I am sure that you think that this is going to be another post about my rental property, but you are wrong. This is about some storage space that I rent. I have been renting one of those “you keep the key” rental spaces for the past few years. It’s a 10×10 non-climate controlled space and was costing $82 a month. I installed some metal shelving in it, and it is fairly packed with all sorts of items. The place that I had been renting from was giving us one month free if we paid for six months in advance. That lowered the price to $68 per month. It was one of the few left in the area that were still locally owned, with most of them having been bought out by large companies within the last few years.
Then it was bought out by a large company. This company just bought four formerly locally owned facilities within the past year. They immediately doubled the rates at all of the properties and eliminated the free month for paying in advance. Instead they began charging a surcharge if you didn’t set up automatic credit card billing. My rate is now $164 a month- two and a half times as much as it was before. That works out to $1.64 a square foot per month for warehouse space.
Me charging $1.05 for my rental property tells you how far below market I am.
Anyway, the increase in price didn’t make service any better. They consolidated the staff in their now four warehouse properties, and the office that is actually staffed is ten miles away. There is now only a note on the office where my unit is, saying to call this number for service. The problem? No one answers it, and the management put a padlock on my unit, making my stuff inaccessible. I am trying to get ahold of them to unlock my stuff. If they don’t do so within the next few days, I will go over there with an angle grinder and get my stuff out of there.
In the meantime, if my shit gets auctioned off before I can get in there, I will be suing them for the contents of the locker.