A real-time site for you ... that's completely unworkable

Several years ago a friend and I were cold-calling owners of bite-sized, usually beat-up, storage facilities in Nashville. One that popped up on our radar back then was a real piece of shit: Brentwood Mini Storage at 9000 Church Street. He walked it back then and it was a multi-level wood-frame facility with wooden units. Zero value as a “going concern.”

Well guess what? Said friend called me up a couple months ago to announce that it is officially on the market!

This is great dirt and the asking price is $1.75m. Very prominent/visible site stretching down the interstate on the northern edge of the 3rd-richest town in Tennessee and one of the best bedroom communities in the red-hot Nashville area. A 19-acre mixed-use project in the works next door. KKR bought the newest facility in Brentwood a couple years ago. So, our thought process was: the use could be grandfathered (Brentwood is high-barrier municipality), you could scrape this ugly bitch, then just rebuild and max it out as best you can. The tallest fattest facility you could fit on this lot.

Unfortunately, you wouldn’t be able to fit much. It’s not as big as it looks.

The building footprint itself probably 9,000-something square feet. Currently 99 units according to the listing, which is tiny in the context of someone paying $1.75m.

But the bigger problem with the property from a development standpoint isn’t even the size, at 0.51 acres. I can name multiple self-storage projects in prominent/sought-after locations that were successfully built on a similarly-sized pad.

Without even talking to a civil engineer, I can tell you it’s the shape. The width of the current building in the back is 15’, and it would almost certainly violate setback requirements to try to build something new in its place, that close to the boundary.

Also, with the Brentwood height limit, you wouldn’t get much more than 4 or 5 stories, which, even if you somehow kept the current footprint (very unlikely), would only get you ~47k gross SF, netting you maybe 35k rentable SF. That is not going to work anywhere in Tennessee if the land is $1.75m and the construction cost is north of $5m, which it could be.

So we reached out to the city: would they cut us a break on setbacks, on height limits, etc.? We were told they hate this thing and would love to see it go. Unfortunately, the conversation was like talking to a robot; they weren’t going to do us any favors to try to fit something workable onto the property.

And of course the price. The seller will not come down, because they aren’t serious. We told the broker to drop this worthless client (side note, it is amazing how many small-time brokers get their time wasted by dumb clients). Someone already tied it up at or above the asking price, trying to make sense of acquiring the existing facility as a “going concern,” and dropped it. Shocker.

Look, if someone wants to buy this thing (it appears to still be on the market if this link is still working) and see if there is a way to legally gut the building completely and rebuild every square foot inside without altering the footprint, then you could end up with a decent (but very small) facility on your hands,… but doing some napkin math your basis could end up exceeding $300 per rentable SF.

Someone might pay one-point-something million for this site, only because of the location, to scrape it and build something very small and modest, but I don’t know what that would be - certainly not a traditional retailer given the access point to the property.

Good luck to Zach the listing agent on this one - he’ll need it.

Overall, I enjoy kicking around unrealistic ideas like this one. Because if it somehow works, then it’s absolutely killer. An old land developer I knew when I was younger once told an interviewer that half his job is “tilting at windmills.”