Miami City Self Storage continues land grab with $7.1M pickup near Grove

UPDATED September 13 12:33 p.m.: Miami City Self Storage has just notched another land deal in its belt with the $7.1 million purchase of four parcels near Coconut Grove, with plans to redevelop the site into a storage facility.

The deal, announced by Chariff Realty Group’s Dan Blakeman and Liana Rivera, covers four contiguous single-story retail buildings at 2460, 2500, 2520 and 2600 Southwest 28th Lane. Altogether, they add up to about 23,125 square feet of land with D1 zoning, which allows for buildable heights up to eight stories.

Rivera told The Real Deal that the seller was Dennis Leaton, who’s both a real estate investor and the owner of Worth Galleries, an antique store that occupied one of the four commercial properties.

Liana Rivera and Dan Blakeman

“He started assembling in 1996, so he definitely took his time putting this together,” Rivera said. That year, Leaton started with the $285,000 purchase of a single warehouse on the block where he set up his expansive antiques shop. Over the next two decades, according to county records, he added the three others for a total of $2.135 million.

Miami City Self Storage, headed by Jay Massirman, Stephen McBride, Stephen Garchik and consultant David Blum, announced early last year that it was launching a plan to build more than 1 million square feet of its namesake, technicolor self storage facilities throughout South Florida.

Massirman told TRD that his firm has 11 self-storage projects in the pipeline, including this latest deal. The company plans to demolish the parcels and build a 150,000-square-foot facility, which would house about 100,000 rentable square feet of storage.

The sale means Leaton’s three tenants — White Tiger and Dragon Martial Arts, Absolutely Needlepoint, and Hot Yoga House Miami — will be moving. Massirman said he worked out a deal where the tenants would stay until his team scored building permits, which could take between six and nine months. From there, he hopes to open the facility by summer or fall 2018.

He said Miami City Self Storage is close to signing a joint-venture agreement to branch out of South Florida and begin developing storage facilities along the West Coast and in New England. As a result, the company’s rate of buying and developing land in Miami will begin to slow down.

“Right now we’re cautious of where we are in the cycle, and we’re cautious of other players getting into the business. We’re looking for the highest barrier-to-entry markets,” he said.