Storageone Rockhampton sold in October 2018
The result was the culmination of a campaign which saw more than 50 interested buyers and 4 offers competing for this fabulous property.
When the owners of Storageone Rockhampton wanted to offer their immaculate, near new, Steel Storage built 3-year-old facility with around 300 units trading at around 75% occupancy and achieving a rental rate of around $110 per sqm complete with a manager’s residence and room to expand.
The occupancy hadn’t moved much over the last few years and had an income to match. In other words, the income whilst consistent had shown little growth. At the time, the rental rate achieved at $110 per sqm was modest compared with a national average of $250 per sqm.
I was concerned that this flatness in growth would potentially give buyers the impression that business strength and future growth prospects in Rocky were underwhelming, worse still, a disincentive to attract them to buy the property.
On further consideration though, here we had an owner-operator who, in a highly competitive, mining-downturn affected, regional market, had managed to build this 300 unit facility from scratch in little over 2 years!. The modest rental rate could easily be explained because they owners had to discount in order to fill the facility fast. And thats what they did.
Wow! How impressive. If that’s not growth I don’t know what is!.
However, this information alone was still not going to be an adequate reason for a buyer to want to buy the property. I needed to know what was going to drive growth for this self-storage business into the future. Perhaps the answer to that was in local market intelligence?
For this information, I contacted “Capricorn Enterprise” Rockhampton’s economic & new business bureau and discovered an amazing story about the immediate future prospects of Rockhampton and the surrounding district. I was delighted to find that Rockhampton was just about to explode with new infrastructure projects bringing with them hundreds of workers and new businesses, many of whom will need storage.
Whilst most of us don’t like the prospect of new coal mines, Adani was about to commit to the world’s largest coal mine infrastructure project only a short drive from Rockhampton. Secondly a new weir infrastructure project was about to be built at nearby Rockwood and the defence department had just entered into a multi-billion dollar joint venture with the Singapore government to build a massive military training area at nearby Shoalwater bay (about 20 mins drive). And if that’s not enough, a massive wind and solar farm at Clark Creek was about to be built. All of this and the new Stockland Parkhurst master-planned community of 2,350 new residential lots less than five minutes away was about to be developed.
Phew, I thought, what a great story this will be!. And this was the growth story that helped me sell the property.
Needless to say I’m so glad I contacted Capricorn Enterprise, they were so helpful.
The property ultimately sold for $4.65m after an intense bidding war between competing self-storage companies
Storage industries require the right sites all over. We have detailed a few of the basic specifications required in order to build a modern self-storage facility in our editorial here
Summary of property was this
- Existing 295-unit facility with DA permit for extra 127 ground level units
- Land size of 11430 m2
- Building area 4062 m2
- Occupancy 75% approx
- Designed & built by Steel Storage Group
- Comfortable on-site managers residence
