Every day I drive by a building that has "SELF STORAGE" written on it. What the heck is this thing, anyway?
Commercial self storage as we know it has been around since the 1960s. The first storage facilities were constructed as a series of long narrow buildings, each with several wide doors on the front that resembled garage doors. Customers usually walked to a central property office, signed a lease, then paid rent every month. They stored cars, furniture, clothes and pretty much anything else in the rented garages, which were exposed to cold, heat, humidity and other weather damaging to stored items. Stored items were rarely in the same condition leaving these facilities as they were when entering.
Fortunately, self storage has improved a lot since then. Individual units can now be rented in sizes as small as 25 square feet and as large as 300 square feet. Customers can rent for a month or stay for years. The best of such modern facilities have very high security, including entry coded key pads and security cameras. The storage units are indoors, where they are air conditioned in the summer, heated in the winter, with humidity kept at optimally low levels.
The next time you drive by one of these buildings, stop in and witness first hand 21st century self storage. If you'd like to learn more about state-of-the-art self storage, just visit www.spacemaxstorage.com.
