The building once housed the Canadian War Museum's collection of firearms, vehicles, art and uniforms. Before that, it was an Ottawa transit commission bus and streetcar depot.

By the spring, however, Metcalfe Realty Company Ltd. hopes to convert the 147,000 square feet of warehouse space once known as Vimy House near LeBreton Flats to 1,100 state of the art self-storage units.

"It's really large, and you're actually going to be able to drive through, and you will be out of the rain, out of the wind and out of the snow," said Tony Fuller, Metcalfe president. "Once you drive in, the door comes down behind you, and that's another level of security.

"That's what the world's come to. It has to be a goal of convenience."

At a time when commercial vacancy in Ottawa hovers at about 6.8 per cent, some experts say it's becoming trendy to convert that empty space to high-end self-storage warehouses.

Mr. Fuller said he wasn't following trends and that the move was a business decision, based on homework.

"I don't really have that feeling," he told the OBJ. "The market research we've been doing shows 99 per cent of the facilities are filled. There are some really fine facilities here in town, and we are looking to become one of them."

He researched the industry in the United States, where Public Storage, the top company in the field, on its own fetches $8.9 billion annually in revenues. "It's not new," he said, "(But) it is new for us."

Metcalfe owns and manages some 1.7 million square feet of commercial real estate in Ottawa, mostly office buildings. It bought the 255 City Centre Ave. property in 1981, and promptly leased it for the next quarter century to the War Museum, which used it for storage until it moved to its new, larger digs on LeBreton Flats.

Instead of trying to find a single, long-term tenant to once again occupy the warehouse, Metcalfe hired an independent researcher to look into the feasibility of turning it into self-storage.

The answer came back positive.

"Obviously, more clients and more diversity is better than having one client," said Mr. Fuller. "Having one client is very volatile."

"At the end of the day . . . when you divide the facility into small (lockers), the actual storage space is less," he admitted. "You have to have room for corridors, drive throughs and lockers." However, if 90 to 95 per cent occupancy is attained, "the revenue is . . . greater than in having one large storage space.

"There's reams and reams of data from the U.S., where they've been doing this well since 1973," he added. "It's a science, and it's an exacting science, with costing down to the cent per square foot."

Coleman Swartz, a research associate at CB Richard Ellis, wrote on recent moves towards self-storage units in his latest MarketView quarterly look at office and commercial real estate in Ottawa.

"It's emerging as a trend," he said. "It was news to me as well."

The main "driver" of the trend, he said, was a recent $33.5-million property sale by Dymon Capital Corporation. The Ottawa real estate manager and developer unloaded seven buildings, totaling 270,000 square feet of rentable area. However, it kept a number of other sites.

Primecorp Commercial Realty Inc., which brokered the deal, said the sale was "a direct result of (Dymon's) decision to refocus operations on the development of its self storage . . . divisions."

Dymon then announced plans to build 10 self-storage units in Ottawa and Gatineau over the next 18 months. The first opened earlier this year on Coventry Road near Lynx Stadium.

"Property owners looking for a way to kick start revenues in otherwise unpopular buildings or sites are increasingly turning to self-storage," wrote Mr. Swartz.

While downtown vacancy remains low at 1.4 per cent, overall commercial vacancy in Ottawa is up this quarter to 6.8 per cent, from 6.6 per cent, he wrote.

For owners of empty warehouse, having hundreds of self-storage units is less of a headache than finding and dealing with one large tenant, he said.

"You don't have to negotiate with tenants every five years," he said. "And the complexity of the agreement is nil: someone wants a locker, they pay for it, it's done. It's pretty straightforward."

Steve Creighton, senior vice-president at Dymon, took issue with the statement that firms were just trying to fill otherwise vacant rental spaces. If that was the case, he said, Dymon wouldn't be planning its facilities for what it deemed were desirable pieces of real estate.

"One of the things we discovered during our research was that the most successful facilities were consistently those located in high traffic locations, with high visibility, adjacent to big-box retail nodes," he told the OBJ. "Traditionally, both in Ottawa and elsewhere, self storage has been nothing more than garages in a field, in less-than-desirable hidden locations in industrial parks.

"We are focused on securing the best available sites in the city for storage. It's one million square feet, so this is a serious business for us," not a default position, he said.

Both Dymon and Metcalfe are promising "state-of-the-art" facilities, with drive-in access, complete shelter from the weather for unloading, and fully climate-controlled units. The facilities may or may not be accessible 24 hours, but both will be or are offering moving trucks clients for clients, "fortress" security, dollies and other moving supplies.