Industry History | Public Storage — Fifty Thousand Dollars and Orange Doors in El Cajon
· 1972-8
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Industry History | Public Storage — Fifty Thousand Dollars and Orange Doors in El Cajon
kevin
People treat Public Storage as a Frisco REIT that always painted a freeway box orange.
The first book was one warehouse beside a California highway.
On 14 August 1972 B. Wayne Hughes and Kenneth Volk Jr. opened the first facility in El Cajon after Volk, posing as a customer on a Texas trip, found a private-storage warehouse already on a wait list.
Each man put in $25,000, $50,000 in 1972 dollars together.
The first corporate name was Private Storage Spaces Inc.; the pair switched to Public Storage so the initials would match and strangers would not think the lot was closed to them.
Orange doors were hung to catch drivers on the nearby freeway.
The first tenant was a San Diego STP oil distributor who needed space for inventory.
The El Cajon box broke even within three months at about 35 percent occupancy.
Hughes treated the sheds as a way to hold land with rent until the parcel could be redeveloped; the rent never stopped covering the land.
Limited partnerships funded a scale that family-and-bank yards could not match.
The firm reached 1,000 locations by 1989 and reorganized as a public REIT in 1995 when Storage Equities merged into the Public Storage name.
The mechanism is still the El Cajon one.
A household or a distributor needs a locked room this month, not a second lease, and a visible box by a highway is cheaper than a warehouse lease.
A visitor in El Cajon still sees orange doors along the I-8 corridor.
The REIT outgrew the first box.
The box is where the book started.
Photo: San Diego County streetscape via Wikimedia Commons.
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