Success Secrets for Boat and RV Storage with Chris Koenig

THE SELF STORAGE REPORT — EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Episode: Success Secrets for Boat and RV Storage with Chris Koenig Guest: Chris Koenig — RV & Boat Storage Developer (self-storage background; solar-covered RV/boat storage) Host: Chris Berg — Abernathey Development Published: October 4, 2025 (live) Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pi_-JimC6s Key topics: Chemical engineer to developer, property-tax-appeal business ($14B appealed), first self-storage build in Brentwood CA, Bob Hayworth / Baja Construction and solar-canopy RV storage, Rio Vista lesson (isolated market, slow absorption), site selection for RV/boat storage vs self-storage, the Pittsburgh CA project, prefab leasing office, PG&E power purchase agreements (7¢/kWh, ~$420K/yr), Inflation Reduction Act tax credits, the Big Beautiful Bill and December 2027 deadline, safe harboring, Ocala FL project, pipeline (American Canyon, Discovery Bay, Chico). Note: Speaker attribution reconstructed from YouTube captions. Light cleanup of transcription errors only; wording preserved. ————————————————————————————— Chris Berg: Welcome to the Self-Storage Report. I'm your host, Chris Berg. Excited for our guest today. He's really diving into an asset class that's on the lips of a lot of people these days: boat and RV storage. His background is in self storage, but now he's making that transition into boat and RV. Chris Koenig. Chris, it's great to have you with us. Just want to start with a little bit about your background, and then let's really get into your thesis around boat and RV. Chris Koenig: Yeah, sure. Thanks for having me, Chris. So I started — I was actually a chemical engineer in college. Graduated with that and then got into real estate development right when I graduated, working for my wife's uncle, actually. He was preaching about real estate — how it's passive income, it's better than working in a lab the rest of your life. So I worked there my first summer and I got hooked. This was up in Napa Valley. I did that for about five years. Then the big financial crisis hit — 2010 — so I left that and started a property tax appeal business. In California, and most states, you can fight your property taxes. I ended up having about $14 billion of assets in California that I had appealed — all over the state, every property type: wineries, warehouses, you name it. And in doing so, I saw the NOI, the financials, for self-storage. I'd have people in Sacramento who paid $10 million for an office building leased to Countrywide — and Countrywide's out now, they can't give the space away, they're just losing money. And the self-storage guys were killing it. Their NOIs, maybe in a bad market, went down 10–20% — most of them 5–10%. I couldn't make money doing a tax appeal for the self-storage guys. So I thought: this is a good business. It's not recession-proof, but it's recession-resilient. I have seen every asset class, and it is the most resilient of everything I saw during that 2012 debacle. So I created a business plan for self-storage around 2015. I found four acres, got it entitled, we raised the capital to build it, and I hired one of my property tax clients to build it. That's been up since 2017 — that was my first self-storage. StorQuest manages it, and it's in Brentwood, California. I just love it. And I was hooked. But in doing so — on that site the perimeter was all single-story drive-up, and the inside was two big buildings with interior units. It was my first one, so I was trusting Cubix, my designer, a great company. And I said, "We have this massive roof. Can we put solar on the roofs and sell it to PG&E?" I'd never done that — I'd just heard about it. It's wasted space, why not have this additional source of revenue? At the time I was really gung-ho on cell tower leases too, for the same reason — it's just passive revenue. So my solar guy said, "You've got to go meet Bob Hayworth with Baja Construction." If anyone's ever been to a self-storage show, they've heard Bob or seen him speak. At the time he was building his Oakley Executive RV & Boat Storage — I think he was just finishing his second phase. Bob was pretty revolutionary on this: he was doing solar canopies — all covered, paved RV and boat storage, just RV and boat storage, but the canopy was a solar carport. So I went out, had lunch with Bob at the Walnut Creek Yacht Club — he drove out in his Maserati, I remember it so vividly — and we're walking around his site, and I'd never seen a site like this. And it clicked. I said, "This is it." Because you're double-dipping. You're getting revenue selling the power from the solar panels to PG&E, the utility company — he was making $400,000, $500,000 a year on the power purchase agreement, just coming in every month. As long as you're producing power, you're getting paid. Then he's renting the covered spaces at a premium to people with their $300K, $500K, $2 million RVs — and he's full. And the competition is a gravel lot down the street with a chain-link fence and a cargo container for an office that's just getting destroyed. Or it's the five stalls at the mini storage — but my catalytic converter keeps getting stolen, because some of the guys in and out of the mini storage are deadbeats and they're taking my catalytic converter. So I was done. And then Bob said, "Oh, and by the way, here's how I financed it with the tax credits — and you can get creative with selling the tax credits, or you use them." And I told Ash, my wife: we are all in on this. I like self storage, don't get me wrong, but no one else is doing this. So I created a relationship with Bob. We ended up building one together with a few other partners out in Rio Vista, California, about 30 minutes north of Oakley — and then this other site in Pittsburg that I just developed. That was a good build, and it was nice to work with Bob on that one. But like you and I were talking about earlier, Rio Vista was one where I was maybe blindly convinced — I got brought into it as it was getting entitled, more as a development manager to project-manage it through. That was a hard lesson for this market. What I found for RV and boat — and the same applies to mini storage — is Rio Vista is a very isolated area with minimal population. The nearest towns to the south are Oakley and Pittsburg — you've got to drive 20, 30 minutes, over a bridge, and there's an extra fee to tow your rig; it's very expensive. The next town to the east is Stockton–Lodi, which is a lower-rent area, so people aren't necessarily going to drive — that's like 20 minutes. And the other direction, to the northwest, is Fairfield–Suisun, right on 80 — and they already have existing facilities with covered boat and RV storage. So my market was literally the city of Rio Vista. And it's really hard to develop in the city of Rio Vista — I wasn't seeing a boom of new homes. So to come online with 500 spaces — really slow absorption. That was the lesson learned. Until then, I firmly believed it was kind of "if you build it, they will come" — people will drive 30 minutes, an hour, because there's not a lot of this product on the market: covered, secure, paved, fenced, gated. People definitely want those amenities. But if there is other competition even closer, you're just not getting this mass influx. Rio Vista was not on a main path of travel. I believe you could be on a major highway — like 80 between San Francisco and Sacramento, in a city like Dixon — and if that's the path of travel for me going to where I recreate, and I can pop right off and pop right on and go get my rig, that works for this product type. It's a different mentality than self storage. Self storage is what — a three-to-five-mile radius, depending on where you're at, because it's mostly homeowners or businesses in that area. For boat and RV storage — and it's all new, it's all in flux, everyone's figuring it out — it's either where you recreate, so right on the lake or right next to the RV park... if you go to Pismo Beach, the RV campsites are all on the beach, and the best RV storage is right nearby, so people can pick up their RV and literally drive across the street and camp. Or boat storage right on the water — Lake Tahoe would be a prime example, Lake Berryessa. So: where I'm recreating, or close to where I live, so I can go pick up my RV and be on my way. That's why the Rio Vista example — very isolated city, not a lot of traffic going in and out. My project in the city of Pittsburg, California — East Contra Costa County — which I was doing around the same time as Rio Vista, got a little delayed because of COVID; my partner pulled the brakes from about 2020 to 2022, we literally just stopped the project. But that one: very dense population, a lot of cities around it, within 15–20 minutes. I don't know if you want to pull it up on a map. Chris Berg: Yeah — so that's really cool. You can see all your solar panels. Chris Koenig: So all of those are covered solar canopies. And I have a leasing office in the front there. I wonder if you can do Google Street View? Chris Berg: Let's take a look... Oh yeah — yes, we can. So here's what we've got. What are we looking at? Chris Koenig: Great. So — I came up with this fence design. It's just corrugated metal, 12 feet. I did nine feet in Rio Vista; it comes in three-foot panels. I went higher here — I was a little more worried about security in Pittsburg, so I went 12 feet, just to be a deterrent. What I've found in RV and boat storage: everything is big. Everything is obnoxiously large. Those columns are 12-foot stone. The big gates open up — my manager calls them the Jurassic Park gates. And it's funny, because I use Nokē — I'm a big fan of Nokē gate openers — so when people come in, the Bluetooth recognizes it and opens the gate for you. Go back to the street view of the office. Chris Berg: Got it. Let's see if we can get this to... there we go. Chris Koenig: So — our costs were getting really high to build a leasing office. I'm not kidding: it was a million dollars to build a 2,000-square-foot leasing office. Outrageous. And I think because my partner on this did all the site work and grading, I was just hiring one guy to do a little leasing office, and they're like, "Hey, to make any money, I need $200 grand profit — it's just too small." So I bought this prefab that's literally a double-wide trailer. And I pit-set it — you can't see it now, but I set it so the finished floor is at the finished concrete level. You would never know it's a prefab. It came in on a trailer, they towed it with a crane and set it in two pieces and merged them together. It literally is a double-wide trailer, but they're commercial — it's called API Trailers, out of the Santa Barbara area. And it was like $300,000. I had Ryan Lorenzini out for my ribbon cutting, and he was like, "This is the nicest office I've ever seen" — he was hanging out in there. As long as it doesn't look like a job trailer — people aren't going to pay more or less in rent. I'm not getting a better cap rate, I'm not getting more rent. So how can I still deliver a Class A facility and product without spending a million bucks? I'm not doing that on every project, but this was a solution to help save on project costs. And people love the office — it's got a conference room if people want to use it. No one has, aside from me and my management company. So we've got — I'm probably 20% full right now after being open a couple months. And one of the things that's really important on this product type is the amenities you provide to your customers. Underneath that first canopy right inside the gate, I've got a dump station for sewer, an air-water machine like you'd see at a gas station, a commercial vacuum... Oh — you can see those blue things in that drive aisle? Those are the office trailers. They just parked them there until we were ready for them. They're literally on wheels. Chris Berg: Wow. So walk me through a little bit about your thesis. Obviously you picked this piece of dirt — what were you doing to say, okay, we feel good about this site, let's go ahead and build? Chris Koenig: You know, in any development there's risk. We had a market study done by Jo Beth White, who I strongly suggest for this type of stuff. We had an appraisal done. They were all positive about the demand for Class A covered RV and boat storage in this area. So we said, let's do it. We thought about phasing the project — which, for non-solar, I would suggest. My issue is that outside of the real estate play, there's the solar business model. It took me about a year to get PG&E approval. As far as PG&E is concerned, this is just a big ground-mount solar farm — they don't care about the RV storage. All they see is that I'm shoving three megawatts to the grid, to the substation down the road. And you see here — I've got a massive population of potential customers, and there's a lot of residential development happening in the city of Pittsburg. My customers are really coming from Pittsburg, Antioch — it's a very dense population, and Highway 4 is a very busy freeway, so being right off it is good. Chris Berg: And you've got water right there. It just seems like kind of a no-brainer location. So walk us through the solar piece. How lucrative is that? And how much does the Big Beautiful Bill get in the way of what you're trying to do here? Chris Koenig: How lucrative is it today, until December 2027? Very. So here there are a couple of factors. One: I'll have what they call a power purchase agreement with PG&E — they buy the power from me for 20 years at 7 cents a kilowatt-hour. A three-megawatt system like this — which is about 200,000 square feet of covered space — generates about 6 million kilowatt-hours a year. So 6 million times 7 cents: PG&E is going to pay me about $420,000 a year over a 20-year period. That is like a triple-net lease with Starbucks, right? Though some banks say PG&E's credit is bad because of the bankruptcies — it's a bouncing ball. For me, I'm the most confident: there are provisions, they have to pay their PPAs, they still have to provide power to customers. And what I found is different from Bob's deal — Bob got so lucky, he was getting like 12 cents a kilowatt-hour at Oakley before he sold it. Same power, but the program Bob had changed. This is a program that I found — I wish I could say it was ChatGPT, but this was all me. I found this little section of the California Public Utilities Commission code that says they have to buy power from small, under-five-megawatt infill solar projects. The idea is to get solar projects closer to where the demand is, rather than a big farm in Fresno — so the electrons don't have to travel as far. And in my opinion, covered RV storage is one of the only assets it really works for, because the price isn't a lot for what the cost is. Making that $400 grand a year is great — but now I get this shaded structure essentially for free, because the payment for my debt on the solar is covered by that PPA revenue. Chris Berg: Got it. Chris Koenig: So bifurcate the two businesses: the solar is kind of operating over here — and on it I get a 50% tax credit, too. Depending on how you structure it, you can take the tax credit... but I don't have a $6 million tax credit appetite, and neither does my partner. The Inflation Reduction Act allows you to sell it — I could sell it to Chris Berg, we fill out literally one form, boom, you take a $6 million tax credit. That's immediately a capital influx for me — I'll discount it, sell it to you for five and a half million, but I'm getting the value of six. How you can structure the capital stack on these is very creative and lucrative. So say the solar works over here and makes a little money. Now, the RV-boat-storage real estate business is probably worth about $20 million once it gets leased up, based on my NOI at, conservatively, a six cap. But because the solar carries the carports and the panels, my only costs are the land, the permitting, the grading and paving, the office, and the fencing. So my cost into this $20 million real estate project is more like eight. I've got $12 million of equity built into the real estate once it's built and leased. That's what I really like about the solar: it offsets my costs for the carport structure, and I'm making money on it. Chris Berg: The Big Beautiful Bill changes that now, though. Chris Koenig: Yeah. So — and here's what I've found being in solar for eight years now — they call it the solar coaster. Bob sold Oakley and moved to Portugal, but any time you talk with Bob, he's got this hysterical laugh, and he'd say: it's the roller coaster. Every four months, six months, every year, they're going to pass some bill, pass some law, and everything's going to change. Constantly. The Inflation Reduction Act, to me, doused lighter fluid on this flame: boom — boost all the tax credits, incentivize panel production, incentivize you to buy US-made material, prevailing wage. My cost is higher because I have to buy US materials and pay prevailing wage, but my tax credit offsets that. It kind of worked — it made sense. The Big Beautiful Bill, to me, just throws a wet blanket on that. The tax credits go away for projects that haven't started by December 2027 — "started" meaning what they call safe harboring: if you've spent 5% — say you place an order for panels or carports — you're grandfathered in under whatever the law is at the time. If you haven't done anything by January 1, 2028, you're kind of screwed, as it stands today. A couple of things on that. I believe something's going to change between now and December 2027, just from what I've seen with solar. Because that's commercial — for residential, unless you're done by December 2025, no tax credit. Unless you're done in four months! To me, that's going to bankrupt any and all residential solar companies — that's the whole incentive. It was a five-year, eight-year payback; now it's double that. I think it's really going to hurt, and I think there'll be enough people complaining that they change it — and I imagine something changes on commercial as well. But here's the big thing, like I said: it cost me eight, and I'm creating $12 million of value. It still works even if I don't have the tax credit — the credit is just really nice. And the other thing — I was talking to my wife about this yesterday — we paid a million dollars more in labor for prevailing wage, and probably half a million more buying US panels. If I'm not incentivized to do that anymore because I'm not getting the tax credit, now I'm buying panels from China — even with tariffs — and paying normal rates for labor. It might not fully offset, but it mitigates the damage. Which works against the whole intention of buying American products, right? So that's where I think something is going to change. And if not — like I said, it still works. I also partnered with someone in Ocala, Florida — that just opened in July and it's leasing up well. Rents are higher than in California, land is half the price, development cost is half the price. Getting out there is a bummer from California! But that's just covered RV storage space, and it performs very well. So my thesis today is pretty laser-focused on this for the next year and a half. I think there's huge demand for this product type. Getting creative with the solar causes a lot of these gray hairs and a lot of anxiety — but it's worth it. I do think the Big Beautiful Bill is unfortunate for the C&I customers — the commercial-industrial guys who just want to put solar on their roof and lower their utility bill. That's going to hurt. And those are the people who benefit the most, because they're paying 40, 50 cents a kilowatt to PG&E, where they could build it, own it, and get paid back in five years. Chris Berg: Chris, I want to give you a chance to promote your site — where it's at, come check it out. Chris Koenig: So this site I just opened is in Pittsburg, California — Contra Costa County. It's being managed by Cubix's management arm, actually — the same group that built my first one. They've been great. We're leasing up — about 15–20% full after a couple of months, projected to be leased up in about a year. Really excited — if anyone wants to come out and take a tour of the site, if you're looking to develop something similar, I'm happy to tour it with you. I'm also under construction on one in Napa — American Canyon, California — and about to break ground on a big one in Discovery Bay, where we'll have enclosed units as well. And probably the first part of next year we'll start one in Chico, California. Really going all in on this product type. Chris Berg: Hey man, you're busy! So there's the website — find out more about the site, and you can reach out to Chris as well. Chris, we really appreciate the convo, man. It's great to have you on. It seems like such a hot, up-and-coming asset class — so keep us in the loop, okay? Chris Koenig: Yeah — and we'll meet up. I'll be in Vegas at the SSA. So look for me. Chris Berg: Thank you for watching the report — and please share this with your colleagues. — END OF TRANSCRIPT —