Columnist

Self-storage still viable despite government VAT change

It may well be time to pack away the outdoor seating and retire the lunches outside as the sun and heat has been supplanted by the cold, cloudy British summer we know and loathe.

And therein lies the dilemma.

Businesses seem to stockpile anything and everything, to the point that the office resembles an assault course.

Rather than becoming adept avoiding the clutter, follow the trend of more and more UK SME’s in ‘outsourcing’ storage.

Offices can be prime for hoarding, be it due to renovation, relocation or just general untidiness. Wouldn’t it be easier to pack off your surplus stock, equipment, promotional material or archive documents to a storage specialist such as Safestore, the UK’s biggest self-storage firm, and the like?

A relatively recent service industry in the UK, self storage centres offer businesses, as well as individuals, a selection of room sizes for hire, from a locker up to the size of a tennis court or larger, short or long term.

So while the office remains clutter-free and efficient, providing more space for business, the wallet is not overly burdened, as Safestore do not charge business rates.

Safestore’s occupancy rate rose to 63.9% last year, and the company proved resilient to the governments’ rescinding of the tax exemption on self storage firms in October last year.

Estimating the space a business needs, and thus the price, depends on several variables; what you need to store, how stackable it is, how high the ceiling of the storage room is, where the storage room is located in the storage centre, generally ground floor is more expensive, and what sort of access you will need since you may want to leave a walkway through the storage room to get to your possessions.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Safestore .