By Andrew Jones
Back in 2021, I was at the first self-storage tradeshow after the pandemic when I was chatting with Brandon Perdeck of Aries Capital (one of the smartest people in self-storage) in the back of an Uber in Nashville and decided to ask, “Brandon what’s the craziest deals you have worked on?”
He responded, “Truck Parking.”
I couldn’t hold back: “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard of!”
Well, I couldn’t get this idea out of my head. One thing led to another, and before long—2023, specifically—I founded OTR Truck Parking (a truck storage business), leaving my position at Extra Space Storage and starting to work with Truck Parking Club.
Today, 3.5 million class-8 trucks (a.k.a. “big rigs”) drive across America to deliver goods. They account for almost 75% of the freight that is sent and, somehow, they have nowhere to park. Not only that: Only one-out-of-11 trucks has a designated parking spot in the U.S. today. To that point, truck drivers in the U.S. spend an average of nearly one hour a day looking for a parking spot.
Of course, they always end up parking somewhere, as they have a time limit on the amount of time they can drive. To that point, this is among the top-five problems drivers consistently rank as their pain points per the American Trucking Association.
I poured over this data for almost a year until I figured out that the federal and state governments were not going to solve this problem. This is mostly because these agencies would get bills passed to add truck parking, but they were not in the best locations for truck drivers, and the cost per space was astronomical.
So, I took my friends and family capital and decided to start my own truck parking lot in the heart of the industry—Midland, Texas. My self-storage friends thought I was crazy, repeatedly telling me, “This industry doesn’t make sense because big rigs can park anywhere.”
But I knew that wasn’t true and there was a need. And, as we’ve all heard, necessity is the mother of invention. I truly believe that I’m onto something.
Luckily, my uncle and aunt drove a truck as a “team driver,” so I asked them many times how bad this problem was and how I could help solve it.
“Don’t do it Andrew,” they told me. “Drivers are dirty and will destroy your lot.”
This deterred me for the first couple of months, but I kept reviewing the data on this need and couldn’t help myself. I decided to confide in my business partner, Matt Weigand. “I have told you a lot of crazy business ideas,” I told him, “but I feel this one in my bones.”
Matt was hesitant, but willing to give it a go. He had a chunk of land in West Texas and told me that I could try it out. I had career experience in self-storage and felt certain I could get this rolling without breaking the bank.
That’s a good thing, because lenders across the nation just didn’t understand. We were going to have to bootstrap this operation and go rogue. I took the money my late parents left me and decided to pay a couple of vendors to make some land improvements. We leased the 6-acre lot and began operations.
Things haven’t always gone to plan since we started, but I’ve discovered several parallels to RV and boat storage as well as self-storage … and I feel like we are positioned at the starting line of a whole other storage segment about to bust loose.
Look, I grew up on an Indian reservation in western Arizona on the Colorado River Indian Tribes. One thing I’ve learned is that truck drivers are incredibly successful and self-storage will always do well.
At the end of the day, our lot in west Texas is about 40% occupied after one-and-a-half years. I can serve daily, monthly and yearly tenants. I can also provide a blueprint to my friends in self-storage that there is an alternative to mini-storage and RV/Boat storage for the land that they already have. It doesn’t take much to get this going and, again, there is a need for it. This is uncharted, promising territory.
When I chat with my friends in self-storage on where to build next, I have to use a scalpel. But when they ask me about truck parking, my answer is always the same: “Get me a property near a highway in any market and we can make it happen.”
Andrew Jones has been in the self-storage business for the last decade working for Yardi, Extra Space, JustStorage as well as founding OTR Truck Parking. He grew up in Parker, Ariz., before attending Arizona State University and relocating to Utah, where he resides now. He can be reached at andrew@otrtruckparking.com.
