Joe DownsCEO & Co-Founder, Belrose Storage Group. Founder, Storage Moguls.

This grandfathered zoning loophole can kill your deal after ONE sale 🚨

21 Jan 2026 · 1 min

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0:34

In this video, the speaker emphasizes the critical need to obtain a formal letter from the municipality confirming that a property’s grandfathered zoning status is recognized and transferable. He warns that without such documentation, the grandfathered status may be limited or lost, jeopardizing a transaction. He illustrates the risk with an anecdote about a student named Gretchen and her attorney Jason, who discovered that a facility’s grandfathered status was marked with an asterisk, meaning it was only transferable to the original buyer and one additional buyer. This hidden restriction exemplifies a loophole that can derail a deal after just one resale, underscoring the importance of verifying and securing transferable grandfathered rights before proceeding with a purchase.

Chapters

You definitely want to get a letter from the municipality saying, acknowledging, yes, you have a grandfather status. You want that, and that's transferable, and you want to transfer that. And it should be transferable, I should say, because what, uh, one of our students Gretchen found out with Jason as her attorney was— this is fascinating because I had never heard of this, um, this particular scenario— the facility was grandfathered with an asterisk. It was grandfathered for, uh, the buyer and one more buyer.