In this guide
If you own a factory in Faisalabad or Sialkot, there's a fair chance part of it is sitting idle right now. A line closed, an export order shrank, a loom shed went quiet after the last buyer moved to another supplier. This guide is about turning that unused factory space into steady rental income by letting us store household goods in it, and about the parts of the arrangement that matter more than the money.
We run our own storage buildings in Lahore, Islamabad and Karachi. Beyond those three cities we're building a network of facility partners: owners who rent us covered space, which we then fill with customers we've found, priced and booked. A factory shed is often a better fit for that than a purpose built godown, for reasons that aren't obvious at first.
Why unused factory space suits long term storage
Most of what we store is the contents of a house. Beds, wardrobes, sofa sets, dining tables, fridges, cartons of crockery and books. Our largest group of customers is families leaving the country, and their goods sit with us for six months to two years. Once a load is in, it mostly stays put.
That's the opposite of a shop or a walk in self storage site, where people come and go all day. The space doesn't need a front counter, a busy road or a retail address. It needs a sound roof, a dry floor, a gate that locks and somebody watching it at night. Plenty of factory buildings already have all four.
It also means very little traffic through your premises. A load arrives once on a truck, gets unloaded and written up, and the next visit might be months away when the family asks for a single trunk or a cupboard. Access is on 48 hours' notice, so you always know who's coming and when. Compare that with a warehouse for rent to a trading business, where a tenant's vehicles are in and out of your gate every day.
The industrial cities we're looking at
We want partner space in Faisalabad, Multan, Gujranwala, Sialkot, Gujrat, Sheikhupura, Bahawalpur and Rahim Yar Khan. We also take space in our own three cities for premium requirements, or when our buildings run short at peak. The industrial towns are where idle covered space tends to be, and each has its own habits.
| City | Where the idle space usually is | What we'll ask about first |
|---|---|---|
| Faisalabad | Textile sheds, weaving halls, old finished goods stores | Lint and dust from lines still running next door |
| Sialkot | Sports goods and surgical instrument units that have consolidated | Keeping storage well away from grinding and polishing |
| Gujranwala | Light engineering workshops and fabrication bays | Oil on the floor, metal swarf, forklift routes |
| Sheikhupura | Industrial units along the M2 corridor | Truck access, room to turn, a separate gate |
| Multan | Larger halls and stores on the edge of the city | Summer heat under a metal roof, and ventilation |
| Gujrat | Furniture and fan workshops with spare covered floor | Wood dust and solvents close by |
Keep storage separate from production
This is the part that decides whether a factory works as a storage partner. A family's furniture can't share an open hall with a running line. Four specific things go wrong.
Fire
Textile waste, packing material, wood dust and solvent all burn readily, and a wardrobe full of clothes is fuel too. If the storage area sits in the same open hall as production, a fire on the line is a fire in somebody's house. A wall between them, or clear distance and a closed shutter, changes that. Smoke detection and working extinguishers by the storage door sit on our nice to have list, but in a factory they matter more, and we'll notice them.
Dust
Fine dust from looms, grinding wheels or sanding settles on everything. On a polished dining table it scratches when someone wipes it off. On upholstery it works into the fabric and stays there. Stored goods need to sit somewhere the air from production doesn't blow through.
Forklifts and your own workers
A forklift reversing past a stack of a customer's furniture will touch it eventually. Workers on a busy shift will, with the best intentions, borrow a corner for a pallet of finished goods. Mark the storage area off physically, with a wall, a partition or a lockable mesh cage, so nobody has to guess where production stops.
Outsiders on your premises
Our customers or their relatives occasionally need to visit, always on notice and always with a record kept. You probably don't want them walking through the shop floor, past your machines and your stock. A separate entrance to the storage area, ideally its own gate from the street or the yard, solves it for both of us.
What the building needs before we can use it
Our hard requirements are the same for a factory as for anyone else. The security standards guide goes through each one and why it matters to the family whose goods are inside, but in short:
- CCTV that records round the clock, covering the entrance and the storage floor, with footage kept for a useful number of days. We'll ask how many.
- A guard on site overnight. Most factories already have a chowkidar on the gate. That counts.
- Access on 48 hours' notice, weekends included. It's what we promise our own customers.
- A real street address and an exact map pin.
- Dry, covered and pest controlled. A roof that holds through the monsoon, decent ventilation, and a fumigation schedule.
- At least five recent photographs of the actual building, taken by you, from our shot list.
Fire detection, racking, a loading dock or ramp, clear ceiling height, power backup and labour on site are all welcome, but none of them is a reason to turn you down on its own.
Metal roofs, monsoon and heat
Factory sheds have one weakness we see again and again, and it's the roof. Corrugated sheet over steel trusses is quick to put up, and after years of sun and rain the fixing bolts have rusted and each one is a small leak. In a production hall nobody notices a drip in July. Over a stored sofa it's ruinous, because the stain and the mould are found months later when the family comes home.
Walk the floor during or straight after heavy rain. Look up for pinpoints of daylight through the sheets, down for tide marks, and outside for gutters that empty against the wall. Resealing bolt holes and clearing a gutter costs far less than losing a partnership over one bad monsoon.
Heat is the other half. Under a metal roof in Multan in June the air near the ceiling gets fierce, and wood, glue and leather don't like it. Turbine vents or a couple of extractor fans keep air moving, and keeping goods off the floor on pallets stops damp rising through the concrete.
What renting factory space to us looks like
You aren't becoming a storage company. You're renting storage space to one tenant, us, and we fill it with customers you never have to find, deal with or chase.
- We bring the customers. We run the advertising, the search listings and the quoting. A customer reaches you already priced and booked.
- One counterparty, one invoice. We hold the agreement with each customer. You invoice us monthly for the space our goods occupy, and the collection risk is ours.
- No exclusivity. Use the rest of your premises however you like and keep any storage customers of your own. We only ask that once a customer's goods are in, that space stays theirs for the agreed term.
- Long stays. Because so many of our customers are going abroad, space that fills tends to stay filled.
There's no published rate. Every facility is negotiated on its own. Weigh what the shed earns you idle, which is nothing, against what it might earn on a long lease to a single business tenant, and remember that we add our own margin before a customer sees a price. Quoting us high doesn't earn you more. It makes your space the dearest line on the quote, and customers pick something else. The guide to how a storage partnership works covers what goes into the written terms.
Who this doesn't suit
These are what usually end an application at the visit.
- A shed you might need back for production at short notice. A family abroad can't have their furniture moved out because an order came in.
- Space that shares air with dyeing, chemical processes or anything that gives off fumes.
- A building with no way to keep visitors off the production floor.
- Hazardous or flammable goods, food stock, or anything that needs a fixed temperature. We don't take those, and we don't offer cold storage.
- A roof you already know leaks and don't plan to fix.
Start with four fields
If you've got an idle hall in Faisalabad, Sialkot, Gujranwala, Sheikhupura, Multan, Gujrat or one of the other cities on our list, the first step is your name, your phone number, your city and the kind of space you have. It takes under a minute and gives you a reference starting with USP. The dossier, with the address, the photographs and your terms, comes after, ideally while you're standing in the building with your phone.
Read about the programme on the storage partners page, or start your application now. Nothing is signed and no goods move until someone from our side has walked through the building with you.
Facility partners
Put your empty space to work
We bring the customers, hold the agreement with them and pay you monthly for the space. You keep your building and your own customers. Nothing is agreed until we've spoken and walked the building.
Tell us about your facility
Name, number, city and the kind of space. The details and photographs come after, in your own time.
