A new building is going up rather quickly in South Sioux City that has RV and boat storage operators scratching their heads. That’s because this new form of storage is likely the latest take in an industry that has boomed over the past 30 years and has morphed into numerous niches already.
This is likely to be the newest of niches to hit the scene in several years.
This building is currently under construction as a 21,000-square-foot, $1.35 million development that will house what developer Shennen Saltzman referred to as “contractor condos”– a total of 13 leasable shop-spaces where contractors and tradespeople can do their work.
“An electrician might rent one. The Matco or the Snap-On tool guy might rent one, to basically office out of,” Saltzman said.
“You could park a couple vans in there. We have an option to put in restrooms, wash-sinks and mezzanines, so you could drop a second story in there for storage and things of that sort, to kind of maximize your space,” he added.
Twelve of the units will be 30 feet-by-50 feet, and will lease for $1,500 per month on a 12-month commercial lease, Saltzman said. The largest, 50 feet-by-50 feet, will lease for $2,500 per month. The building will have 14 foot-by-14 foot overhead doors, along with human-size side doors; the units will be heated and cooled; the driveways will be all concrete; the inside will be lit with high-lumen LED lights; each unit will have floor drains; and the building will offer three-phase electrical outfit, which is used to power larger electric motors or for other high-load uses.
Saltzman, who also operates around 300 self-storage units in South Sioux City, said the idea for the contractor spaces came to him through his storage unit business. This new project is somewhat of an expansion of the storage business.
“We just kind of see a need for people needing more space,” said Saltzman, who is also a longtime Burger King franchise-holder and whosehttps://www.facebook.com/toystoragenation family owns Callahan’s Discount Liquor. “Because we have a lot of contractors now that rent our (storage) units to kind of work out of them, but they’re not big enough. So, they’ve been telling us that they’d like to have a shop that could be heated and cooled, so they could work in them year-round.”
Tim Hynds is a reporter for the Sioux City Journal.
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