Real Estate Investor Magazine South Africa March 2016 | Page 11

MASTER INVESTOR

I

n the days before the launch of Stor-Age, Gavin
Lucas, the companies CEO, was living at home
and racking his brain for the perfect name for
his fledgling self-storage company. When he asked
his mother for ideas she suggested simply taking
the word ‘storage’ and putting a dash in the middle.
‘Stor-Age – The Age of Quality Self-Storage’ became
the company’s tag line, but as the business grew and
developed, the slightly robust title was shortened to
just ‘Stor-Age’. The name though still remains as a
reminder that ultimately our parents do know what’s
best for us.
In 2005 Gavin Lucas, then 24 years old, was
completing his second year accounting articles at
KPMG when an offhand remark about the difficulty
of finding secure, temporary self storage space
sparked the idea of a nationwide, storage business.
After pitching the idea to both his father and brother
Stephen ( and later, Steven Horton, who himself was
completing his articles at Ernst & Young) they set
about conducting small, speculative investments in
property and identified an opportunity for a business
park in Edgemead, Cape Town.
The initial business plan involved completing a 7,500
m2 property development on a piece of land that was
still owned by Eskom and was not on the market. This
meant constructing it themselves, raising R10 million
in pre-sales to use as security to do the development,
taking on multi-million Rand property finance from
Standard Bank, starting a new self storage company to
manage the property and doing all of this with next to
no start-up capital and using a business model which
had never been tested with self storage in South Africa
before.

“Starting small is an excellent way
to get going, as opposed to starting
with mammoth objectives of taking
over the world”
The objective of the newly formed Stor-Age was to
deliver an attractive income stream from a portfolio of
high quality self storage properties with potential for
income and capital growth through increasing rentals
and occupancy levels.
In November 2015, Stor-Age listed on the JSE
in the specialty real estate investment trust (‘REIT’)
sector, with a property portfolio valued at R1.3 billion
and represented by 181 500m2 of gross lettable area.
www.reimag.co.za

Represented throughout South Africa’s six main cities,
Stor-Age Property REIT also enjoys the benefit
of having a pre-emptive right of acquisition over an
estimated R1.5 billion pipeline of both existing trading
self storage properties and new ones that are still to be
developed.
Along with traditional property development
principles, Stor-Age also relies on detailed consumer
demographic research in its projected catchment
areas in order to choose the sites where their stores
will be best located, this also includes targeting
prime locations with high visibility to commuters.
In determining the location of its new stores, Gavin
considers the properties placement as critical. Around
80% of the company’s customers are residential users,
who typically experience life changing events. The life
changing events can be both positive and negative and
include events such as relocation, having a new baby,
entering into or ending a relationship and carrying out
renovations or alterations. All of these events create a
need for people to store their personal goods.

Growth and Learning

For Gavin, the most significant property deal of his life
was obtaining the support of Paul Theodosiou and the
Acucap Board to partner with them back in 2010. At
the time, Acucap were one of South Africa’s largest and
most successful retail focused property funds listed on
the JSE. The partnership between Acucap and StorAge saw the company embarking on an ambitious
rollout of self-storage properties across South Africa’s
four main cities.

Age: 34

BIOGRAPHY

Title: CEO of Stor-Age
Qualifications: Gavin is a qualified Chartered Accountant, having
previously worked for KPMG in South Africa.
Married: Yes, happily married to my beautiful wife Leanne
Children: Leanne & I have two wonderful little boys – Jack and Harry
Currently Reading: leisure – Heart of the Hunter by Deon Meyer;
business - Great by Choice by Jim Collins
Motto: Whatever you do in life, do it with passion!

MARCH 2016 SA Real Estate Investor

9