Designing a Self Storage Facility | Kuboid

It's not going to be long before you're going to be able to tap into an AI engine, the size of the building or even drop the design into it and say, this is my ideal average. Press a button, bang. There's a storage design.

Yeah. Hello and welcome to the latest edition of our podcast, Self Storage Explained. Today I'm joined by Martin Fletcher from Cuboid. Hello, Martin.

Hey, Gavin, how you doing?

I'm good, thanks. How are you?

Yeah, really good, thank you.

Thank you so much for joining us. In this episode we're going to actually dig into how to design a self storage facility with Martin's help. So we'll dive into the key considerations, challenges and best practices for designing a successful self storage facility focused on indoor self storage, presumably, Martin, that's fine. So we're going to talk about site selection, layout optimization, the sort of stuff that you've been doing now in self storage for a long time and can hopefully provide lots of advice on to listeners. So thank you for joining us.

That's right. Thank you so much for having me.

And so you're from Cuboid. Do you want to tell us what Cuboid do first? Yeah.

In short, Cuboid are a self storage fit out company. The longer answer is that we consult design Build. We also manufacture all our materials and yeah, it's a full turnkey solution for the client. So we will get involved with a client at any point on that sort of journey spectrum that they're on. So from very, very early consultation all the way through to actually building and sort of delivering that store for them, we'll get involved at any point in that spectrum.

Normally moving on then to kind of designing a self storage facility.

Yeah.

What's the first step?

The very first step is a discussion with the client. So it's really, really important and I can't stress enough that we have a detailed discussion with the client on their expectations, their requirements on ultimately what their vision is. If we don't have the full information up front, it makes it very difficult. As we move through the process, we find that we do a design and then there's multiple revisions because it wasn't quite right and we're changing this and changing that. So if we have all that information up front, that's the most important thing.

If you're listening to this and thinking about getting into self storage or opening up an indoor self storage site, one of the first steps would be having a chat with you or one of your colleagues.

Exactly, yeah.

Discuss. Here's what I'm trying to achieve. Here's the site, bit of, bit more information about it.

Yeah, we can either, we can either meet people on site and have face to face meetings and consultations. We can do it over the phone, we can do it on teams, we can even involve our design team as well. So our design team aren't just sat in a dark dingy room somewhere tapping away. They, you know, they do get involved with the clients and they have certain pertinent questions they need to have answers too. So you know, we like to bring them in at the early stage as well. So the customer really, from a customer experience point of view, they do get to sort of be cuddled by Cuboid, so to speak. So it's really good.

Yeah. So if you've got a site, you've had an initial conversation, what are the key things that people need to consider when looking at a new site from a design perspective? I suppose some of this early discussion, what are the things that need to be considered and discussed?

Okay, so it's important for a client to realize from the outset that they're not going to get 100% yield on the space that they've got. For example, if someone's looking at a 10,000 square foot warehouse, they're not going to be able to rent out 10,000 square foot of that space because we need room for corridors, accesses, fire exits, loading bays, receptions, stairwells, that sort of thing.

Yeah.

So the general rule of thumb is 30% of that space has to be used for non lettable. So the actual net lettable area that can be achieved is usually around the 70% mark. We'll always try and push it that little bit more if we can. But if someone's doing initial sort of revenue returns, they need to base it on 70% of the, the area that they've got basically. The other thing is from a perspective, we need to know where, you know, things like columns are, any obstructions, beams, heights, there's quite a lot of measurements that we need. It's not always easy to, from a customer's perspective, they might phone and say, right, I've got this, I've got this warehouse, it's X amount of meters by X amount of meters, how much is it going to cost me? And there's so many factors that lead to that final project price things that we need to be aware of to do the design. But that's part of the consultation process that we have with the client and trying to find out as much information as possible and really yet to do a good survey. So you Know the earliest opportunity we can get to visit site, do a survey, take all the measurements we need. The quicker we can do that, the better really.

So actually if you just, if numbers top of your head, if you've got a 10,000 square foot warehouse, 7,000 might end up being self storage space you can rent out. And then of course 100% capacity isn't normal either and you might be at 75, 80% capacity. So if you've got 10,000 square feet, 7,000 of it is filled out in self storage, you might actually end up running at about 5 to 6,000 square feet. Yeah, kind of, of, of letters. Once you're at kind of, you know, you're, you've sort of filled the thing. What are, what are some of the biggest mistakes you see people making when selecting a site? So if you haven't got a site and you're looking for one, as I've.

Mentioned, assuming that you're going to get 100 of that area, you know, taking the site on before they've spoken to us is another one sort of bang or. Yeah, basically I've seen a building, I'm lease, I'm going to lease it, I'm going to go for it, sign the contract. Right, let's get cuboid involved. We come in and we say, well, you're not going to earn that much.

Because what are some of the reasons? Like what are some of the things that you might find? You know, if they've bought somewhere, you go along like actually, you know, this.

It'S that knowing how much of the space they can rent out.

Okay, what about location? Is that, does that. Location, you don't get involved in that.

Yeah, location is important. Obviously demographics. You've got to look at the area, look at your competition, who else is in the area, how full they are. You know, if you've got competitors in the area and they're, they're stacked full, you know, there's demand there, you know, there's, there's, you know, further growth. If all your competitors are half full, we're doing loads of deals, you know, we can't get the customers in then obviously don't, yeah, don't set up there. So location is extremely important. And yeah, just knowing, knowing the demographics, looking at, you know, their new housing states being built nearby, because that drives, you know, that drives a lot of house moves and self storage and things. So yeah, I mean there are, there's obviously tools out there as well. You've had Tim Brant on recently talking about the AI demographics tool that you know, can, can, can identify where, where pockets are that so would, could require self storage. So that was really, that was a really interesting podcast to be fair. So talking about the AI side of it.

So is there a difference between the design for a self storage facility in a city like in a, an urban area versus in a more rural area or a small town?

Yeah, definitely. City centers you tend to find a lot more smaller rooms. Okay, smaller rooms can generate more.

What size is a small room?

25 square foot. Okay, so 15 square foot up to probably 50, I would say.

Okay.

Yeah. A lot of places in. You look at cities like the London and Birmingham etc, you do, you do find that space is a premium. Space is precious as well. There's not a lot of it around. So people are trying to do weird and wonderful things with storage. We recently built a self store with a mezzanine inside a railway arch in London really. So something like that was, was a fantastic project to work on. It was really challenging. We had to overcome certain boundaries with network rail and all this sort of stuff to try and make it work for the client. But ultimately people are looking for a wide variety that you wouldn't necessarily see in rural areas. You know, basement car parks being developed into self storage in cities. Whereas rurally there tends to be more, larger buildings, more warehousing slash, you know, sort of farmers and things like that. So you tend to find that they tend to be larger buildings with larger rooms. But yeah, the other thing with having smaller rooms, particularly in the, in the city centers, is that as self storage is now kind of being encompassed with this investor backed model, investors need to see that return. So where you've got, you know, an operator can prove that a lot of small rooms can generate more money. They're using that basically to, to help drive the investment.

So then, so then if you look at a smaller town, are you saying you might, it might be a bit different there?

Yeah, you might.

Bit more bigger rooms. I've certainly found that in my, my locations that. And whenever I fit it out, I think the Average size is 75. But I have two hundreds, 150s. I remember thinking, and when I was setting the price I was thinking like who's going to, who's going to pay 350 quid for this? But actually for the 200 square feet, like they actually there's a lot of demand. People moving from a big house, they just need lots of space.

That's it. Exactly that. And you know, the drivers in self storage as we know, desks, marri Divorces, moving house, all that kind of thing. And you know, people do want, do want that space. The other thing that's helped drive self storage as well is Internet selling. So Amazon, ebay, sellers, et cetera, want somewhere to put their stock. And it's cheaper to rent a self storage unit and work from a self store than it is to have a, you know, a unit and an office. So you know that those 200 square foot units could be used as a, as a commercial, on the commercial basis.

Are there any kind of creative ways that you use regularly to make the most of limited space?

That's a really good question. Yeah, there is. You can reduce corridor width. So that's something that we look at. Especially if there's multiple floors where you've got larger rooms downstairs you tend to want a decent corridor width.

What's a decent corridor with? 1.5 meters, 1.5 meters.

But as you go up the floors you can reduce it 1.4, 1.3 because the rooms are getting smaller. The theory is people are taking smaller stuff up there. They don't need the. So you can't. There's ways to do that. Lockers is another one. So double stacked lockers. So essentially, so our meter cube locker that we do, you can put one on top of another and it's roughly 10 square foot. So you can charge twice for that 10 square foot space. So it's a way to up the yield on the, on the net letable area a little bit.

By the way, what sort of customers use that sort of space?

The lockers would be students, people that don't need a whole self storage unit that goes up to 2.4 meters. Yeah, they just want a little bit of space just to, just to put some, some things. But it does tend to be the city centers that garner the, the locker side of things. The downside to the lockers is that and smaller rooms is that you, to have access to them you've got to be able, you've got to then create more corridors. So you're almost, you've got to be able to put enough in that it counteracts the corridors you're putting in, right? Yeah, but essentially you can charge twice for the same space.

What about whenever, say multiple floors and a low ceiling height and maybe beams in a unit. I've seen units with beams in the middle of them. How should operators think about that when they're thinking about fit out?

Okay, so there's two sort of trains of thought there. Firstly, I'll cover the beams and the Pillars in the way. So when you've got mezzanines, you have mezzanine posts. Some buildings have structural columns. We'll always 99.9% of the time be able to hide those things with inside the rooms. But the way we design it is that we partition walls as close to those as possible or put them into a corner of a room so that the actual room isn't really affected too much by having that column.

How do you determine the, the ideal layout? Sorry, like unit sizes for different facilities?

Yeah, that's a really good question.

Factors there.

Yeah, really good question. So we've got various kind of matrixes, bases based, based on average square foot. So if we're in an area that would demand 65 or 55 square foot for instance, as an average, then what we do is we plug that into our little system that we've got and it tells the designer how many rooms of each size to go for.

Okay. Yeah.

Then that gets transferred into the design. Doesn't always work precisely.

Quite often because of limitations.

Building shape and everything else we have to. Sometimes someone might say, well, why is there a 200 square foot unit right at the back, right in the corner? Because that's the only place. That's what has to be there. We can't do anything else. But ultimately any, any sales store would benefit from having a good range of sizes.

Yeah.

You know, there is no real, there is no real golden nugget because you're never going to know what customers you're going to have come through your door until you're open. So it's almost, it's almost a bit of chicken and egg scenario.

How many, how many, how many customers of yours would phase the growth? Because if you're phasing the growth, then of course, you know, you can learn a little bit about. From phase one.

Precisely. Yeah.

How many would most people fears or.

Depends on the size of the, the unit? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. It is more common, it's becoming more common I think because facilities are getting bigger.

Right? Yeah.

When you're looking at investment backed models, they're not going to give you all the money up front, that sort of thing, you know. You know we can phase in various ways. So we can phase areas into different sections. We can, we can phase mezzanines. So we can do a ground floor and there's, you know, a one tier mezzanine with ground floor and then come in later and do another tier and et cetera, et cetera. So there's various ways that we can Phase to help on the budget inside for the clients at the end of the day.

What about security features? So what are the most common security features you'd see, like CCTV and alarms? I guess you kind of get into quite a bit of tech and cost potentially. And what are the security features you would normally see?

Yeah, access control. So that's the keypads into either a gate or the main entrance into the building. For the customer it's usually a keypad. So you know who's coming in and who's going out of the building any one time. So access control, cctv, individual unit alarms. So the alarm contacts on each of the doors and what that does is that then ties into the access control. So when somebody taps in their code, it deactivates the alarm to their unit only. So then if they start playing around with someone else's room, the alarms are active on those. So it's quite a clever, quite simple but quite a clever little system. Remote monitoring. So, you know, people like DSOC doing the remote monitoring side, that's becoming a lot more popular, particularly as we now move more towards an unstaffed site. There's a lot of people looking at having sites that are unstaffed. So, you know, remote monitoring is quite important. A site can be made super secure.

Yes.

And talking about AI again, I heard recently that there's, there's AI software that can pick up through the visuals on a camera if somebody's in the wrong part of a building to where their room is.

Yeah.

You know, that kind of thing is going to be fantastic for self storage.

Yeah.

And that unstaffed kind of utopia, so.

To speak, what are the top three, like when you're thinking about locks and alarms and like beyond the layout of the units, what are the top three things that you think the most important three things for somebody to consider? Like for example, if you want to be on staffed, then you probably need to think about, you need to think carefully about the whole experience of people getting in and out and how that's managed. Like what are those, what are the top three things that you would see people having to consider?

So you're quite right. So the access control side of it, how are you going to give access to somebody, particularly if you're unstaffed or even if you are staffed? You know, you want your customer strategy just come and go as they, as they need to. That's what makes self storage so, so easy. So the, the customer experience, how that works. There's things coming out on the market now like the kiosks, have you seen the kiosks? So it's like a McDonald's. You order, you order on the, on, on the, on the, on the screen in the McDonald's. It's exactly the same. You know, someone can walk into a self store, they can pick their room, they can pay for their room, they can set the sign their contract, talk to somebody, live in a call center if they need to. And some of these even dispense locks as well. So you don't have to have the expense of having a smart lock. You can still use padlocks. And that's, I think the customer experience is paramount. Having a good security system, you know, having a system that's robust and one that's, you know, used within the self storage market, I'd say. And then the final thing is a really good store management software to tie all together. I don't know if you know any, but.

No, I'll have to have a think about somewhere. The point you make there about making sure you're using tools that are used in self storage industry. Yeah, I think that's a really interesting point because. So like why is that important? And like I kind of, and I know the answer myself now because we sometimes are talking to people who've maybe installed some like git access system that isn't self storage related.

Yes.

And they may be the only people in the UK using that access system.

Yes.

For self storage.

Yeah.

And then we talk to them about, you know, using STORA for their software product and they say great, can you integrate with this lock system? And it's like, well there's actually a lot of cost to doing that. There's like some of our team for whatever week, two weeks, three weeks and then the ongoing maintenance of it. So for one customer alone it actually it's not financially viable for us to do that support your system. Whereas if they pick one of the smart entry systems just connects it and it's easy.

Exactly.

Is that why you would recommend people to pick stuff that's generally in the, in the industry?

Definitely, yeah. You've hit the nail on the head. There are lots of companies out there that work within self storage that understand self storage. And I think from a customer's perspective, especially a client that's coming new to the market, it's important to surround yourself with people that actually know the market and know the industry. One of the things that we offer as part of our build sort of program is a building control approval service. So these are independent building control approvers that we've worked with for a number of years and they specifically work in self storage. They know how to build. Building regs isn't always as straightforward as saying that's one and that's two. It's like an up for interpretation, a little bit of a gray area. As long as you're kind of in this thing, then it's okay sort of thing. And what we find is if a client was to bring in another building control approver, which they're more than obviously obliged to do, it's not a problem. If that building control approver hasn't had experience in self storage, they might look at it slightly differently.

What are some of the most common pitfalls, challenges that you face when you're designing a self storage facility? So you know when you're putting these things together, what are some of those common pitfalls? How can you avoid them?

Not having enough information up front from a design perspective. We talk about designing self storage facilities from a design perspective. Not having enough information up front is quite a pitfall, but you can overcome that with conversations with the client, etc. Etc. Not being able to do a survey. So not everyone wants to do a survey survey. They, they might not have taken the lease on the building at the time and, but they want to be open really, really quickly. So once they've signed the lease, they want to get going and okay, by doing a survey we can see any pitfalls and basically head them off at the pass. Yeah, as it were. So we can effectively see if there's any issues with the building, see if there's anything the client needs to overcome. It's not always as simple as saying that's a square building, I need to fill it with units. It could be, could be leaky walls, there could be a hole somewhere, the floor might be in terrible state. You know, there might be all sorts of things like that. Really? I would say from a design perspective, it's overcoming obstacles like ramps in the building, columns build structural things, how to get around certain things, and then also designing to building regs. That's also a pitfall because we have to make sure that we've got the right travel distances.

What's the like if you are looking to get some design work done? Like what is the, how long does it usually take to get, you know, sort of design, like what's, what's the design phase? How long does that take? And then how long does it take to do the actual fit out?

From a design perspective, it can take a few hours depending on the size of the site and all the information that we've got, it could take anywhere to sort of three to four hours to sort of three to four days to fully complete design. Depending on the complexities. The things that hold up the design is having to check with building building control approver if certain things would work, that can take a few days. If we have to keep liaising with the client on certain things that can drag it out. We have a lead time of 10 days on designs. But that, that's the marker we put on from receiving the initial inquiry and having the conversation with the client to supplying the first drawing, the initial drawing to say look, there's your, there's, there's a layout. What do you think?

Yeah. Then once the trigger's pulled and the orders placed.

Yeah.

And I know it all. I know there's, it depends on the size of the facility and everything else, but what's included. Let's say you have a 10,000 square foot facility, which is roughly what I had. Yeah. What's typically the like the day people arrive on site to start fitting things out.

You're looking around four to six weeks to have people on site.

Okay.

Building those units normally mezzanine additional, you're looking at another sort of eight weeks on top of that as well for the mezzanine.

Okay. So you're talking about one to three months?

Yeah, yeah, yes, maybe. Yeah.

Obviously there's dependent, depending longer, maybe maybe less.

But depends what's included. The, obviously the larger builds have, have staircase enclosures for fire protection, all that kind of stuff. So there's a little bit extra there. But normally within that sort of three to four month window for a large facility of that kind of size, smaller facilities obviously a lot quicker.

What's the most interesting facility design you've ever seen? I've been involved in.

There's been real way artists is on that list definitely because that was, that were small. It was very, it was quite complicated. The challenges that we had on that one to overcome, I would say yeah. Railway arch car parks are always, always a challenge and interesting to, to try and design.

What are the challenges with car parks?

Well, some people want people still to be able to drive, drive around. So I want to drive to different levels that they're, they're storing their stuff on. So you've almost got to have access as well as having units. Some people don't. Some, some, some car parks are you, you park at the bottom and then you, you, you take the lift up, etc. So car parks, basements, basement Car parks that they're all, they're all, they're all quite low. All tend to be quite low ceilings as well. So it's always a little bit tricky. Yeah. We've done aircraft hangars, car showrooms that are almost circular in shape. You know, putting square boxes in circles in a circle shaped building. I've just, just designed actually a chapel. So someone's bought a chapel that they, they want to start. It's quite small but they've got, they want a mezzanine and a ground floor first floor inside a chapel. So that's quite an interesting concept as well. So the weird and wonderful things are happening now. People are looking at a variety of buildings for, for self storage. It's quite exciting actually.

Yeah. Interesting, interesting. What's, what's a feature you'd love to design into a self storage facility but haven't had the chance to yet? Have you ever?

It's not that I haven't had the chance to. I can't work out how to do it. Should I give all my ideas away? No, the. What, what, what? I'd like to see something, I'd like to, to try and develop adaptable storage so some way adapt it so that the store operator can offer any size room to anybody and you just move the partitions wherever you want them to be.

Yeah.

Obviously you've got to account for a lot of doors because you've got to be able to put them within the doors. But it's how you do that and make it safe and unadaptable by, by a general public user.

When you think about kind of where things are going in the next five years, I mean that, that's maybe, that's, that's something that's an innovation that's maybe coming. How do you see the changes that are happening in the industry? How do you see them affecting facilities and how they're designed over the next five years?

Yeah, we've already seen the impact of the automated smart locks and with obviously the software element and everything that's being driven into self storage. But to be honest, I think we are going to see more and more unstaffed sites which is going to drive the security side and the software side, etc. Etc. But personally I think from a design perspective, I think again to mention it, A.I. i think, you know, it's not going to be long before you're going to be able to tap into an AI engine the size of the building or even drop of the design into, into it and say this is my ideal average I want an average of 65 square foot. Press a button, bang. There's a storage design.

Yeah.

How that AI is able to cope with the gray areas of and the finer details of building regs and that side of things is obviously interesting and yet to be seen. But I, I don't think we're that far away from it, to be honest. Yeah, I think, I think you know, the next five years, you know the design, the designers are going to be there to basically adjust the design. That's, that's put it will just speed that process up. Yeah, they'll be there to try and make sure the building regs is being adhered to and make sure that this, the design actually works.

Yeah. Well, Martin, thanks very much.

That's right.

Good to have you here.

Yeah, it's been brilliant and yeah, really, really appreciate you inviting us and having us on.

Thanks for coming. Before we finish up, it's worth mentioning we have a referral scheme with Cuboid, so if you are a Cuboid customer, you can get half 50% off your first three months with Stora. So I think it's Stora. If you go to Stora Co, Cuboid K U B O I D then details are there. So, so if you're a Cuboid customer and you're coming to Stora, you can get your first three months at half price. So check out that link and yeah, thanks again. That's right. I'll see you too. Good luck.

Excellent. Thanks so much.

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