In the middle of an expanding market for L.A.’s self storage industry, plans have emerged for two new facilities along the same stretch of Ventura Boulevard in the San Fernando Valley.
At 20401 West Ventura in Woodland Hills, Banner Real Estate group, a firm based in Greater Chicago, intends to build a three-story, 158,000-square-foot, climate-controlled self storage facility on what is currently a vacant parking lot.
The proposal was recently registered with the city of Los Angeles and comes more than two years after the property owner, Kamyar Marouni, had filed plans for a four-story, 149-key hotel on the site.
Marouni, the CEO of an audio products distributor, purchased the site through an LLC in 2015 for $6.2 million, according to property records. A partnership entity for the property subsequently took on several million dollars in loans. The businessman did not immediately respond to a request for comment, however, and it was unclear why the hotel plans got shelved.
Banner Real Estate Group, based in Chicago and Deerfield, Illinois, is a multifamily developer that has built over 2 million square feet of self-storage facilities, according to the firm’s website.
The facility at 20401 is slated to go up about a mile east of another planned self storage facility. In late November, a proposal was recorded for a 104,000-square-foot space at 21101 West Ventura Boulevard in Woodland Hills, on a 2.5-acre property that currently houses a Courtyard by Marriott hotel.
The developer of the project, South Carolina-based Johnson Development Associates, wants to subdivide the property in order to build a six-story storage warehouse with 7,000 square feet of office space.
Throughout 2022 — after the pandemic reshuffled many people’s living arrangements — self-storage has become a burgeoning asset class nationwide: One study earlier this year identified more than 6 million square feet of storage space in the works for Greater L.A., which ranked second among all U.S. metro markets.
The boom includes numerous development projects underway in the suburban San Fernando Valley, including one recently revealed plan by a New York investment firm to repurpose a Tarzana film school campus.
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