How Self Storage Can Help Tenants

  • Published: 09 Apr 13

Self Storage

Picture the scene. You’ve searched long and hard through pages of Gumtree adverts for that perfect flat to no avail. You’ve trawled through the listings from Glasgow’s other letting agents and you’ve come up empty. You’ve scoured Facebook, combed newsagents and combed countless online message boards for that elusive property and you’ve found nowhere up to snuff.

Zilch.

With your hope fading, you turn to the Glasgow experts: CLS. With our local knowledge and seventh sense the perfect properties – not that we’re boasting – we’re able to hunt you out the perfect flat.

High ceilings, efficient heating, double glazing, spacious rooms, loaded with character and bang on budget. It’s perfect.

Unfortunately, the landlord has a penchant for leopard print sofas and there’s three dotted around the living room. It’s a potential deal breaker, right?

Wrong.

Most people think furnished flats come as an unchangeable unit, that the furniture is somehow welded to the ground – it isn’t.

Landlords are usually okay with you moving stuff in and out so long as everything is back where it started when you move out. The only problem with this is having somewhere to store it when you’re still living in the property.

When situations like these pop up, we typically recommend tenants consider copying our cousins across the Atlantic.

Self storage is huge in the States. We’re talking a scale where the total storage space is larger than some countries – a little over three times the size of San Marino or one hundred and twenty times the size of the Vatican City.

Back in Scotland things are less massive but self storage is still just as useful. We grabbed David from Glasgow-based Storage Vault to discuss what the ins and outs of Scotland’s self storage industry.

“It’s about flexibility,” says David. “Most people don’t have a warehouse attached to their house because they simply don’t need one. While this makes sense a lot of the time, it can leave you high and dry when you need extra storage.”

Self storage provides people with that warehouse space, but only asks them to pay when they need it and only charges them for what they use. If you want to move out a sofa, you’ll pay for a sofa-sized unit. If you want to clean house and start with an empty room, you’ll pay for a room-sized unit.

Storage Vault have a number of storage units in Glasgow and see a huge range of people of people come through the doors.

“We see the occasional odd ball,” says David, chuckling slightly. “But mostly it’s families, businesses and tradesmen that need a bit more space. If a family’s decorating or moving or just have nowhere to fit an old kitchen table, they’ll come to us.”

So when you find that almost perfect flat, don’t think give up. Get active and nudge the property over the line and into dream flat territory.


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