What does a self storage developer actually need to see on a piece of raw land before they get interested in it

Self storage site selection has a real pecking order, and most developers I have seen described in industry material run through it in roughly this order: traffic count, then visibility, then size and shape, then zoning, then competition distance.

On traffic, the number I see cited most often for developers wanting serious interest is somewhere between 25,000 and 35,000 vehicles per day on the fronting road. A count below 15,000 tends to produce a hard pass unless the site has something unusual going for it, like a dense residential cluster with no nearby competitor. You can pull traffic counts for Michigan roads free from MDOT's traffic data portal, which is worth bookmarking.

On size, single-story facilities generally need a minimum of three to five acres to pencil out, because you lose a meaningful portion of the parcel to drive aisles, setbacks, and stormwater. Multi-story can work on one and a half to two acres in a dense urban or suburban setting, but that product costs significantly more to build. So yes, under two acres probably ends the conversation for single story, though multi-story on a tight infill parcel is a real category.

On shape, developers want something close to rectangular. An L-shaped or flag parcel makes the unit layout inefficient, and you lose rentable square footage to the geometry. Odd configurations in Macomb that you described are a real screen-out factor.

On competition, a common threshold I see referenced is no existing facility within a two to three mile radius, though this loosens in high-density areas.

The thing you did not ask about is environmental. A Phase I environmental assessment (a document that reviews the history of a parcel for contamination risk) can cost $2,000 to $4,000 and is almost always required before a developer will engage seriously. If a parcel already has an environmental question mark, that is not automatically disqualifying, but it adds cost and time that most developers will price into their offer or use to walk away.

What traffic counts are you seeing on the parcels you are looking at most closely?

The traffic threshold most developers quote is 25,000 to 35,000 vehicles per day on the fronting road, because that count correlates with drive-by awareness replacing paid advertising as the primary customer acquisition channel. Below 15,000 you are paying for the site's cheapness with a marketing budget instead.

On acreage, the rough floor for a single-story project worth building is about three acres, because you need room for drive aisles wide enough for a moving truck, setbacks, stormwater detention, and a small office footprint, and those eat more land than people expect before a single unit goes up. A two-acre parcel is not automatically dead, but a developer doing the math will pencil in fewer rentable square feet per dollar of land than a three-plus-acre site offers, and the numbers usually do not recover. Multi-story changes the arithmetic by stacking the rentable area, so a 1.5 to 2 acre site in a dense suburban infill location can work if land prices justify the concrete construction premium, which in outer Macomb versus inner-ring suburbs is a real question.

The shape problem you are describing is the one that kills otherwise decent sites. Self storage needs a rectangular or near-rectangular footprint to lay out row buildings efficiently. An L-shaped or pie-shaped parcel forces curved aisles or wasted corners, and a developer's yield drops fast. Environmental flags compound this because lenders on self storage construction will require a Phase II before committing, and the cost and timeline of that process on a distressed parcel adds risk that most developers price into a lower land offer rather than absorbing.

Zoning is usually B-2 or light industrial in Michigan municipalities, but the variance question is site-specific enough that the county or township's planning department is the only reliable source. What trade area

The shape question is the one I'd be most worried about in Macomb specifically. A two-acre rectangle on a 25k-traffic road is a workable site. A two-acre flag lot or an L-shaped parcel with a 60-foot throat is going to eat your drive aisle efficiency and the developer knows it before they even pull the survey.

Single-story climate-controlled needs roughly 3-4 acres to pencil at the unit counts that make construction costs bearable right now. Multi-story can work tighter, call it 1.5-2 acres if the footprint is clean, but you're adding an elevator and a steel structure so your basis has to be low enough to absorb that. Environmental question marks are a hard stop for most developers at the LOI stage, not something they work through later.

What's the existing zoning on the parcels you're seeing, and are the defaults you're looking at distressed enough that you could move on price if the site checks out?

The environmental question mark you mentioned is probably the fastest kill in Macomb specifically because of all the old industrial parcels sitting around up there. A Phase I alone can eat six to eight weeks before a developer will even pencil a number.

On acreage, the single-story guys I have heard on dispo calls generally want five acres minimum to make the unit count work, multi-story can compress to two and a half or three if the zoning and grade are clean. Under two is basically a no unless it is infill urban and that is not what Macomb looks like.

What is the actual road the parcels you are finding front on, and what is the AADT posted for that segment?

The acreage floor is roughly two acres for single-story and you can get away with less on multi-story because you are stacking units rather than spreading them, but below two acres you are also fighting the turn radius requirements for box trucks and the setbacks that most municipalities layer onto self storage specifically, so the site can pencil on square footage and still fail on geometry.

For Macomb specifically, the shape problem you are describing matters more than raw acreage. Developers want a rectangle or something close to it because the building modules are rectangular and the drive aisles need consistent width end to end. An L-shaped or flagged parcel burns square footage on dead corners and makes the site plan fight itself. Before you spend time on traffic counts, run the parcel through a rough site plan sketch: two rows of buildings, a center drive aisle of about 25 to 30 feet, and a perimeter setback of whatever the local ordinance requires, and see what actually fits.

On the environmental question marks, a Phase I is standard due diligence for any buyer, but self storage developers are particularly cold on anything with a prior industrial use because concrete slabs and climate-controlled units trap vapor migration and a Phase II that comes back positive can kill a deal that otherwise penciled. That detail tends to filter out Macomb's older industrial remnants early.

What zoning category are the parcels you are seeing most often, B-2 commercial, industrial, or something else, because the variance question depends entirely on where those parcels currently sit in the ordinance?

The number I kept hearing from the one storage developer I talked to seriously, this was around 2021, a regional operator out of Grand Rapids, was 25,000 vehicles per day on the fronting road, but he immediately said that number is a floor for a site he would build without hesitation, not the cutoff. He said he would look at 15,000 if the demographics within three miles were right, meaning dense rental housing and a median income somewhere in the $55,000 to $75,000 range, because that band rents units longest. Below $55K the turnover kills you, above $75K they have garages and basements. Macomb County is a mixed bag on that because you have got Shelby Township at the high end and parts of Warren that come in lower, so the same traffic count means different things depending on which side of a line you are on.

On shape, the real problem with a lot of default parcels is that self storage wants a rectangle or close to it, and the reason is drive aisle math. You need roughly 25 feet of aisle for a standard unit row, plus the unit depth, plus another row on the other side, so an L-shaped parcel either wastes the elbow entirely or forces a second access point which most municipalities in Macomb are not going to grant easily without an existing curb cut. A two-acre square is more useful than a four-acre flag lot. What I do not see you mention anywhere is what the default situations you are looking at actually look like from a title standpoint, because a parcel with an environmental flag already recorded in the chain of title is a completely different problem than one that just has visible disturbance and no recorded history. That distinction matters before the acreage question even becomes relevant.

Zoning category is the first filter, and it decides whether you have a conversation at all.

Most self storage goes into general commercial or light industrial zoning, and the distinction matters because light industrial parcels in default situations are exactly the oddly shaped, environmentally questionable ones you are describing. A site zoned light industrial may pencil on acreage and frontage and still require a conditional use permit or variance for storage, which adds six to eighteen months and real dollars to a pro forma before a shovel moves. Take a two-acre parcel at $8 a square foot, roughly $700k. If entitlement risk adds a year of carry at 7 percent, that is $49k before any vertical cost, and a developer modeling a 10 percent stabilized yield on cost feels that immediately.

On shape, the working assumption is that a single-story drive-up facility needs a rectangle or close to it, because the internal drive aisle has to run 26 to 28 feet wide between building rows and you need two rows minimum to make the land work. An L-shaped or flag-lot parcel kills that efficiency fast. Multi-story climate-controlled is more forgiving on shape because you are stacking, but the construction cost per square foot jumps significantly and the population density needed to support those rents in Macomb County is the real question.

The environmental question mark you flagged is where I would spend money early, because a Phase I that comes back with a recognized environmental condition triggers a Phase II, and a Phase II with confirmed contamination can crater the land value entirely regardless of what the traffic count or zoning says.

What are the typical lot depths on the parcels you are seeing, because that dimension controls everything else?

The size floor is real but it moves with format: single-story drive-up needs roughly two to three acres to pencil after you account for drive aisles, stormwater detention, and setbacks, while climate-controlled multi-story can work on under two acres if the zoning allows the building height and the land cost is low enough to survive the more expensive construction. Road frontage matters more than raw acreage to most developers, and the standard I see referenced most often is a minimum of 150 to 200 feet of frontage on the primary road, because signage visibility and a clean ingress-egress configuration both depend on it. The oddly shaped parcels you are describing in default situations are a genuine problem for this use, since self storage layouts are repetitive rectangles and an irregular site forces you to waste leasable square footage on geometry rather than units. The environmental question is usually the first thing that kills a meeting before acreage or traffic even come up, so before you approach a developer with a parcel, pull the Phase I status if one exists and check the Michigan DEQ database for any historical industrial use on the site.

What is the typical configuration of the parcels you are seeing, narrow and deep, or wide and shallow with the irregular edge at the rear?

Multi-story changes the acreage floor more than anything else in this list.

Macomb County specifically is tricky because a lot of those parcels sitting in default came out of the 2008-2012 cycle and the environmental question marks are not random, they cluster around certain corridors where light industrial was rezoned residential and never fully cleaned up. That matters before any traffic count conversation. On the traffic number, 25,000 ADT gets quoted a lot but I have seen viable facilities pencil out closer to 18,000 on roads with limited competing supply, so the number is really a proxy for capture rate, not a hard floor. What I would actually want to know about a parcel is the depth-to-frontage ratio, because a site that is 300 feet wide and 600 feet deep does something very different for a drive-aisle layout than one that is 150 by 1,200, and oddly configured Macomb parcels almost always fail on that before they fail on anything else. Multi-story changes the math some but it raises your construction cost per square foot enough that you need either a very dense trade area or very strong street rates to justify it, and I have not seen Macomb street rates that make multi-story look obvious.

What is the approximate depth on the parcels you are actually looking at?

Before acreage or traffic counts, the question a storage developer is actually answering is whether the site can support enough net rentable square footage to service the construction debt, and that math starts with the shape of the usable envelope after you subtract setbacks, stormwater detention, drive aisles (typically 26 feet wide for two-way), and required parking. A two-acre parcel that is 400 feet deep and 200 feet wide builds very differently than one that is 700 feet long and 120 feet wide, and the narrow one may not fit a standard building module at all. For single-story, most developers want to land somewhere between 40,000 and 60,000 net rentable square feet to make the pro forma work at current construction costs, which on flat land translates to roughly three to four acres of usable ground once you account for all the site deductions. Multi-story changes the footprint math but introduces elevator cost and a different lender conversation, so developers use it selectively, usually when land cost is high enough that vertical density is the only way to get to acceptable returns per dollar of basis.

The environmental question mark you flagged deserves a specific checklist rather than a general caution. Phase I is the floor, but for parcels with prior industrial or agricultural use you want to know whether any recognized environmental conditions on the report were generated by a use that involved underground storage tanks, because tank removal and soil remediation costs can erase the margin on a storage deal fast given the relatively thin per-square-foot revenue. On oddly configured parcels in a county like Macomb where you see former auto-adjacent industrial scattered through suburban corridors, ask the seller for any prior Phase II data before you spend money on your own. The other item nobody prices carefully is detention: some Michigan municipalities require on-site stormwater detention sized for

Multi-story changes the land math dramatically, a 1.5 acre infill site in a dense suburb can pencil if you go four floors, but you need a municipality that has actually approved a multi-story storage project before, because the first one through planning in any given town takes 18 months and kills your pro forma. Macomb County has a lot of B-2 and B-3 parcels that look right on paper but sit in townships where storage is a permitted use in name and a variance fight in practice.

What traffic number are you seeing on the specific parcels you're tracking?

Single-story ground-floor storage needs roughly 3.5 to 5 acres to pencil once you account for drive aisles, setbacks, and stormwater detention, and anything under two acres is a real stretch unless the market is dense enough to justify four or five stories of climate-controlled space, which carries a completely different construction cost structure and requires a different conversation with a lender. The shape constraint is tighter than most people realize: a long narrow parcel that looks like two acres on paper often cannot fit a functional double-loaded drive aisle, and the developer's site planner will kill it in the first sketch. On traffic, the working assumption I have seen applied is that locations on roads carrying fewer than 15,000 vehicles per day tend to rely almost entirely on digital marketing rather than drive-by discovery, which adds a customer acquisition cost that compresses the yield, so roads in the 25,000 to 40,000 range are where interest sharpens. Distance from existing facilities matters most when the nearby competition is newer and climate-controlled, because older non-climate stock in the same radius competes in a different segment. On the environmental side, confirm with a Phase I before you bring the parcel to anyone, because a developer will order one anyway and a prior agricultural or light industrial use in Macomb adds real ambiguity around petroleum or chemical soil contamination that can stop the project cold. What zoning categories are actually on the parcels you are tracking, because that determines whether the variance path is a standard conditional use permit or a full rezoning with a public hearing?

The assumption doing the most work in your post is that acreage is the primary filter, but shape and topography eliminate more sites before a developer even counts acres.

A two-acre parcel that is long and narrow, say 200 feet wide, cannot fit a standard drive aisle plus two rows of units plus a second drive aisle, which is roughly 160 to 170 feet of width minimum for a single-story climate-controlled layout. So a developer passes on it regardless of total square footage. The sites worth keeping in Macomb are the ones where the usable rectangle inside any setbacks and easements clears that width threshold.

On traffic, 25,000 vehicles per day on the fronting road is the number most feasibility consultants use as a floor for a primary site, but a secondary road with 15,000 can still work if the parcel sits within a half mile of a signalized intersection on a higher-count corridor, because that is what drives the discovery rate. The visibility question is really about whether a driver making a left turn from the main road can see the sign, not whether the facility fronts the road directly.

Environmental flags in default parcels matter differently depending on the contamination type. Phase I findings that point to a prior dry cleaner or gas station on a site almost certainly kill it, because the remediation timeline and indeterminate cost make lenders unwilling to underwrite construction financing. A wetland setback is more workable if the buildable area after the buffer still clears the size and shape test.

The zoning category matters most in Macomb because several townships treat self storage as a conditional use under light industrial rather than commercial, which means a variance is not required but a public hearing is, and that adds four to six months to the entitlement timeline that a distressed seller may not tolerate.

What is the

Macomb County specifically has a lot of C-2 and light industrial split parcels that look usable until you realize the municipality already has a storage moratorium or an informal "we are not approving more" stance from planning. Did you call the township planner directly and ask whether they are actively entertaining new self storage applications right now?

Because the traffic count and acreage minimums are almost secondary to that. I watched a deal in a Columbus suburb die at the zoning stage after the developer had already paid for a feasibility study, purely because the township had quietly decided they had enough units.

Shape matters too but the real kill shot on oddly configured parcels is the drive-aisle width requirement. Most operators want 26 to 30 feet for two-way traffic between buildings, and a weird lot shape eats that up fast before you even count setbacks.

Shape constrains the use more than acreage does, because single-story needs a rectangle to fit drive aisles.

Single-story needs roughly two acres minimum, but multi-story can work on less than one if the market supports it.

The shape question matters more than the acreage number in Macomb specifically, because what you want is a rectangle or near-rectangle with depth, not road frontage. A 300-foot-deep parcel gives you two rows of units plus a drive aisle; an oddly configured corner lot of the same square footage often cannot fit a functional layout without wasted land that still gets taxed and paved. So when you are screening parcels, calculate usable rectangular area, not total acreage.

On traffic, 25,000 vehicles per day is the threshold most site selectors use for primary visibility, but self storage is not a true impulse purchase, so a parcel one block off a 40,000-count road often pencils better because land is cheaper and the drive-by customer still finds it online first. The visibility question is really about whether Google Maps, a sign on the main road, and a five-minute drive combine to make the facility feel accessible, not whether every commuter sees the facade.

The environmental question mark you are seeing on default parcels in Macomb is probably the deal-killer in rank order, above shape, above traffic. A Phase I that escalates to a Phase II kills the timeline, and a long permit timeline on a self storage deal is a hard carry cost problem because construction draws are running while the facility produces nothing. Developers underwrite that carry against a lease-up assumption, and if the entitlement drags, the assumption breaks before a shovel goes in.

What is the typical lot depth on the parcels you are seeing, and are the environmental flags Phase I questions or something already disclosed in the listing?