Business & Professional
"Mom's
happiness is
absolutely
priceless."
Storing Success
Self-storage maven Maurice Pogoda
opens his 40th facility in Redford,
a growing market.
Bill Carroll
Special to the Jewish News
A
murderer needed a place
to store the body; a rob-
ber needed to stash the
$400,000 he stole from a bank; a drug
dealer needed to hide his narcot-
ics; a down-and-out man needed
a cheap place to live so he "stored"
himself.
These are extreme and unusual
storage stories, but they're true.
Jewish businessman Maurice
Pogoda has seen it all in the nearly
20 years he has been a self-stor-
age operator, broker and consultant
— the largest such operator in
Michigan and the 25th largest in the
United States.
Pogoda Companies of Farmington
Hills, with 75 employees, has .3 mil-
lion square feet of self-storage space
under management in 40 facilities
in Michigan and Ohio. The organi-
zation also operates Pogoda Group
and Pogoda Management, and
owns seven mobile home parks in
Michigan.
Each storage center brings in gross
fees of $500,000-$800,000 each year.
The newest property to enter the
burgeoning, highly competitive self-
storage market is National Storage
Center, a 90,000-square-foot, 500-
unit facility that opened recently in
Redford Township. Pogoda says he
spent about $4 million buying and
totally renovating the former Empire
Door manufacturing/showroom
facility along 341 feet of Telegraph
frontage, between West Chicago and
Joy roads.
The building is geared to attract
attention from the estimated 61,000
vehicles that pass the 3.2-acre site
daily, mainly because of the brightly
colored exterior capped by an 11-foot
reproduction of the U.S. Capitol dome
that's illuminated at night.
"One of the big challenges in this
business is that there's an overcapac-
ity of self-storage places in many
parts of the country, including this
strip along Telegraph because it's
a high-visibility road and provides
easy access to the property:' said
Pogoda. "But we're meeting the chal-
"When Dad passed away
last year, I watched
helplessly as my fun-loving
lenge head on and we're continuing
to expand; we're searching for more
properties in other states:'
mom stayed home most
Moving On
In the 1980s, Pogoda, now 50, of
Franklin, found him himself trapped
she quickly saw residents
nights. When she visited
The Park at Trowbridge,
enjoying activities together.
We knew Mom was fully
settled when she stopped
watching her soap operas.
Arnie S.
-
son of resident Edith S.
She leaves for breakfast
at 8:30 and sometimes
doesn't return until
evening.
Mom is busy meeting new
friends, and I'm happy
she's enjoying life again."
Maurice Pogoda at his newest storage
24111 Civic Center Drive
Southfield, MI 48033
center in Redford Township.
for three years in a large corpora-
tion, Lever Brothers, in his native
New York. As a marketing and train-
ing manager, he dabbled with the
Snuggle fabric softener and Wisk and
Dove kitchen soaps.
"But I really disliked that type of
work; I hated corporate life. I wanted
to have my own business;' he assert-
ed. "So my wife, Lori, and I returned
to Michigan and I entered the family
commercial real estate business oper-
ated by her father, Peter Helman.
"I got interested in the self-stor-
age business because it was smaller
at that time and not over-saturated.
I believe everyone needs a `niche:
in life, and the self-storage industry
became my niche.
"I began in 1987 as a self-stor-
age broker, managing and brokering
places for banks and the old savings
and loans that had invested in them.
Then I started purchasing self-stor-
age facilities on my own."
Scott Shevin, a partner in the
accounting firm of Polk & Associates
in Bingham Farms, calls Pogoda a "a
Storing Success on page 32
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December 14 2006
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