New self-storage facility opens in the city

A new self-storage facility with some 150 units run by the “placeB AG” company opened recently on Sumpfstrasse in the city.

As Terry Fehlamnn, the CEO and co-founder of the company, explained, their self-storage facilities are already available in 16 locations across Switzerland, for example in Zurich, Kriens and Dietikon, and now one is available in Zug, too. What is different about this company is that all its processes are digitised, which means no staff are required to run them on site. This helps, too, in that this makes it easier to run a number of smaller self-storage facilities not far from residential areas, rather than one large one on city peripheries.

A whole team at “placeB” is busy looking at potential future sites, knowing that people who are in the process of moving, or who may be in one location for a limited time only, such as expats, may need items to be stored for a while.

Indeed, Fehlmann mentioned how a number of them had been enquiring about storage facilities, not least as they are far more common in the English-speaking world, where cellars are not the tradition as they are on the continent.

Furthermore, with the current policy of building to greater density, not least in Zug, the place where people traditionally stored items not in regular use was in the attic, but this sort of space just does not exist in modern developments. And where there are cellars, these are getting increasingly smaller. It is only natural developers want to maximise living space as possible, and with rents so high, no-one wants to use space in a flat as a store room.

Fehlmann (on the left in the photograph) went on to mention that as many as one fifth of all 150 spaces available in Zug had been let out and in a relatively short time, too, since the facility opened. The storage spaces available range from ones of just one cubic metre, for CHF 29 per month, to ones of 25 cubic metres for several hundreds of francs. “And the longer they are rented out, the cheaper they become,” added co-founder Manuel Gerber (on the right), who is also head of marketing.

As mentioned, these new storage facilities in Zug are on Sumpfstrasse, at numbers 26-28. If you would like to rent one, all you need do is go to the company’s homepage and then download an app, which acts as a key when transferred to a mobile phone.

But what about security? “Everywhere is monitored by surveillance cameras and everyone who uses our facilities is registered and leaves a digital fingerprint on each visit. And criminals know this, too,” added Gerber.