Office Value Plunge Opens Door For New Conversion Play: Self-Storage

For decades, a four-story brick building in the Glenforest neighborhood of Raleigh, North Carolina, served as a call center for AT&T.

But next month, it will open as a self-storage facility for people to keep old newspaper clippings, couches and teddy bears.

The project is Tourbineau Real Estate Partners’ first office-to-self-storage conversion, and the company is on the precipice of taking that model national, with six more in the pipeline — focusing on urban districts with vacant office space.

“We`ve seen, anecdotally, a lot of these urban governments and community groups finally understand that these buildings aren`t really going to become anything else,” said Tourbineau Chief Investment Officer Ben Wong.

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RSK: This is not for every office building to be converted to self storage. But for the ones that can, it sure makes economic sense.