Yesterday, in Bucharest, EuroMiniStorage opened the doors for Romania's first and only self-storage facility. The new facility represents an eight-million-euro investment by Canadian investors. In U.S. dollars, in January 2010, that comes out to $11,491,533.24.
Construction of the new facility began in August 2008. The building, which was designed for self-storage by Shurgard, a European consulting company specializing in self-storage, received its operating permit two months ago, in November 2009.
EuroMiniStorage also has a facility in Budapest, Hungary.
The new facility is at the southern end of Bucharest, at Bucharest's exit toward Autostrada Soarelui (Sun's Motorway). The building contains 1,000 units on three floors, ranging in size from small cupboards that are only a few meters long, to large rooms and halls. Tenants can rent between one and 27 square meters of space. The minimum rental period is 30 days. To open their units, tenants must use a personal security card provided by EuroMiniStorage.
EuroMiniStorage of Bucharest offers the same basic services that are offered by most self-storage companies, such as providing individual alarm systems and smoke detectors for each unit, offering insurance for stored items, and making utensils such as boxes, tape, locks, cutters, shelves, hangars, etc. available to tenants. But EuroMiniStorage of Bucharest also has a few quirks that make it unique: it does not allow storage of valuable goods, such as money or jewels, and it does offer the use of vehicles from its own car pool for tenants and prospective tenants to use in transporting goods from their homes or businesses to a self-storage unit.
EuroMiniStorage is a member of the Self Storage Association of the United Kingdom, and is partnered with Intellio, a company specializing in intelligent security systems.