The benefits of diversifying into providing storage solutions

Farmers and rural land owners are in unique possession of a highly sought after commodity - space. 

As people's lives are becoming busier and more cluttered, they are increasingly looking for storage solutions for the bits and pieces in their lives that they simply don't have room for at home. Farmers are ideally located to take advantage of that high demand for storage space, by utilising surplus farm buildings, or secure yard areas to bring in an additional income stream to their farming enterprises.

If you are considering diversifying your farm and are looking for a venture which is relatively low cost to start up, low maintenance, and in high demand, you could do far worse than considering diversifying into providing storage solutions.

There are numerous reasons self-storage offers a real benefit to many people. Moving home, transitioning after a divorce, needing to store bulky seasonal items (for example such as large Christmas ornaments), storing business supplies, or sometimes people simply don’t have room at home for bulky items such as bikes, lawn mowers, caravans, or even boats. There is growing demand too, from businesses for self storage solutions to fit their needs. Businesses, especially those based online, are able to take advantage of the flexibility that self-storage offers- with no business rates to pay and the ability to rent exactly the amount of space that they need. The boom in online deliveries has also led to a surge in demand for more rural and semi-rural warehouse space from companies looking to improve their rural logistics.

What facilities you have, available space, and access to your farm, will all affect what sort of items you want to/ are able to store. You might simply want to utilise an area of hard standing, or a disused farm building. You might want to take advantage of your unique location and offer storage tailored to your local area (for example, if you live near the coast, there is high demand for winter storage of boats, yachts, jet skis, dinghies and the like). Either way, there are many opportunities for landowners to take advantage of the growing market for both short and long term storage solutions.

Whilst items such as vehicles, boats, trailers etc are perfectly able to be stored outdoors, undercover and/ or weatherproof storage will always demand a premium price. Shipping containers don't require a huge amount of space, and are a relatively inexpensive outlay, which can quickly pay for themselves. As well as being easily scalable, they offer the benefit of being able to provide immediate, secure, dry storage space, whilst only requiring a minimum of a level site.

With the demand for accessible storage space for both business and personal use increasing, farmers and rural landowners are in the ideal  position to take advantage of the possibilities that offering storage solutions could bring to their farm.

The Business Barn is the leading free to use diversification website, dedicated to providing ideas, inspiration and rural business advice to diversifying farmers and rural landowners, as well as connecting them to businesses who can provide advice, products and services for all their diversification needs.

By The Business Barn

Contact:  01299 848111, https://www.thebusinessbarn.co.uk/

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