Welcome to the Real Estate Special Podcast, your morning shot of what's new in the world of real estate investing. I'm your host, Victor Monash. This is the weekend edition where we interview notable people from the world of real estate investing. Today is no exception. We have a great guest all the way from Central Florida.
Welcome to the show, Chris Long. Thanks, Victor. Excited to be here. Great to have you here. Now, Chris, you and I have known each other for a number of years originally from my home city of Ottawa, Canada, where you got your start currently based in Central Florida.
Maybe before we dive into the details of what you're working on right now, give a little bit of your backstory and how you got to this point in your journey. Yeah. I appreciate that. So, grew up in our cold capital of Ottawa, which I always like to say, especially now being in the warm weather of Florida. Started off in the trades as a carpenter, just doing renovations.
Got my ticket as a licensed carpenter. As soon as I got my ticket, I started up my construction company, and then I got into I was always involved in real estate, which is where we met at at, one of our local real estate meet ups. And, you know, got into the small residential game, turning a house into a duplex my first time, bought a second house, turned into a duplex, and I always had that construction back end which allowed me to, you know, put on the belt and and get things done and grew into a general contractor. I ran my construction company for 10 years. And then, while I was on that journey, my passion for real estate and my discovery of a need in the marketplace with Longyearrds led me to the infancy of LongYards.
So a little bit of my history and and why I started the 1st LongYards in Ottawa, which was basically bootstrapping my first location. You know, as a contractor, I discovered a need that there was tools, equipment, and you couldn't get your own little yard for it. And I was like, how come this doesn't exist? Thankfully, I had a commercial property conveniently 8 minutes from my house, and then I decided to start up LongYards, and now we're expanding internationally. So excited for on the journey.
What we're really talking about is a segment that now actually has a name. Maybe when you started, it didn't. Today, it's called industrial outdoor storage or iOS for short, and it's a it's a growing segment. There are contractors that need place to store equipment, to store materials, secure very expensive pieces of equipment that, believe it or not, gets stolen. People steal bulldozers and things like that that you would never think would happen, and yet it does.
So when you've got pieces of equipment that are that where the starting price is a quarter $1,000,000 on up, they're attractive to steal even though they're not convenient to steal. So security is absolutely important, and it's a growing need nationwide. 100% agreed. And we're seeing that along the areas between the need and the presence of security. It's one of the reasons we've leased up so successfully.
When we started our storage fund, one of the things that we noticed when we looked at the storage landscape, we found that what we traditionally call storage, people think for the most part, you know, these metal buildings with roll up garage doors and all of that for place to store your extra boxes, in most primary markets, that is saturated. There's there's oversupply. The institutional players have come into those markets, and we see falling occupancy. We see falling rents. We see more move in incentives.
There are other segments, though, that are underserviced. Now certainly, secondary markets are underserviced, but we see even in primary markets, this particular segment is underserviced. Boat and RV is underserviced in many primary markets. And so we see this as kind of the, let's say, the hole in the Swiss cheese where there's really tremendous, tremendous opportunity that really has not caught the attention of the institutional players. You're absolutely right.
And, that's why we wanna scale this because one of our core values as long yards is adapt. And we do adapt to the marketplace. We adapt to our clients. So the segment is whether or not it's as simple, you just need a yard space. And so that's the long yards model, and the yard space is made to adapt to your growing needs.
But also, we introduced long boxes, which are offices that a small business, small landscape company, arborist, or what have it, needs a little place for their admin to set up shop, keep an eye on inventory, help with logistics and shipping, all the way to the long boxes so you have now everything a small business can need from infancy, up to, you know, a good sized operation. And that that's a large segment of the market, so we feel like we're catering well to those needs. We've seen this segment evolve quite a bit over the last years. If you think about those industrial strip malls, those flex multi tenant industrial products, that might house a plumber or an electrician or someone like that where you've got a big roll up garage door and a small office at the front. Certainly, those are still in demand.
But often those businesses run out of space and they need overflow space. I think about landscaping companies where they wanna buy material by the truckload. They don't have a truckload worth of space in their in their garage. They need a space to store those materials. You're absolutely right.
And it goes from those small businesses, medium sized business, to even homeowners, hobbyists that have a boat, an RV, a CDU, and a couple toys, and they want it in a yard. So it it caters to a wide broad of avatars. So when you're looking at site selection for a product like this, what are some of the things that you're looking for? That's a great question. So we have a tier based system.
It's, you know, obviously, the the land and the soil and location, you know, location, location, location. But then, you know, it it kinda looks simple, the business falling on the surface. But I'll tell you, as, you know, we've learned working together, it's not easy. So this the slight is very important because the construction cost can vary deeply based on location, even the distance to the quarry. So we have an internal feasibility tool that allows us to filter through each property.
I mean, on a high level, you want to be, you know, close to arteries of main traffic, highways. You wanna be ideally on on good ground, good soil, and you just wanna be where the city is growing towards. Those are probably a couple of bullet points on a high level. Talk a little bit about zoning. Does this need to be zoned rural?
Does it need to be zoned in zoned industrial, commercial, light industrial? What kind of zonings would be appropriate for this product? Zoning has been a very big challenge. As I'm very focused in Florida, we have Ocala. Like, they're just simply saying no to outside storage unless it's existing and grandfathered in.
So in the in the most popular case, it would be industrial, and then it works its way down from different segments of industrial, mostly heavy industrial light, and then you go into commercial zones. Commercial could be very vague. You really have to read the fine print, and and mostly, it doesn't it's either industrial or commercial, and and those are the two segments that we're going after. So I can certainly imagine that some communities would be resistant to a product like this coming into an area where they might say, you know what? This isn't particularly a beautiful thing in our neighborhood.
What are some of the concessions that cities would demand in order to permit a product like this? Great question, Victor. And that's one of the things we're working, deeply on is the basically, we don't present ourselves like a regular storage yard, and we're not. We are like a small business community incubator. And that's the angle that, you know, we wanna communicate to the city.
It's not we're here to store store a bunch of junk. We're here to support the small business and to, bring life to the city. And, I mean, on you know, the visibility factors would be, you know, big landscape buffer around the perimeter. We have beautiful branding that goes on our fencing. It's very clean.
We try to keep it at a height that most equipment is gonna be stored. You don't get too much of the visibility. So anything that's laid down in the actual yard, which is majority of the storage, you don't really see. So I have a simple philosophy, out of sight, out of mind, and I like that for my clients, and I like it for the perimeter. So good landscape buffer, well lit up, very presentable, and clients that are clean and respectful of, the operations inside the facility as well.
Now you're not gonna just take a piece of dirt and put a fence around it and you're in business. We've got to think about things like turning radius for larger equipment. We've got to think about, what's the right size, what's the right proportion of space for each individual customer, and how you segregate it? How do you work that out, or do you just guess? No.
There's a lot of checklist tools, and, you know, I had to rebuild my first location several times to factor this in because you make assumptions and what the market tells you is different right from the width of the road to the width of the gate. And obviously, in Canada, in winter climates, you gotta really strongly factor in the snow and how far you wanna push the snow. So you gotta make sure you're you're factoring for large equipment, 53 foot trucks. They gotta be able to turn around, move around. Even if you have multiple contractors coming in at certain areas, you gotta make sure the gate flow is is sufficient.
So there's there's a lot of little micro nuances to be considered. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. What are some of the other features that clients ask for in this product? Is it just a fenced yard, or are they looking for more?
No. So to begin with, I mean, it's it's like a regular storage unit. So just the precedence of, like, having a gate with a keypad to an outside storage yard is, like, a nice feature and and separate. So that's the first impression. Now we have we give shared camera access, and once you rent with us, you know, you can see what's going on, and you can have a camera in your yard.
One of the biggest things too is we wanna bring power to the yard, so that's that's really convenient, and then obviously you have the privacy of your own your own yard. So, I mean, I'm a big believer keeping it simple and and keeping it private, and that's what a lot of people just love, and it's actually not in the marketplace. It's really hard to find a small area completely private with those security parameters, And then, obviously, we add the other long box features. So all these are just little additional, what I like to Canadian call it, little tidbits, to our to our clients, but it really helps. I love it.
Well, Chris, if folks wanna connect, if they wanna learn more, what's the best way? Beautiful. I mean, they could reach me at my email at clong@longears.com. They can check out the website, longears.com, and find find us through there. And they could also call or text 941-278-1995.
Well, Chris, great to catch up. Love what you're doing and excited to see Long Yard's Winter Haven coming, very soon to fruition to completion. That's currently in construction. And for the listeners who don't, definitely connect with chrislong@longyards.com. The links will be in the show notes.
And in the meantime, have an awesome rest of your weekend. Go make some great things happen, and we'll talk to you again tomorrow.