StoreLocal Welcomes Keylock Storage
StoreLocal, parent company to Storage Front and The Renter’s Bent, is growing fast! We’re pleased to announce the addition of a new founding member to the StoreLocal family, Keylock Storage.
Headquartered in Irvine, California, StoreLocal is a cooperative of self-storage companies working together to meet storage industry challenges of the 21st century. Together, they share the purchasing power of a single, massive corporation when acquiring services and products, making it easier for each small member company to compete against national chains.
Keylock Storage is StoreLocal’s first founding member in the Pacific Northwest. Based in Boise, Idaho, Keylock Storage owns and operates six facilities in Idaho, Oregon, and Washington. The StoreLocal bylaws cap founder membership at 30. Keylock Storage passed the rigorous background checks all prospective founders must go through to become the 21st founding company in the StoreLocal Cooperative. The addition of Keylock Storage brings the number of facilities within the co-op to more than 700.
Keylock Storage, owned and run by Keylock Storage Holdings, a wholly owned subsidiary of Bitterroot Holdings LLC, opened its first facility in 2003. CEO of Keylock Storage, Ron Osborne, stated that previous experience with a national employee benefits association was a major factor in his decision to join StoreLocal.
“It was very, very helpful and we were able to interact with firms like us around the country. When we found out about Storelocal and got checking into it, we said, ‘Oh my goodness! This is very, very similar to what we experienced in the employee benefit arena.’ It looks and feels and smells amazingly like that,” Osborne stated. “The more we got checking into it we said, ‘We’ve got to be a part of this,’ because we were in the other association from the ground up and helped build it and were very involved participants and saw it grow and helped various members a lot and we wanted to be able to do the same here in the storage business.” He continued, “Some of the advantages we could really see and we experienced right off, which we experienced in that other association, is as a group we can purchase much more cost effective vendor services and the other thing we saw in Storelocal that was extremely appealing to us is that we would be able to play at least in the ballpark like REITs.”
Lance Watkins, StoreLocal CEO, welcomes Osborne’s employee benefits experience as it will help the StoreLocal co-op. “Ron Osborne has a unique background in employee benefits programs. He and his son are building a portfolio of stores and they have a very modest growth rate that they’re targeting for 2020 and we’re excited to add them to StorageFront. They’ll be a great founder in being able to mentor us with an employee benefit program that will help us all offer benefits to our employees across the co-op.”
On working out of the Pacific Northwest, Osborne said, “Since Storelocal didn’t have anybody in the Northwest, we wanted to be on board early on to help here. [Storelocal membership] would be absolutely a huge advantage to [the small to medium sized operator], even if they’re looking at it from a purely selfish way. Being able to achieve economies of scale when purchasing from the various vendors would be huge to them, so it seems like a no brainer.”
If you’d like to learn more about StoreLocal to consider joining the cooperative, or simply to understand its business model, visit the Storelocal website, www.storelocal.com or call Natalie Bragg, Director of Public Relations, at 949-629-4142.
