REIT advice please?

[ShepardHumphries]

My wife and I are closing in on our dream of not having to work. We have various investments and speculations and stores of value, however, we are now interested in adding REITs to our portfolio. Our research has not shown us much actionable information. We find many stockbroker types, many too-good-to-be-true options, however we are not finding a good actionable patch to purchasing. We are specifically interested in the "storage" sector. We are also interested in the Boomer housing sector.

We had hoped that our investigations would lead to the REIT equivalent to Vanguard's Index Funds, kind of a widely accepted good way to go. We are not finding specific, actionable info. Are you an experienced REIT investor? May we pick your brain?

Some of our experiences/reasoning:
*A trusted distant-kin fellow explained that to properly scale a personal storage business, it requires a minimum of $2.7m, anything less is typically not worth the hassle. For example, you need a $50k/yr person to run it, and if they are running a 6-unit place; it doesn't break even, but 600 units does. There are a zillion other things that we know that we don't know, and we only want to allocate less than $450k, so we want to go the REIT route, likely divided between 3 or 4 different funds for further diversification.

*We have some residential rentals (Grand Junction, CO & Fountain Hills, AZ), however, we predict inflation and also national residential rent control at some point, so we want to diversify into storage, hoping that it will not be subjected to as much woke regulation.

 

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[Hong_Kong]

My wife and I are closing in on our dream of not having to work. We have various investments and speculations and stores of value, however, we are now interested in adding REITs to our portfolio. Our research has not shown us much actionable information. We find many stockbroker types, many too-good-to-be-true options, however we are not finding a good actionable patch to purchasing. We are specifically interested in the "storage" sector. We are also interested in the Boomer housing sector.

We had hoped that our investigations would lead to the REIT equivalent to Vanguard's Index Funds, kind of a widely accepted good way to go. We are not finding specific, actionable info. Are you an experienced REIT investor? May we pick your brain?

Some of our experiences/reasoning:
*A trusted distant-kin fellow explained that to properly scale a personal storage business, it requires a minimum of $2.7m, anything less is typically not worth the hassle. For example, you need a $50k/yr person to run it, and if they are running a 6-unit place; it doesn't break even, but 600 units does. There are a zillion other things that we know that we don't know, and we only want to allocate less than $450k, so we want to go the REIT route, likely divided between 3 or 4 different funds for further diversification.

*We have some residential rentals (Grand Junction, CO & Fountain Hills, AZ), however, we predict inflation and also national residential rent control at some point, so we want to diversify into storage, hoping that it will not be subjected to as much woke regulation.

I know of a local company that is very forward thinking in the storage space industry. What they do is build multilevel buildings for self storage to cover the cost of the building. The trick, is that the buildings can easily be converted to apartments later down the road. All the locations are almost prime.

There is an immense capital cost to do this successfully, the number you gave seems about right. A little less for rural outdoor self storage.

If you're looking for a REIT what about a listed REIT (checkout Granite REIT, STAG industrial) that focus on industrial property rather than just self storage? Warehousing space demand is very high, and expected to grow. Granite rents to stable tenants like Homedepot, Walmart.

If you're looking for a non-listed LP deal in the self storage space I would recommend looking on real estate crowd funding sites.