CELEBRATING 30 YEARS

Shane Marshall

Shane owns and operates four, investment facilities located at Eastgardens, Hurstville, Penrith and Rockdale. He completed and opened his fifth facility at Taren Point in November 2020.

Shane’s story is a ‘from the ground up’ journey in the self storage industry.

As a young builder, Shane travelled to England, after working through an English winter he moved to the US and got a job with Ribroof, a company specialising in self storage construction. After working in the US for three years, Shane started to think about the potential of the industry in Australia and returned home.

In 1987 he found a site at Eastgardens in the eastern suburbs of Sydney. Shane's primary restriction at the time was a lack of available funds. The site at Eastgardens was covered by some very large sandhills that needed to be removed to allow building. Rather than this being a cost, Shane was able to sell the sand to the nearby Australian Glass Manufacturers, at Alexandria and local builders. This provided an income that allowed him to obtain finance to fund the original construction.

Shane says those early years were tough, with every dollar going into the project. He and his wife lived in a very modest caretaker flat on the facility for many of those early years. After ten years and three stages of construction, the Eastgardens facility was completed with over 900 storage units.

Shane remembers the early 1990s recession (Keating’s ‘the recession we had to have’) as a tough and testing trading period for all those in the self storage industry.

Shane purchased his site at Penrith in 1990 and filled the first stage in less than two years. He went on to buy the adjoining site and doubled the size of the facility. “Shane’s hard work and persistence over the past 30 years has given rise to a portfolio of first-class, investment standard self storage facilities that extend throughout Sydney.

In 1992 he purchased his site on Forest Road Hurstville and developed a multi-level storage facility. Shane followed this up with the acquisition of Marshall Bentnell’s facility at Princes Highway, Hurstville in 2011. Marshall was a fishing mate of Shane.

Initially trading as Marshall Storage, Shane joined the Storage King team in 1998 and has stayed with them since. Shane recognises the operating economies associated with the Storage King Brand and is happy to say that he has had good value out of his association with Storage King. Shane’s son Tom and his daughter, Brooke, have been involved in the business from an early age. They have both become essential elements in the Marshall business. Tom focuses on the identification and development of new business opportunities while Brooke has become fundamental to the operational side of the business. Brooke’s knowledge of the Storman system is legendary, and Storman regularly uses Brooke as the test pilot for new products and innovations.

Shane now leaves a large amount of the business to his two children but remains an active participant in the industry. Shane, Tom and Brooke are committed to the long-term growth of the business and make a powerful team. They have development approval for a large scale, mixed-use development adjoining there original Eastgardens site together with plans to further develop a further 4,000 sqm of net storage areas to the original Eastgardens facility. l