Self-storage developer planning buildings in Manchester, Shockoe

A rendering of the planned facility on Maury Street. (Courtesy NitNeil Partners)

A pair of new storage facilities are in the works in the city as a new developer sets its sights on Manchester and Shockoe. 

NitNeil Partners is planning to build the two self-storage facilities at 101 Maury St. in Manchester and 501 Oliver Hill Way near Shockoe Bottom. 

The Atlanta-based firm has been in the self-storage development industry for over 20 years, building primarily throughout the Southeast.

Nitesh Sapra, who runs the business with his brother Neil, said they got their start in the multifamily development world before pivoting to self-storage.

Nitesh Sapra

“We took best practices from (multifamily) and used them to inform our business plan within self-storage. Our M.O. is just developing institutional-grade self-storage assets across high-growth Sunbelt markets,” Nitesh Sapra said.

“We take a long-term investment in them, and we deploy a lot of our own equity deals. We will fundraise from time to time, but we’re not merchant developers. We’re not flippers.”

Within a few days last month NitNeil bought 101 Maury St. and filed plans for the 501 Oliver Hill Way facility. Nitesh Sapra said he could only comment on the Maury Street facility at this time. 

Located in a southeastern pocket of Manchester that increasingly has drawn developer interest in recent years, 101 Maury St. is a 1-acre plot on which a vacant auxiliary building currently stands. 

Sapra said the partners are planning to knock down the existing building and put up a four-story, 79,000-square-foot storage facility with over 800 units. 

“We see tremendous growth in Manchester, but yet there’s not really a state-of-the-art, Class A self-storage facility that will serve the residents, artists and businesses that are moving to that area,” Sapra said. “So this is designed to address that need.”

NitNeil bought the Maury lot for $1.2 million in a Sept. 13 deal brokered by Divaris Real Estate’s Read Goode. Sapra said the company is in the process of bidding out the development to general contractors and hopes to begin construction later this month. He declined to disclose the project cost but said NitNeil’s new builds typically range from $12 million to $15 million.

Sapra said NitNeil typically brings in a national operator such as CubeSmart or Extra Space Storage to run its facilities. He said he’s not sure which brand the Manchester facility will carry. 

A rendering of the planned facility on Oliver Hill Way. (City documents)

On Oliver Hill Way, NitNeil has its eye on another 1-acre lot just off the northbound Interstate 95-Broad Street exit. In 2020, 501 Oliver Hill Way was bought by local developers Jeremy Connell and Jon Rasich for $1.3 million but the existing warehouse was never leased out or redeveloped. 

Plans show that NitNeil is planning to also raze that structure and build a five-story, 102,000-square-foot storage facility. Timmons Group is listed as the project engineer and Atlanta-based Vision Architects is the designer. 

Elsewhere in Shockoe, an existing self-storage facility off East Cary Street recently sold for $12 million.

Sapra said the industry as a whole is correlated to the housing market and does well when demand for housing is high.

“Within commercial real estate, this asset class is oftentimes labeled as recession-resistant. It performs well in up markets and also performs well in down markets,” Sapra said. 

“It supports transition in people’s lives. So, when people are upsizing or downsizing, or working from home, or going through life transitions, that will generally drive the need for self-storage.”