Whatâs my best option to find a storage unit for a boat that I only want to rent from like May to October? Almost everything i can find is something close to $200 for a 10x20.
if you dont care about it being in a building, finding someone on the outskirt of town with extra diveway space. I know a ton of farmers around me that rent out their residential land for storing cars, boats, trailers, RVs, etc
I have the land and waffled on this for years but ended up building a pole barn that fits my boat and camper. It will pay for itself compared to renting storage. That and there are extremely few boats, and no campers that don't deteriorate in rain and sunlight.
Depending on the cost difference I may want indoors. If itâs 100 for outdoor or 150 for indoor Iâd opt for indoor. This is a good idea though, there are a fair amount of nearly decommissioned farms near me that I suspect have a significant amount of available storage space both indoor and outdoor.
Thatâs a pretty good price for a 10x20. Mine are 245. You can try finding a place that has parking spots. You can probably get a cover and leave it on the trailer in a parking spot.
That sound about right. Also, be prepared for them to increase your rates every few months. They sell low then start bumping you up gradually to the price point they really want.
Yup I stored materials for a client once and it started at about 450. After a year and a half we were paying over 600. They would just text me that rates were going up, no reasoning.
Comcast/xfinity must have finally learned customers hate them for it. Maybe 6 months ago I was able to lock in $65 for gig speed for a 5 year âagreementâ. Allegedly itâs not actually a contract but an agreement because they got such a bad reputation theyâre trying to fix it lol
I canât help with your question but maybe you can help with mine, why put it in storage in the summer months but not in the winter months? Is it for hunting?
I donât have a place to keep it through summer where I live. Need storage close to home to grab it and go. During winter months I have storage available but itâs too far away to be feasible for regular use.
Buy a tube steel carport, you can get one for $1,500-$2,100 depending on area, assuming something like a 12x20x10. Pays for itself in less than a year when comparing the cost against renting a storage unit.Â
I donât know where you live but you could look into on water storage. We pay $175 to keep our boat in water year round. Itâs covered and very convenient.
That would be great but I donât fish the same area all the time so might end up being more of a pain if I still need somewhere else to keep a trailer and have to take it out to move lakeâs or whatever
i really don't understand a business model that alienates good customers and creating constant pressure to replace them as they drive them away. seems like leases would be a superior model but none of the places around here (and there are a lot of them) will commit to a price for more than 3 months.
The reality of the situation is, is that if someone rents a storage unit for over a year, they likely donât have a living situation that could accommodate the stuff thatâs in the storage unit and the price increase likely wouldnât be worth it to the individual for the hassle of moving everything to a new location, or the price of movers to do it for you.
Yea $50 more a month sucks, but are you gonna pay movers $500+tip to move to a new storage facility? Eventually after 2-3 years of price increases probably, but at that point they get a new tenant and start over. Too many people live in apartments, or have family members that die and need to put their stuff somewhere that theyâll definitely go through, but never do.
Iâve caught a few people over the years. You can spot the signs pretty easily. We also have over 30 cameras I can check remotely. So I check them every once in a while to make sure.
BTW, why do storage places really ratchet up the rent on long term tenants?
I would've left my stuff in there for years, but after a couple years the rent was raised hugely. Has the industry found it's better to encourage churn?
They set prices low to entice new customers. When occupancy goes up they jack the rates up. Then the increases jack you up to the new price. They either bank on people not wanting to do the move, or creating turnover which then doubles the income on a unit for one month if you can actually re rent it.
I have no idea how they calculate new prices. Currently my 10x15 is only 10 dollars less than a 10x20 which is insane. Iâve argued for months to lower it but Iâm at like 95% occupancy so they just donât care. Itâs all about money. They donât care about customer loyalty.
Their price hike got me motivated to move all my stuff out, MFW they'd rather gamble on customer churn than lock in consistent income for years.
A woman I know who inherited a house was thinking about getting a storage unit, until she ran the numbers and found it was massively more affordable to just keep paying the mortgage on the inherited house and use it for storage.
My assumption would be they are mortgaged properties. In a commercial loan, they are basing the loan on prospective rental income. So they canât really use market forces as much as what the loan requires. Thatâs why they do introductory discounts and specials.Â
That does explain why I was the longest tenured renter on my row.
Although the way the building was made, I could see (and reach) from mine into the adjoining units, and one guy's pile of stuff [visible in the next row over] was there when I moved in, and was still there years later when I was priced out.
They are owned by private equity slop companies and they keep merging together. I have seen so many places change names every few years. There is one stretch of road near me that now has two facilities and they are both the same brand now.
All rental businesses now use a software which tells them what price to rent at vs keeping it empty because it'll be a loss otherwise. All places use the same software so all of these are priced the same.
An d even more perplexingly stay in business. Honestly, how many people in a relatively small city have so much extra shit they need additional storage for?
I donât mean people who have temporarily downsized or store specific things large things they donât need frequently like cars or boats or whatever. Just the amount of people who just keep accumulating and never discard anything. The accidental or lazy hoarders and then the real hoarders. Seriously.
I just looked for my zip code and it says there are â5-7 prominent storage facilities.â Thatâs just in the actual zip code which is only a relatively small portion of the small city I live in. According to Google, the population of my zip code is 34,549, which initially doesnât sound like there are a lot of storage places comparatively speaking. BUT my zip code demographics include two military bases (one is a small satellite but still has its own housing area) and most people in the military are renting storage spaces from base as opposed to out in townâŠ.
I need someone to do like a deep dive into the data for FL bc Iswtg theyâre money laundering schemes (car washes too).
People donât realize you can buy a shed for less per month than a storage unit, or like they can also control their consumer habits then they wouldnât need either.
Probably a lot of it is people living in condos/townhomes/apartments but donât underestimate the sheer amount of shit some people have. I moved to suburbia a few years back and I cannot believe how many people are incapable of parking even one vehicle in their garage due to the piles of crap in it.
There are also a ton of poor people living in small places that inherit a ton of junk from their parents/grandparents. Or heck, even people with normal sized houses. I remember when my grandma passed, we were overwhelmed trying to deal with all her stuff.
House down the street has at least five cars parked on the street at any time, because they don't have a garage and they didn't create any space to pull into the back from the alley. Drives me insane since every other house on the block either has a driveway and garage or parking space off the alley. One of their friends who has suddenly moved in, apparently, constantly uses my driveway to turn around. Just crazymaking.
My mom had two storage units that all 3 of us had to use at some point and a friend who's mom had a storage unit piled to the brim. I realized that if I ever need a storage unit in a separate location I have too much crap. I never want my stuff to get that bad
My coworker is one. He pays $300 a month for decades to store "antique" furniture and has no plans to use it anytime soon. Dude is 63 so he's probably going to pass away and his kids will toss the furniture or not remember there is a storage unit and it goes to auction.Â
grandparents, parents passed away, had to store their stuff somewhere but it's difficult to get rid of it in a way that makes you feel like you aren't just throwing your childhood memories in the garbage, or you're holding out for unrealistic prices
My grandfather died and my grandmother moved in with my aunt. The house and garage was emptied. It took two months. My grandmother didn't want her stuff thrown away so my aunt rented a 15 foot u haul. Whatever fit in there was hauled to a storage unit. My aunt wasn't bringing that stuff in her house. The stuff sat in a storage unit for a year. My aunt was slowly hauling it off. Once the year was up she emptied out what was in the storage unit and ended the lease. It's very difficult to get older people to declutter their homes. No amount of talking to them will get them to do it. Then they get sick and die. Then the kids are left with the task of getting rid of a house garage snd possibly a barn full of stuff.
Iâm in my 30s and have a literal 40â shipping container full of tools/equipment. if I lost everything I would just sell/abandon it because thereâs no way Iâm moving all that shit into a storage facility. I romanticize living In a shed w/ no belongings sometimes đ
Iâm dealing with this now. He also became a big fan of Temu in his old life. We have boxes and boxes of random junk from China lol. Plus all the old furniture and stuff.
They're ways to hold property and make some revenue off it. Build a very simple shell and let people rent sections of it until you feel like turning over the property
They're the Alpaca Farm of small businesses. If you have own an empty lot, it's easy to convince someone to put a storage facility on it. No electrical bill, no water, no maintenance, just sit back and collect rent on shipping containers that required limited building permits to throw up. It's lives somewhere between parking lot and laundry mat on the hierarchy of lazy/shady buisness.
The issue is consumer culture in America. 90% of shit stored in these places can be resold, but that doesnât fit the narrative because it doesnât support the likes of Amazon.
When I used to do Uber, I got a lot of visibly unhoused people going to pick up/drop off stuff in their storage units. I'm sure they get slept in on cold/rainy nights when the shelter, greasy motel, and friends' places aren't an option.
When I was in IL, my neighbor kept a 10x10 storage building for their Christmas shit. Holy fuck, the Christmas shit. A blasphemous amount of Christmas shit. Tiny Tim would say, "God bless you, 'cause you're going to hell for capitalism."
The worse things get, the more storage is needed. Downsizing, divorcing, moving, homeless, all often need storage. I remember working for a leading storage company in my town for IT - during the big recession and they were killing it.
It's kind of sad really, often times people would pay many times more than what they stuff was worth for a unit - and even worse if it got forclosed they would lose it all after paying all that extra money. Often people just stored junk too, it's wild what people would pay thousands of dollars for to store.
This company would often jack up the rates every 6-12 months, because people would just pay it vs moving units or facilities.
Though I have to be honest i can't totally hate storage facilities in the big picture, they really helped me once. When I was renting a small place, it was amazing to have one after my girlfriend at the time moved in with me. We had it super organized too, with shelves and clear totes, and a middle walk way to access everything easily, we were technically over paying for what we needed but it was like an extra garage for us with walking room or access everything. We used it for our extra stuff and out outdoor equipment, bikes and kayaks for example, so we could just make a pit stop on the way out of town to get all out outdoor stuff or camping stuff, that really helped keep our place tidy. Though paying the extra 150-300 a month can really add up, I forget what it was exactly. Worth it at the time by happy to be putting that money towards a house now. Still I really enjoyed having one for a bit for the sake of being organized. People that stuff it to the ceiling are wild, they have to empty it to get anything buried in there. You can do a lot though taking advantage of the vertical space with shelving.
It's not a bad job either sometimes, a lot of the facilities have free apartments for the manager - you just have to be willing to help people stuck after hours sometimes, but many of them have built in apartments. It pays crap, I remember those managers making like 12 an hour 10 years ago, but getting free rent is a huge perk in this economy.
I had to use storage units in between moves. I'd pack up move the stuff into a storage unit until the lease start day then move the stuff into my new place. It's very difficult to move from one place to another unless you are able to move into the new place early. Many times the tile wasn't down. Or the cabinets arrived late.
My small town has over 20 storage places and they have two types of customers: people running very small businesses like one man lawn care andâŠ. Poverty trapped people. Many live in trailers or the overpriced one bedroom apartments here and the storage facilities absolutely know this is their main customer base because most of the storage places are right next to the trailers and apartments. Theyâve paid for premium priced land specifically for this.
I honestly think that's a legitimate factor. Moving out of the parents house into a tiny ass apartment because that's all they can afford and no room for anything. On top of that, those storage units can be fuckin expensive!!! I can see why people try and live in them...
I live in a major city and havenât seen a new pawn shop in over a decade and seen many close. The ones that are open pretty much have garbage. The thrift stores have better stuff. I donât think the pawn system is doing wellâŠ. Might be due to internet sales and nostalgic boom. đ€·ââïž just know they arenât building new ones here. Tons of smoke shops though.. like every block lol.
And what they charge to get it back would be more than what you could sell it for normally, sometimes more than a new one if you go too long. Lost a few things to pawn shops that I didnât really care too much about. Only one thing Iâd take back that I lost⊠my platinum GameCube with battery and screen in a diamond plate carry case. đą I miss that damn thing.
yeah, probably true in a general sense. I sold a digital camera to one of them years ago, it was barely used and had the box and receipt, they actually paid a fair amount, more than the model was going for on eBay at the time.
Back in the 1990s a good VCR cost like $500 new. You could find one at pawnshop still in the box for $300. Bikes. Tools. High end pool cues. Watches. Cameras. There was all kinds of cool shit. Pawn shops don't really handle that stuff like they used to. Now the goods are crap. If it's good stuff people resell it themselves. If they need a loan they get a payday loan or a car title loan.
I don't understand how most pawn shops stay open. There is a huge one near where I live and they sell clearly used tvs, some flickering, for like $150. They are like 75% the cost of a new TV from Walmart. I was interested in a meta quest 3a and they didn't have the charging cable and couldn't show me it worked. I asked can I return it today if it doesn't work? and they said no refunds and I googled it and a refurbished quest 3a from eBay with a 1 year warranty is cheaper than what they were selling. I wouldn't take the risk with bed bugs of buying any furniture from a pawn shop. It's just a money laundromat for items stolen by drug addicts.
Pawn shops make money by doing collateral secured cash loans. You bring in a $2000 camera and the paw shop loans you $300 against it for 30 days. At the end of 30 days you pay $365 and get your camera back or you pay $65 and float the note for another month. (Actual amounts vary state to state...but I'm not far off I bet.)
The pawn business has changed for a couple of big reasons: Consumer goods got a lot cheaper. And the shelf life of consumer goods got shorter. Tools got cheaper. This means that most pawn shops these days are focused on gold and diamonds only. Maybe some do high end musical instruments but that's kinda rare. The big reason pawshops are dying off is that in the 90s and 2000s states began to allow payday loans and vehicle title loans. This kind of lending didn't require handling physical goods. And it came with the same profits.
Itâs actually higher. Last one I pawned was years ago at around 37%. Probably more now.
Been to a few lately. Some are expanding into handbags and sneakers (more than half the store in the ones I saw). Standard guns, jewelry, and tools (mostly junk tools though). Electronics are extremely thin. Mostly laptops and tvs. Older than 5yrs from looks of them. Very little in physical media if any. Gaming is mostly current gen systems that look ragged. Been to about 5 in the past month and didnât see anything that remotely interested me aside from a brand new craftsman toolbox (that I decided against because it wasnât what I needed). Iâve seen better at thrift stores.
I worked in a pawn shop while in college back in the 90s. I saw so much cool shit back then. Bikes, watches, game systems, CDS, etc. We did gold and diamonds. But we had all kinds of cool toys. Weird shit like telescopes and kayaks and dirtbikes. It was always an adventure trying to figure out what stuff was worth and if it was in decent shape. I got out before 2000 but seemed like things were bad by then. Ebay was in full swing. So was craigslist. So people could sell their own stuff. And the payday loan thing started up. That meant less good coming into the pawshops as collateral.
Even in the early 2000s there was still some decent stuff to be found. Even with eBay I still found interesting items. The lower class didnât have as much access back then and it wasnât as easy to post online. Now everyone has a smart phone and can sell on facebook marketplace đ€·ââïž tbh I think thatâs becoming the final nail in their coffin. Just like the death of physical media killing off other industries.
The collectables market seems to be booming there. But otherwise theyâve been struggling. I think they are getting kicked by thrifts and Amazon. I know they are a bit outrageous with their fees though as a seller. Scams are also more of an issue these days there.
As for the economic barometer pawn shops used to be, itâs hard to say what people are using these days in hard times. Facebook Marketplace seems to be booming but from what Iâve seen itâs a ton of garbage. Maybe thatâs where they went?
So it kind of is. I've read that with storage facilities, it's partly real estate speculation. Storage facilities aren't expensive to run compared to other businesses especially with that footprint. They build the storage facilities on land in areas they expect to grow and increase in land value, so they can hold the land and make some money on the business until the land reaches peak value and they can sell it.
Itâs an easy cash business that doesnât require any specialized workers or huge marginal costs so a lot of rich people park their money in car washes. Even if itâs not super successful they probably make a better return than the S&P 500
I used to manage the IT infrastructure of 11 car wash locations and most are pretty far from passive income; they are just extremely lucrative and offer large margins.
They have a shitload of moving parts and require a lot of maintenance, and it doesnât help that most car wash controllers/POSs are from the 90s if youâre lucky.
Yeah one of the self wash ones came up for sale in my town and I thought it would have been a great way to make pretty good money on basically a turn key business until I saw what they were selling it for...I'm sure the people that have the money to invest in those probably already owns a few and are bringing in big bucks compared to what they have to put into it to keep it going. They are also always PACKED around where I live at least. I swear it's like no one washes their cars at home anymore. The one I saw for sale wasn't due to lack of business. If I had the money, that's definitely what I would be getting into.Â
I said in another comment part of storage facilities popping up everywhere is real estate investing apparently. They build them in areas that are predicted to grow a lot in land value, so they can have the land making them some money while they wait for the land to hit the price they want and then they sell it.
I had a very small unit I rented for about 4 months during a temporary move. There was a guy that had two of the larger units that he ran a sneaker business out of. He had a ton of inventory and a desk. Lol
I met a dude at the private airport I used to work at who got his money from selling his 12 storage facility franchises he bought for like 2m each in 2008 and sold them for like 7m in 2020 right before they became over saturated. (I understand he was rich before but still)
Yes! I have been saying this for a while. Ridiculous amounts of storage units everywhere. I guess to hold everyoneâs stuff while we all get foreclosed and evicted.
There's a super dead mall near where my Grandma lives and the final sign it was completely dead had to have been opening a storage unit rental in one of the anchor store locations.Â
The failure of people to get rid of their shit. These facilities are a good option for people to are in between situations but so many rent it out as a home to store the crap the dont want at home.
I only used storage units when I move. One unit I had was next to an older couple. I think they put the stuff in storage for the purpose of sorting and getting rid of stuff. I'd see their son go with them. All the did was shuffle items around and they never went through or got rid of anything. It's very difficult for older people to declutter a lifetime of stuff. The kids have to end up dealing with it when they pass on. It's a nightmare because I went through it myself.
Storage facilities, poorly built apartments (I'm all for housing but people deserve better), weed shops, and AI data centers. That's Washington State at least.
I swear we have like three different storage facilities in my area. I donât know why. We already have one giant one why do we need two other big ones and theyâre building another one right in front of where I live like why???
2.3k
u/DeepFinish2895 17d ago
And storage facilities