How people actually invest
A search for “invest in self storage” usually mixes four different jobs. One person wants to buy a facility and hire a manager. Another wants a traded stock and no gate codes. A third wants a private fund to assemble a portfolio. A fourth wants to be the lender, not the owner. Those are not versions of the same product. Access, liquidity, control, and the work involved are different, and so is the way you lose money if you are wrong.
Direct ownership means a deed, a rent roll, and the bills. A public REIT means shares that trade on an exchange. A private fund or syndication means a contract with a manager, usually limited to investors who meet that offering’s requirements, and usually hard to exit on a Tuesday. Lending means you are paid from the property’s cash flow only after you have underwritten the borrower. The comparison is at self-storage REITs vs direct ownership vs private funds. Debt, as a tool rather than a product pitch, is at financing a self-storage facility.
What this series covers
Start with the business, not a ticker. How self-storage facilities make money explains occupancy, street rates, in-place rent, ancillary income, and expenses. What to look for when buying a self-storage facility is the field guide for a purchase. Self-storage due diligence checklist is the list to take into a data room. Buying an existing self-storage facility vs building a new one separates an operating facility from a construction project. How to choose a self-storage market is about supply, households, and trade areas, without a thin page for every city.
Self-storage market trends collects figures only when a named source, a publication, and a date are available. Risks of self-storage investing is the matching list of ways these investments fail. Self-storage investing glossary defines the words underwriters actually use. Self-storage investing: common questions answers the short questions people type into search. 1031 exchanges and self storage is a high-level note on like-kind exchanges of real property, and it is not tax advice. Third-party management for a self-storage facility is about hiring an operator.
What Cove will not invent
Cove is a directory of storage facilities, portable containers, and neighbor-hosted space. It does not broker facility sales, publish a national cap rate, or quote a return. When a page here uses a number, the sentence names who published it and when. A target is labeled a target. A same-store figure from one public company is not rewritten as “the industry.” If a statistic could not be checked against a current primary source, it is not on the page.
City and state pages on Cove count facilities in this directory. Facilities per 100,000 people sets those counts next to Census population. That report is useful context. It is not net rentable square footage, not occupancy, and not a price index. Call a facility for a unit. Read a rent roll, or a filing, for an investment.
A private fund mentioned because the businesses are related
Eclipse Capital Advisors publishes its own description of a private self-storage fund, Fortified SunVault Evergreen Fund LP, at working with Eclipse Capital. Cove and Eclipse Capital Advisors are related businesses. Both are associated with Justin Draplin. The Eclipse page is included so a reader can see what that firm actually publishes, including the limits in its disclosures. It is one path among the paths above. It is not a ranking, and it is not an offer to sell a security. Any offer that firm makes is made only through its own offering documents, to investors who qualify, off this website.