Silver Star Properties Shifts Focus to Self Storage
The company, which will focus primarily on self storage, is aiming to go public.
Image by Adam Winger via Unsplash.com
Silver Star Properties REIT is pivoting its focus from office, retail and light industrial assets to self storage. To that end, the REIT is acquiring Southern Star Self-Storage Investment Co. in a move that has been approved by Silver Star’s board of directors.
Silver Star Properties Lead Director Gerald Haddock stated in prepared remarks that Southern Star will operate as a sister company of an existing Silver Star Properties subsidiary.
The deal involves a three-year employment agreement with Silver Star Properties CEO Mark Torok, who will lead the repositioning of the company with the goal of listing it on a public exchange.
Southern Star Self Storage, which was founded in 2019, owns a portfolio of nine self storage properties totaling 2,526 units and 321,291 rentable square feet. The company has two assets under contract which will add 208,220 rentable square feet to its portfolio. Those deals are expected to close by June 2023. Southern Star properties offers both non-climate controlled and climate-controlled units and parking space for boats, RVs and cars. Most of its facilities are located in Texas, Florida, North Carolina and Colorado.
Noteworthy deals in the storage sector in 2023
It has been a fairly active year for self storage. In February, Stuf, a tech-enabled self storage startup, received $11 million in Series A funding. The company repurposes existing vacant commercial real estate and transforms it into storage facilities. That same month, Nuveen Real Estate announced that it had invested in MyPlace, a vertically integrated self storage platform.
In the sector’s biggest deal of the year so far, Extra Space Storage last week announced that it will acquire Life Storage. The merging of the two companies will lead create a company with an estimated enterprise value of $47 billion and a pro forma equity market value of $36 billion. This comes only a month after Public Storage made an unsolicited offer of $11 billion to acquire Life Storage.
