Tips and Tricks for Designing an Effective
Self Storage Numbering System
The first step is to look at the big picture with questions like these. What is the facility layout? What are my future plans? How will the tenant access the property? What directional signs will I need in order for my tenant to be able to find his or her unit? For interior units, what will the directional signs need to be?
Next, create a logical numbering system that takes into consideration future development. When your property is built out, you want the numbering system to be simple and intuitive. You want your manager to be able to easily tell a tenant how to find their unit and you want your tenant to have a good experience. On smaller, drive up properties this is easier. With larger climate controlled buildings this becomes more challenging and requires more thought.
Tips to Consider
- Start with a clear reference point. It could be the office, the entry driveway, or on a climate controlled building a specific door.
- On drive up units, number consecutively around the exterior of a building.
- Maintain a consistent direction with your numbering.
- Number down one side of an isle at a time. Don’t use hotel system numbering. Hotel rooms are usually numbered even numbers on one side of the hall and odd numbers on the other. Hotel rooms are generally identical in size so this makes their numbering intuitive. Storage units are rarely the same size down an aisle. Trying to do even numbers on one side of the aisle and odd numbers on the other is going to be confusing.
- Inside of a climate controlled building, use logical groupings. Entry doors are a good place to start. Consider building divisions like fire doors as a separator.
- Keep your numbering as simple as possible. Try to avoid unit numbers like ‘107B(a)10×10’. That number may mean a lot to you, but your tenant will be lost.
- In buildings with more than 100 units per section, use four digit numbers.
- We suggest starting any sequence of numbers with 1 instead of 0, so on a 2000 sequence of numbers start with unit 2001 instead of unit 2000. This is a small issue, but slightly more intuitive.
- Because we are not on site and we don’t know what your strategies and future plans are, we are not the best judge of how your facility should be numbered. You can walk the aisles and make a far better judgement than we can from just looking at a set of plans.
- And finally, we do follow the ‘other’ golden rule: You have the gold, you make the rules. You decide how you want your units numbered, give us the numbers you want, we will produce them for you!
- If you would like an estimate for your self storage unit numbers click here.