Alumni in the News
Daniel Nixon – Finance, 1985
Lock It Up adding 700 storage units in Davis, Weber counties
The Enterprise - March 26, 2008
By Debbi Olson
Lock It Up Self Storage has started construction on a new three-building storage facility in Farmington that will add 700 storage units to the company's 2,500 existing storage units in Davis and Weber counties.
The new facility, to be located on Bourne Circle, just west of the intersection of Park Lane and Lagoon Drive in Farmington, will include 90,000 square feet of storage capacity located in two two-story units and one one-story unit. The facility, which will sit on three acres, is being built by Kier Construction.
"About half the units are drive-up and half are our hallway units," said Dan Nixon, president of Lock It Up Storage. "Thirty-five percent of the inside units are climate controlled. Our climate controlled units are some of our most desirable units. Women especially like them because they're clean and more secure than drive-up units."
The storage units range from 5x5 feet to 10x30 feet in both the hallway units and the drive-up units.
"We have all the sizes in the hallway units because we have people who leave for two years for church assignments or military assignments and they want their items in a clean environment," Nixon said. "We're also having a lot of growth in the commercial use of our storage units."
Nixon said the company chose to locate its newest facility in Farmington because there was a need for storage services in the area, and in order to accommodate customers who prefer self-storage units that are easily accessible to their residences or places of business.
The new facility will also feature a two-story townhouse for its on-site manager and a sales center. "The sales center will be a place where a customer can come in and purchase packing supplies and boxes and shelving," Nixon said. "Then we have a display center that will be adjacent to the sales area where customers can come in and see display units and look at different sizes."
The buildings on the three-acre site will sit back from Park Lane so the entire facility will look more like a commercial storefront than a storage project, Nixon said. It also will have a water feature in the front and additional landscaping to fit in with the surrounding area.
"We set the buildings back an additional 40 feet to add some landscaping features to the front so the sizes of the buildings weren't so dramatic," Nixon said. "The larger buildings aren't seen as much and you'll see a lot more landscaping with water features."
The company is also building a new wetlands preserve on the property to mitigate construction at the site.
In addition to the Farmington facility, which is expected to open in October, Lock It Up Storage is also completing an expansion to its Ogden storage facility. The company is constructing a 30,000 square foot building that will have 250 new units in Ogden, including climate control units. The facility currently has approximately 500 units. The Ogden site will also include a secure, outside, non-covered parking area where customers can store their RV units. The new addition is expected to be complete in May.
Work is also being completed on the acquisitions Lock It Up Storage made in late 2007 of Northside Self Storage in North Ogden and Storage Solutions in Clearfield. Both locations have reopened under the Lock It Up Self Storage brand.
"The Northside property is adjacent to our existing one in North Ogden," Nixon said. "When it came for sale we combined it into one large property. We added 175 units to the 550 units we already had."
Since the Northside storage buildings were older, the company has replaced doors, painted units, repaired asphalt and added video surveillance equipment.
The Clearfield acquisition added 160 new storage units to the company. The firm added a part-time office to the facility as well as installed new video surveillance equipment and added a new electronic gate that allows access to the property only by customers.
Because the company's new Clearfield facility and its existing Clinton facility are too small to have a full-time on-site manager, the company has installed kiosks that allow customers to pay their monthly rent as well as allow new customers to lease a unit.
We're the first ones in Utah to have the kiosks," Nixon said. "The kiosks will allow the customers to pay their rent and they can rent a unit without the office being open. They can go through security features, type the contract and print it out; it takes a digital photo of you, scans your driver's license and dispenses a lock."
All of the company's other locations have a full-time onsite manager available six days per week.
The combined acquisitions and new construction will add 1,000 new storage units to the company's inventory, bringing the total to 3,500 units on 500,000 square feet in eight locations. The company also has facilities in Bountiful and Layton.