How LEED Standards Affect Your Facility Design’s Storage Units

In the modern-day, there are a million and one things to think about when deciding which tenant storage units you want to install on your property. In fact, that list only grows longer and longer by the day. You have to decide where to put them, get any required permits from the city, county, or state, think about the budget, and potentially a lot of other things. It feels like every day there’s a new organization that has its eyes on this kind of project, and that can make the whole task feel a lot more complicated.

So, how do these kinds of organizations affect your plans to install storage units on your property? There are a few ways that they can, but you can also use this to your advantage and sell more units for longer periods of time. All it takes is a little bit of research and creativity and you can make your storage units even easier to market to your tenants. Today we’re going to be looking at LEED standards. What they are, the impact they have on you, and how you can use them to make your units more profitable.

What Are LEED Standards? 

There’s a good chance that you don’t know what LEED standards are or even what organization LEED is connected to. If you do already know you could skip past this section, we’re mostly putting this in for people that are unaware of this. It’s important to make sure that we leave our readers with as much information as possible by the time that we finish this article so it’s we try our best to be as thorough as we are concise on these matters for every single one of our readers’ benefit.

LEED is a certification program that is used the world over. In fact, the LEED certification is the most commonly used certification around the world for this. LEED stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design. It was created by the USGBC, or the United States Green Building Council, in 1994 to help encourage sustainable design and development practices. They do this with, in their own words, “a voluntary, consensus-based, market-driven building rating system based on existing proven technology.” This program has been incredibly successful over the years and only continues to be more and more successful as time goes on.

The standards that are set forth by the USGBC in order to get a LEED certification are able to be applied to new developments, old developments, commercial properties, and private properties. This is especially important for making sure that as many buildings as possible are able to get this certification, and is a big part of the reason why this standard has grown as much as it has. There are a total of five critical points that the USGBC looks at when determining if a building meets the criteria to be LEED certified at all.

• Sustainable site development, including reusing buildings as often as possible. They also encourage things like roof gardens.
• Water conservation. This includes the cleaning and recycling of grey water, or previously used water, whenever possible as well as the use of rainwater collection.
• Energy efficiency, which usually includes using renewable energy sources like solar, wind, geothermal, biomass, natural gas, or even water.
• Recycled or locally sourced supplies being used as much as possible during the construction process.
• Indoor environmental quality including ventilation, a sense of control over personal space, and the use of materials that do not emit any sort of toxic gasses or fumes.

How Does a LEED Certification Affect Your Storage Unit Plans?

This is really the bottom line of the matter, how does this affect you? At the end of the day, only as much as you want it to. This isn’t a certification that is required by any governmental body so you could entirely disregard it if you felt like that was a better choice. In fact, plenty of builders completely ignore this at the request of their clients That being said, if this is something that you care about, how much could it potentially impact your plans to install some on-site storage for your tenants?

Well, it really depends on if you had your heart set on something that isn’t LEED certified. If you did, that could cause you some issues and you’d have to find something else. Otherwise, it wouldn’t really impact much other than the amount of time that you’d need to spend researching this topic. Of course, there are companies that would want to cash in on this certification and that could put them out of your budget, but there are other companies that have a passion for storage solutions and being considered a green product that are happy to work with you.

In fact, you could be very likely to find companies that have LEED certifications that are cheaper than some companies that don’t. It might take a bit of time and effort but they are most certainly out there. Because this is a project that is going to end up being an investment, you’d probably want to do your research anyway. That being said, if you end up finding a company that is cheap, LEED certified, and reliable, that’s a perfect trifecta and could end up being very profitable for you in the long run.

How to Market Your LEED Certified Storage Units

Now to how you can further monetize your LEED certified tenant lockers. As you’re probably aware, everything needs at least a bit of marketing to sell. If you want people to rent out your apartments you have to market the good things about the unit and the property overall. The car that you drive, your favorite drinks, musicians, T.V. shows, clothes, and really anything else has a marketing strategy to help make sure that you’re willing to pay a few extra dollars in order to gain access to or ownership of their product.

Your on-site storage solutions are no exception to this. If you just put them up with a sign that says that they’re available, you might get a few bites from curious tenants that need a little extra storage space. If you send out a notice to your tenants that says something like “New storage available. Accessible 24/7. Secure, safe, convenient, and only 25 dollars a month” then you might get even more people to bite. Maybe not with that exact verbiage, we aren’t marketers here just people that are passionate about storage on multi-family properties, but something along those lines should get more people interested.

Now, in the modern age, there are a lot of people that are worried about sustainability. There are a limited number of resources on this planet which means that we could run out someday, and if we do that could mean some very not fun things for human beings on this planet. Some people are also worried about global warming, and many scientists attribute the unnecessary use of fossil fuels and aerosols to that phenomenon. Lots of people are concerned about one or the other or even in some cases both, and that’s where your marketing can really target.

On top of providing secure and convenient storage for your tenants, you give them the promise that it was made in a sustainable way. Of course, without the LEED certification, they could assume that you were just saying that to try and get more money from them, but the LEED certification is given out by a third party that inspects the projects and determines if it is able to receive the certification. That is definitely something you can and should advertise when trying to get your tenants to rent out your storage units.

It’s actually incredibly easy to market this to the right crowd. You could say something like “We care about you having a place to store your extra things, but we also care about the planet being a viable place for humans to live for as long as possible.” and your tenants would truly believe you because you put in the footwork to make it happen. That’s a big deal, and it could easily turn more tenants into customers of your on-site storage. It’s really that easy and it makes a big difference both in the short and long run for you and your tenants.

Being a Little More Green

People all around the world have concerns about the resources that we have on this planet. Knowing that the products that you’re using, especially for big projects, are sustainable can help you feel better while also providing a better experience for your clients that just so happen to be concerned about this kind of thing. It can be pretty easy to find companies that sell LEED certified storage units that you can install in your apartment complex, and then you can turn that investment into a little bit more income for your property overall.