Although new self-storage development has slowed in the past couple of years, there are still pockets of growth around the country. Self-storage conversions have become more prevalent as empty big-box stores become available. Sometimes a conversion can make better financial sense to a developer than a ground-up project, which requires a greater investment of time for planning, zoning and construction.

The six-hour Developers Seminar taught by RK Kliebenstein, vice president of business development for Metro Self Storage, delved deep into self-storage feasibility using project examples to examine if/then scenarios. To realize the dynamics of proposed project, attendees actually “built” a self-storage project in the seminar. They got to see how the outcome of the project changed under different circumstances, for example, what happened to the internal rate of return, cash-on-cash return and developers' yield under particular financial scenarios.