A warehouse to self storage conversion pencils in a secondary market for one reason: your acquisition basis on an underused industrial building is a fraction of ground-up cost, and the buildout can be phased out of cash flow instead of financed all at once. Brian Laing bought his first building in 2016 — 30,000 square feet in Broome County, New York, for roughly $225,000 to $250,000 — and turned the whole thing into storage, building it out at night. He now runs six facilities and has never taken outside capital.
The catch is that not every cheap building is convertible. Flood zone location, road frontage and site acreage disqualify or multiply a deal before you ever price the racking, doors, or climate systems. Get those wrong and low square-foot cost will not save you.
What follows is the screening filter, the phasing sequence, the honest financing tradeoff, and the lease-up tactics an independent operator uses to hold occupancy against national brands with real ad budgets.
Key takeaways
- Screen for flood zone status before you price a building — Laing deliberately buys outside flood zones and notes many competing facilities in his market sit inside them.
- A small footprint can still carry itself: Laing’s 5,000 sq ft temperature-controlled building is paid off and sits on a highway carrying 15,000–20,000 cars a day, which he treats as advertising for all six locations.
- Phase the buildout. Convert one building, let it stabilize, then add — Laing’s current expansion takes 160 units and adds 40 temperature-controlled, roughly 100 standard, plus vehicle storage.
- Expect local banks to struggle with the asset class. Laing bootstrapped all six facilities because lenders in his market did not understand storage, which capped his growth rate.
- Automate billing and onboarding through software, but write your procedures down before the next conversion — Laing says the owner-level personal touch and the marketing are what would break if he stepped away for 30 days.
From the Real Estate Pros Show
This article draws on an interview with Brian Laing of Laing Self Storage on the Real Estate Pros Show, hosted by Meghan Escobar.
Warehouse to Self Storage Conversion: Why Existing Buildings Beat Ground-Up in Secondary Markets
In a small market, the building is usually the bargain. Laing’s entry point in 2016 was a 30,000-square-foot structure he picked up for roughly $225,000 to $250,000 and repurposed entirely into storage units. He and his father did the buildout themselves, working nights. That single conversion is what seeded the next five facilities.
The appeal is not only basis. Laing came to storage after two frustrating rounds with other real estate. Small residential rentals meant hot water tanks, light bulbs, washer-dryers and leaky pipes, and he sold those units nearly as fast as he bought them. Leasing the family company’s vacant warehouse space to commercial tenants — construction outfits, a taxi company — produced tenants who left mid-lease and stopped paying, and as he puts it, you can’t get blood out of a stone.
Storage solved both problems at once. You own the real estate and you control who occupies it, at a unit size small enough that a single non-paying tenant is a rounding error rather than a vacancy crisis.
The practical screen for an investor already holding industrial space: your building is a candidate if the shell is sound, the roof and slab are usable, and the location clears the site tests in the next section. Interior partition work, doors and a gate system are largely controllable costs you can stage. What you cannot fix after closing is where the building sits.
Owner-occupied and family-held industrial buildings are the best source of these deals in secondary markets. Laing’s largest current project is exactly that — his family’s trucking property, closed after decades of operation and now being converted rather than sold.
Site Screening: Flood Zones, Traffic Counts, and Acreage
Two things disqualify a building and two things multiply it. Run all four before you make an offer.
Disqualifier one: flood zone. Laing buys outside flood zones on purpose, and he points out that a number of the competing facilities in his market are inside them. The reason matters beyond insurance cost. Storage tenants put furniture, records and inventory on a slab. A single flood event produces claims, one-star reviews and a reputation your competitors will quietly use against you for years.
Disqualifier two: no visibility. A cheap building tucked behind other industrial buildings on a dead-end service road has to be filled entirely with paid and organic marketing. Storage demand is local and impulse-driven; drive-by presence does real work.
Multiplier one: traffic count. Laing’s 5,000-square-foot temperature-controlled building sits on a highway carrying 15,000 to 20,000 cars a day. He treats that frontage as free advertising for the entire portfolio, not just for that site. Pull the state DOT traffic count for any road you are considering — it is public data and it takes minutes.
Multiplier two: usable acreage. The former family trucking property covers eight acres with two warehouses on it. That gives him indoor conversion square footage plus open ground for outdoor vehicle storage, which is the lowest-capex revenue on the site. A building on a tight lot gives you one product. A building on acreage gives you three.
Apply these filters in order — flood map, traffic count, road frontage, acreage — and you will kill most candidates before you spend money on inspections or engineering.
A lot of the local banks, as much as they say they want to be a part and they want to help you grow, they just don’t understand self storage. We’ve bootstrapped everything.
— Brian Laing, Laing Self Storage
Phasing the Buildout Instead of Financing It All at Once
The sequence that keeps a conversion self-funding is: convert one building, let it stabilize, then use its cash flow to build the next phase. Laing has repeated that pattern six times across two counties over roughly a decade.
His current expansion shows what a later phase looks like once a site is proven. The facility he operates from has 160 existing units. He is adding roughly 40 temperature-controlled units, another 100 non-temperature-controlled units, and vehicle storage on the same footprint. He is not guessing at demand — he is adding to a site that already rents.
The unit mix decision is where phasing earns its money. Non-temperature-controlled units are the cheapest to build and the fastest to fill. Temperature-controlled units cost more per square foot but command higher rents and attract a different tenant. Vehicle and outdoor storage requires the least construction of all if you already have surfaced acreage. Build the cheap product first, prove absorption, then commit capital to the expensive product.
Small footprints are not automatically bad economics. Laing’s 5,000-square-foot temperature-controlled building would look subscale on a spreadsheet, but the building is paid off and its highway frontage markets the other five locations. A conversion earns its keep on total contribution — rent, debt position, and what it does for portfolio-wide lead flow — not on square footage alone.
The tradeoff is honest: phasing takes years. If you need 200 units producing income in eighteen months, this is not the model.
The Financing Wall: Why Local Banks Struggle With Self Storage
The single largest constraint on Laing’s growth has not been deal flow or demand. It has been financing. He has bootstrapped all six facilities because the local banks in his market, in his words, say they want to help you grow but do not understand self storage. The process with the banks he did use was painful.
That experience is common for small operators in secondary markets. Community lenders underwrite what they see repeatedly — owner-occupied commercial, small multifamily, equipment. A converted warehouse full of month-to-month storage tenants does not fit a familiar template, and a loan officer who cannot compare it to three recent files in the same market tends to slow the file down or price it defensively. Terms vary by lender and market, and you should get your own quotes rather than assume anything.
Self-funding avoids that fight entirely. It also caps your pace. Laing wants to grow faster than cash flow allows and is open to outside capital, but he has never taken an investor and says he does not know what that road looks like.
He is also cautious for a specific reason. The hardest setback in his career was partnering with the wrong people — a former business partner situation that, as he describes it, turned his life upside down and left him careful about who he trusts.
That is the real tradeoff for a conversion operator. Bootstrapping costs you speed. Outside capital costs you control and requires partner selection you may not be good at yet. Pick deliberately rather than by default.
Lease-Up and Retention When You Can’t Outspend the Nationals
Laing rates his own marketing about an 8 out of 10 and says paid advertising works to an extent but is expensive relative to what you get back. His fill comes from organic search, Google Business profiles, reviews and word of mouth — when someone needs storage, they call him because an aunt or an uncle already rents from him.
The sharpest tactic he runs is abandoned cart recovery. Cubby, his management software, alerts him by phone or email when someone starts an online rental and drops out, or vacates the shopping cart. He logs in and sends a message that is not a template — he writes it himself, Saturday or Tuesday morning, it does not matter.
The reason this matters is specific to storage. If a prospect looks at one location and the size they want is unavailable, they will not click through to your other sites. They assume you do not have it and they shop a competitor. A same-day personal message offering a different size or a nearby location intercepts that.
Two more habits defend occupancy:
- Personal onboarding. Laing reaches out to every new tenant himself, introduces himself, and handles access questions. Many customers have his cell number, so a down gate gets fixed immediately.
- Working with late payers. Times are tight and people miss dates. He works with them rather than pushing them out, which protects both occupancy and reputation.
The result: nothing below five stars across all six locations, except a single three-star review inherited from a poorly managed facility he acquired.
What Breaks When the Owner Is the System
Ask Laing what fails if he disappears for 30 days and he names two things: the personalized owner touch and the marketing. Billing and onboarding are automated end to end through Cubby, so the operational floor holds — rent collects, units rent online, gates work. What stops is the part that actually differentiates the business.
He is candid that documented procedures are his weakest area. The procedures exist in his head because he is the one running them daily. Writing them down is not work he enjoys, and he would rather spend his time on marketing and growth. His internal accountant has absorbed some phone calls and tenant onboarding, which helped, but that is delegation without documentation.
He also knows the next constraint. Before he builds two or three more facilities, he needs a site manager who can handle multiple locations the way he does — and that, as he says, comes down to writing the right procedures and policies, putting them in place, and making sure they are followed.
For any owner-operator running conversions, the lesson is sequencing. Write the SOPs before the next conversion, not after. The procedures worth documenting first are the ones that produce revenue, not the ones that feel administrative:
- The abandoned-cart follow-up: trigger, response time, what the message says, who sends it.
- New tenant welcome: who calls, what gets covered, what gets logged.
- Late payment handling: at what day, in what tone, with what options.
- Site screening criteria for the next acquisition, in writing, so someone else can pre-qualify buildings.
Four documents. None of them require a consultant.
Frequently asked questions
What makes a warehouse a bad candidate for self storage conversion?
Location disqualifiers you cannot fix after closing. A flood zone site is the clearest one — Laing buys outside flood zones deliberately and notes that several competing facilities in his market sit inside them, which creates insurance cost, claims exposure and long-term reputation damage.
The second is a lack of visibility. A building with no meaningful road frontage forces you to fill every unit through marketing spend, with no drive-by demand helping you. A tight lot with no surrounding acreage is a lesser problem, but it limits you to indoor units and rules out outdoor vehicle storage.
How do you pay for a self storage conversion if local banks won’t lend on it?
Phase it and fund it from cash flow. Laing built six facilities without outside investors, converting one building at a time and letting each stabilize before adding the next phase. His current expansion adds roughly 140 units plus vehicle storage to a site that already has 160 units renting.
The honest cost is speed. He wants to grow faster than self-funding allows and is open to outside capital, but has never taken an investor. Financing structures and terms vary by lender and market, so talk to multiple lenders and your own advisors before assuming what is available.
Is temperature-controlled storage worth the extra buildout cost in a small market?
It can be, but build it in a later phase rather than a first one. Laing runs temperature-controlled space in a 5,000-square-foot building and is converting two warehouses on his eight-acre property to it, yet his current expansion adds only about 40 temperature-controlled units against roughly 100 standard units.
That ratio reflects the practical order of operations: build the cheaper product first, confirm absorption at your site, then commit the extra capital to climate control where the rent premium justifies it.
What software do small self storage operators use to automate billing and rentals?
Laing uses Cubby across all six of his locations and describes billing as automated from A to Z, along with online rentals and tenant onboarding. That automation is what lets a single owner-operator run six facilities.
The feature that earns its keep for him is the alert when a prospect abandons an online rental in progress. It converts a passive management platform into a lead recovery tool, provided someone actually responds to the alert.
How do independent self storage owners compete with national operators on price and marketing?
Not on ad spend. Laing considers paid advertising expensive relative to the return and relies on organic search, Google Business profiles, reviews and word of mouth. Across six locations he has nothing below five stars, apart from one three-star review inherited with an acquired facility.
The competitive edge is response speed and personal contact — a hand-written message to a prospect who dropped out of the online cart, a personal welcome to every new tenant, and flexibility with tenants who are late on rent. National operators do not do those things at the owner level.
The bottom line
If you are holding or evaluating an industrial building, run the site screen first — flood map, traffic count, frontage, acreage — and only then build a phased conversion budget you can fund out of the first stabilized phase. Write the four revenue-producing procedures down while the facility is small enough that you still remember all of them.
