How gravel and a fence turned six acres into a trailer parking ground lease at $210k

Land plays into industrial income without a building on it, and here's how one worth studying comes together. Take 6.1 acres of I-2 zoned ground in a secondary market about 4 miles from an interstate interchange, in a corridor where every warehouse built in the last decade has more dock doors than trailer stalls. Say it trades at $540,000, roughly $88,000 an acre. The site is raw, partly wooded, with a ditch running the northeast corner. The use that fits is industrial outdoor storage, meaning trailer and container parking, which in many jurisdictions is permitted by right in I-2 as long as screening and surfacing standards are met. Worth being careful here: whether outdoor storage is permitted, and what surface counts, is entirely local, and the definitions differ from one zoning code to the next even inside the same county. A written opinion from a land use attorney before closing is worth paying for every time. Work breaks out roughly like this: clearing and grubbing $46,000, engineered stormwater basin $71,000 (the ditch is usually the expensive part), 9 inches of compacted crushed base over the usable 5.2 acres $63,000, 8 foot fence with two gates $22,000, lighting and a gravel apron $8,000. Call it $210,000. Permitting and engineering can run another $31,000 and take seven months, often longer than quoted. On the lease side, a regional trucking operator taking the whole yard on a 7 year absolute net ground lease at $9,500 a month, 3 percent annual bumps, tenant maintaining the surface and carrying insurance, produces $114,000 a year against $781,000 all in, about 14.6 percent on cost. No roof, no HVAC, no tenant improvements ever. The part that most often breaks a pro forma like this is the stormwater review. An early submittal that assumes an existing ditch can stay as conveyance frequently gets rejected, and the redesign is where the money and months tend to go. If the basin ends up needing to be bigger, usable acreage and the rent that depends on it both shrink. The lesson worth keeping: pay for a civil engineer's opinion on drainage before removing the inspection contingency. Skip that step and you're relying on luck.