Premier Storage Buys Bellevue Facility for $51 Million

A Bellevue self-storage property has changed hands in a nearly $51 million deal.

Tennessee-based Premier Storage Investors acquired the six-story West Coast Self-Storage facility at 12399 Northup Way, the Puget Sound Business Journal reported. California investment firm Commune Capital was the seller.

The 140,000-square-foot property, built in 2016 along Bellevue’s Northup Way corridor near State Route 520, includes 1,000 storage units on a 1.2-acre site. The deal shakes out to about $364 per square foot.

Commune Capital bought the undeveloped parcel in 2014 for $2.2 million before building the facility at an estimated cost of $9.3 million, according to permit filings cited by the Business Journal. The property is assessed at $30.1 million. It was previously co-owned by Gene Juarez, founder of the Seattle-area salon chain that bears his name, before being sold in 2007.

Premier Storage Investors operates seven facilities across western Washington, including locations in Mountlake Terrace, Maple Valley, Bonney Lake and Vancouver. It recently completed a 101,500-square-foot facility at 1115 NW 46th Street in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood and is developing another 95,000-square-foot project in Auburn. The firm owns roughly 6 million square feet of storage space across 15 states.

As tech companies like Amazon and OpenAI flock to Bellevue, so too are workers. That increase in residents could limit self-storage supply. The self-storage sector is expected to continue growing nationwide as population growth and demand for storage units come face-to-face with limited space, according to Precedence Research data cited by the Business Journal.

The country’s self-storage sector has grown by 547 million square feet over the past decade, making for roughly 2 billion square feet total nationwide, The Real Deal previously reported. The growth is clustered in cities where apartment demand ticked upward while home ownership declined.

— Chris Malone Méndez