s getting them to manage the whole thing. That’s what he’s doing.

It’s coming out to about $40 a square foot for all that. Essentially, what you would need to do is compare, “If I have to pay $40 a square foot to build a storage facility or $20 a square foot to build a boat storage, what will I receive as payments?” Boat and RV parking depends on how big the lane is. It’s costing around anywhere from $75 to $100. We charge about $75 a lane but most likely, that’s going to go up to $100. In one of the facilities that we have, we repaved. It’s beautiful. We got the whole thing nice. We’re going up to $100 a lane on that for all of our boats.

That does big trucks and things like that too. Essentially, it’s $100 a lane. Typically, you’re going to see anywhere from $50 to $100. I would not recommend parking cars. It’s a bad idea to park cars because when people are coming in, working on them and stuff like this all the time, it’s super annoying. Our rule is, “Do not park any cars.” We park boats, RVs, pickup trucks, big rigs, dump trucks, box trucks and things like that, but we don’t do any smaller cars anymore because it’s too much of a headache. That’s just my opinion, but you can try it out and see.

Cars are $30 a lane and they take up space. If you do these huge lanes and then park this little car, you’re wasting all that square footage unless you have it where you can do little lanes of 12×30 feet. It might help a little bit. It depends on the storage facility. We have one storage facility where there are three rows of buildings. You could put another row, but it’s a little bit too squishy. It’s like, “Maybe we can park some 10×30 cars over there or something.” We haven’t done that either because it’s a pain in the butt with the cars.

It’s $40 a square foot for the enclosed or $20. You have to compare what you would be getting for income, “If I could put 50 lanes at $100 each, that’s $5,000 a month. If I could do another 150 units at $100 each, which I could, that’s a lot of money.” It’s $15,000, but it does cost you more to build. How much more money would you be making? You have to look at that. Essentially, that is what we’re looking at and deciding on in that facility. I wanted to show that to you as well, so you get an idea of what we’re thinking.

If you want to build a storage, the first thing you need to do is to find land to purchase. Share on X

Storage Building Process

I wanted to make sure we go step-by-step into how everything works. We will talk a little bit about the process, but I want to write a step-by-step process so that you can have an idea and get you going on that. Let’s do a new build step-by-step process or whatever you want to call that. I already talked about it. The first thing is you’ve got to find some land to purchase either by you got to hire a realtor to help you, mail letters, go online to look or go on Facebook groups. I gave you four ways to find land to purchase.

The second thing is that now that you found this land, you’re like, “I have a piece of property that may be good to build a storage facility on.” We may go out of order, but in my mind, this would be the second thing. The second thing is to talk to the county or the city to make sure that you can build storage on that property. You have to ask them, “Can I build a storage facility on this property? If I can, what is the process from you to allow me to be able to build?” The process for them may be that you have to get it rezoned.

Maybe it’s, “What’s the zoning? Is it zone commercial, industrial, light industrial, agricultural or residential? What is it zoned as? If it’s not zoned what it should be, can I get a rezone? What’s the process of that, if necessary? What’s the permitting process?” They say, “You can build a storage facility. It’s zoned light industrial. You’re perfect.” You say, “That’s great. What’s the permitting process? How does the process work? What do I need to know as the person that’s managing this? What do I need to be doing?” They will tell you what they need to be doing.

We have one facility in the middle of Georgia. We were looking at buying another one across the street and then adding to that. It’s a very tertiary market in Georgia, but it’s near the ocean. I don’t know why it’s so tertiary. Georgia is weird. Essentially, I called the permitting office and talked to the zoning guy. I said, “I’m Stacy Rossetti. I’m thinking about buying this facility.” It’s on 2 acres. It has maybe 20 or 30 doors on it. I wanted to add on. He was like, “I know that property.” I said, “Can I add more units to it and build on this?” He’s like, “You’re good.” That was it.

I was like, “What do you mean I’m good?” He’s like, “You will be fine on that.” I was like, “Is there a permit I need to get? What’s the process?” He’s like, “Come into the office and fill out this piece of paper. You could go ahead and do whatever you want.” I was like, “Is there a variance? Are there setbacks?” He’s like, “For setbacks, do ten feet. You will be fine.” I swear that’s exactly how the conversation went. That’s what happens when you go into the middle of the country and you want to buy a storage facility.

 

You can ask for setbacks. You can ask, “Is there anything I should know? Are there any rules or anything like that?” They will tell you. If you did that in Atlanta, they would be like, “Here are a thousand rules and you have to follow all of them.” That’s why I like doing secondary and tertiary markets because there are way fewer rules. We have talked to the permitting department or the zoning department. They might be two separate departments, honestly. If you get into a bigger area, we have a permitting and then the zoning but most of the time, they’re together.

They give you the thumbs up and say, “You can build.” After you did that, the next thing is to get a feasibility study. This is number three. The feasibility study is you hiring a company to look at the market and make sure that this is a good project that you should be working on based on the competitors, how much is driving and what the area calls for. They will tell you also what you should be building and all kinds of stuff. If you go to a bank and get a loan, the bank is going to ask you, “Where’s your feasibility study?” You have to get this done if you know for sure that you’re going to be building a new build.

There are a lot of companies out there that do feasibility studies. It’s going to be expensive. This is an expense that you’re going to have to pay. It’s a couple of thousand dollars, if not more, depending on how big the facility is. You want to get a feasibility study done. That’s going to take a couple of weeks. What I wanted to say about that, too, was that when you put the land under contract, you want to make sure that you put all these stipulations in there. One of the stipulations is if this feasibility study comes back and says, “This is not a good thing,” then I would like to cancel or terminate the contract.

If the county comes back and says, “You can’t build your storage facility,” I’m going to cancel the contract. You want to make sure that you put your stipulations for termination on the contract. That is that. We have the land, the zoning and the feasibility study. Number four is talking to a metal fabrication company and having them give you a quote on how many units you can build. The reason why is these fabrication companies, at least all the ones I know and work for, can give you a quote back in 24 hours a lot of times. They will give you a rough idea.

You tell them the address and maybe give them a drawing of what your property looks like. They can quickly come in and do a quick diagram of how many units they think they could build on this. That doesn’t go off the feasibility study or anything like that. Once you get the feasibility study back, then you could be like, “I need to change the unit sizes, mixes and stuff because this is what the market calls for.” They can give you a good idea of how much square footage you can put in that area. They do this all for free, honestly. They give you a quick quote. They’re used to doing these things as well.

Before you close on your storage deal, make sure that you do all the things that the lender wants you to do. Share on X

Once you get that land, I would get a quote and a drawing from a metal fabrication company, talk to 2 or 3 of them and get some different ideas. That way, you can see what you think you can do there. You get the land, talk to the county, make sure it’s okay to build, put it under contract, talk to a metal fabrication company, get them to draw it out and get the feasibility study. What you’re going to do is talk to lenders for a loan. Many lenders out there will do new construction loans on storage facilities. I highly recommend that you go local, but SBA also does this.

I would go talk to the local banks in the area and then see what their terms are and what they could offer you. Also, talk to the other banks that would do SBA loans and see what they would do. SBA does love new construction as well. They will do new construction loans. A lot of people don’t know that. I’m looking at a facility in the North Georgia area and it happens to be in the USDA area. USDA also does commercial loans. You could also do a loan through USDA. These loans typically take a minimum of 120 days. SBA is going to take you 90.

It’s going to take you 120 days to do an SBA or USDA loan to even purchase it. Local banks are a little bit quicker than that, but it’s up to you. It’s more conventional versus government-backed loans. Talk to as many lenders as you possibly can and get their terms. You’re looking for the money, talking to the lenders and trying to get some loans. You’ve got the law and you got approved. You’ve closed on the deal. Before you close on the deal, you got to make sure that you do all the things that the lender wants you to do, like the environmental studies, appraisal and all that stuff too.

Find out what the lender wants. What does the lender need? I’m not 100% sure, but they may require you to do some things. You would want to find out about that as well. Also, after you talk to the lender and get the approval for the loan, I would go back to the metal fabrication companies and start working on getting ready to put your down payment for your metal. The reason why is because it could take up to six months to get depending on which company you’ve used. One of my students essentially is using a company that bought a lot of metal even before COVID.

They’re going to get that thing done. As soon as they get the permitting or the permitting process A-OK, that facility is going to have that thing done in a month. Some of them don’t buy steel. The person puts the down payment for the steel down. There’s a six-month backup time for that. It’s taking a long time for that. If you want to get that thing done, you pay more money. If you want to wait, it’s okay to wait for six months. You could go with one of those types of companies. You have to pay those loans back from those lenders.

As soon as you can, you want to pay the money to the down payment so you can get that metal block for you and that locked pricing for that steel. It’s a down payment to get that thing going. You might not be able to pay that until you close because then you’re going to get the money and then you will have the money to do that. Pay that and then go back to the metal fabrication company. After you get that feasibility study, finalize the proposal for structures so that they can be built with the metal fabrication company.

Finalize the drawings. You may have to hire a civil engineer to draw the drawings out for you. Make sure that your setbacks are okay. You have to work with the county. They have to approve and go through the permitting process. Take drawings for permitting approval. There’s the civil engineer, the metal fabrication company and maybe all the studies. I’m not sure if they’re going to need other stuff as well. Maybe they need an environmental study. Whatever the permitting process needs is what you’re going to be working on in going through that permitting process.

Once you get that permitting process, then you get to start building. Depending on whether or not you hire a project manager from the company to manage that or you manage it yourself and if you’re going to be hands-on or they’re watching and managing everything, then gung-ho, do that if you want to do that or hire the internal person in that company to manage everything for you. That’s going to be hiring a GC, external or yourself. You’re hiring the GC. He’s going to manage any type of clearing. Let’s do ten project steps. It’s clearing trees, grading electrical or water if needed, laying the foundation and building the frame.

This is the main stuff. You’ve got to clear the trees, get it graded nice and flat and lay the electrical because you’re going to need lights and things like this but not water. If you want to put water, you can put water in. If there’s an office, then you could put all that in as well. This is the mechanicals. Pour the foundation and do the asphalt or gravel. Asphalt and gravel are last. It’s the foundation. Build the frame out and then put the asphalt and the gravel. That’s it for all the steps. You got to start leasing up. That’s a whole other webinar, the lease-up phase.

That is the process of building new. Put some fencing on that list if you have any fencing and security. That’s my thought process of how new builds go. Fencing and security should be added to that list. It looks Ariel put a lot of stuff, “How do you find a company to do a feasibility study?” I would Google feasibility study self-storage. I go into the groups and then post it out in the groups like, “Who knows somebody that does a feasibility study?” “What are your thoughts on recycled asphalt or recycled concrete?” What’s your budget? That’s the thought. We did asphalt. For an acre, it was $30,000. Concrete is way more than that. Our budget is less.

A reminder before I hop off is that the StorageNerds’ doors are closed, but you can get on the waitlist. If you’re interested in getting into the coaching program, go to StorageNerds.com/waitlist. The course Super Simple Self-Storage is available. You can go to StacyRossetti.com and click on Online Courses for that. We’re going to hop on and do the Self Storage Fund of America. It’s StacyRossetti.com/fund. I appreciate everything. I appreciate you hanging out with me. I will see you at the next session. Take care.

 

Important Links

• Self Storage Fund of America
• LandWatch
• Lands of America
• Lands of Texas
• Lands for sale in Georgia – Facebook
• Farms, Land and Houses – Facebook
• San Antonio Land For Sale – Facebook
• Texas For Sale By Owner – Facebook
• MsLillians.com
• StorageNerds.com/waitlist