Self storage company to buy one of Strip's largest buildings
Pittsburgh Business Times - by Tim Schooley
 Dec. 7, 2007 - One of the Strip District's largest buildings has been sold to one of Pittsburgh's fastest-growing businesses. A 120,000-square-foot former mattress factory at 2839 Liberty Ave. is under agreement to Storage Development Inc., a company owned by Steve Cohen, who also owns East Liberty-based Guardian Storage Solutions.
Cohen signed a sales agreement for the property last week and will now undergo a due diligence period before closing on the purchase of the 100-year-old structure, which is comprised of three adjoining buildings.
Cohen, whose company has nine self-storage facilities in the region, believes the amount of new residential development in the Strip and nearby neighborhoods makes the building perfect as a storage facility. It had been slated to become a residential property before Cohen's purchase.
"The Strip District was interesting to me for 15 years," Cohen said. "With the advent of more residential living Downtown and the revitalization of Lawrenceville, this was something for which the timing was right."
The seller is BBSB LLC, a local partnership including Rich Beynon, president of Downtown-based Beynon & Co. Beynon would not reveal the other partners nor disclose the sales price. Allegheny County
property records show that BBSB bought the building for $950,000 in 2001, and the property has an assessed value of $938,000.
Cohen's purchase comes just a few months after a sale to an undisclosed New York outfit that wanted to convert the building into condos fell through due to financing issues, Beynon said.
While that residential redevelopment didn't come to fruition, growing residential development Downtown and elsewhere is what led Cohen to invest in the building with the expectation of cleaning, renovating and outfitting it with the kind of lighting, security systems and storage amenities of his other properties.
Currently, the building is being used for storage by a number of small tenants on short-term leases, Beynon said. He said the timing was right for BBSB to sell the property.
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