SmartStop beefed up its South Florida self-storage portfolio, buying a recently completed North Miami facility for $30.8 million.
An affiliate of Ladera Ranch, California-based SmartStop, led by CEO H. Michael Schwartz, acquired a three-story 99,280-square-foot self-storage building at 250 Northeast 135th Street, records and real estate database Vizzda show.
The deal breaks down to $310 a square foot.
The seller, an affiliate of Miami-based Abreu Development, acquired the 1.4-acre property in 2022 for $3 million, and completed the facility last year, records show. Abreu previously leased the building to Public Storage.
SmartStop operates more than 195 self-storage facilities in 22 states and Canada, totaling more than 15.3 million rentable square feet, according to the firm’s website.
In 2016, SmartStop entered the South Florida market by acquiring a self-storage building in unincorporated northwest Miami-Dade County for $24.8 million, and a facility in Pembroke Pines for $15.7 million, records show. Two years later, the company paid $36.2 million for a self-storage building in Fort Lauderdale.
A SmartStop affiliated trust also owns a five-story self-storage building in Tamarac. Last year, Strategic Storage Growth Trust III paid $19.5 million for the facility at 8251 West McNab Road.
While demand for self-storage projects has boomed in recent years, its niche in South Florida’s industrial market is in the midst of a construction slowdown. Local developers are projected to add 175,889 new square feet of self-storage by the end of this year, a decline of roughly 31.9 percent compared to 2023, according to StorageCafe, a division of Yardi.
In the past year, prices for renting self-storage units in the South Florida market have also dropped by 11.3 percent to roughly $157 a month for a 10-foot by 10-foot unit, the average size at most facilities, StorageCafe found. However, South Florida prices are still higher than the national average of $120 a month.