The first snowbirds usually show up around the third week of October. By Thanksgiving you can’t get a tee time before ten and the Costco parking lot is a full-contact sport.

We feel it earlier than that. The phone starts going in September — people calling from Washington, Alberta, Minnesota, wanting a unit lined up before they point the truck south.

Most of those calls sound the same. Someone owns a place in Indio or La Quinta and lives in it five months a year. The house is furnished, but there’s a golf cart, patio furniture, two bikes, a spare set of clubs, and eight boxes of things that live in the garage the other seven months. The garage is full. So the overflow goes in a unit.

The other version is the reverse. They rent the place out in summer, so everything personal has to come out of the house by May and go back in around October. That’s a bigger load — closets, framed photos, the good dishes, sometimes a bedroom set.

A 10×10 covers most of both. Ours are $95 a month, which tends to land well with people who just priced a unit back home. A 5×10 at $50 handles the golf-cart-and-boxes crowd. If you’re emptying a whole three-bedroom for the season, look at a 10×20 at $136. Full list is on the rates page and it’s the real number — no teaser rate that jumps in month three.

Now the part nobody likes to hear.

Our units are drive-up and not climate controlled, and neither is most of what you’ll find in the valley at this price. A closed unit in July gets hot. Candles turn into puddles. Vinyl warps. Old photographs stick together, and anything with a battery in it is a bad bet. So keep electronics, medications, photo albums, and candles in the house or in the car going home with you. Furniture, tools, patio stuff, holiday decorations, luggage, sporting goods — all fine, year after year.

Wrap upholstered pieces in moving blankets instead of plastic. Plastic traps whatever moisture is in the fabric and you’ll smell it in October.

All 284 of our units are ground level with a roll-up door you can back a truck up to. That matters more than it sounds like it does. You’re loading in mid-November when it’s 78 and pleasant, or you’re loading in late April when it’s already 105 — and the difference between rolling a hand truck ten feet and hauling everything to an elevator is the difference between a two-hour job and losing your whole afternoon.

The lease is month to month. People ask if they have to keep paying through the summer while they’re gone. You don’t — leave whenever you want, no penalty. That said, most of our seasonal folks keep the unit year-round, because emptying it in April and re-renting in October means moving everything twice and paying a mover to do it. At $95 a month the math usually favors just keeping it.

First month is a dollar, and whatever rate you sign at is locked for twelve months. We’ve been family-owned for more than thirty years with no corporate office anywhere, so the person answering the phone can actually make a decision.

Senior discount is 5%. Military, first responders, and government employees get 10%.

We’re on Market Street in Indio, easy off the 10, and we’ve got customers driving in from Palm Desert, Bermuda Dunes, and Indian Wells because the drive pays for itself the first month.

Gate’s open 6AM to 8PM every day. Office is Monday through Saturday, 8:30 to 5:30.

If you’re coming out this fall, call now rather than in November. The 10x10s go first.

Call us at (760) 342-5911, see current pricing on our rates page, or send a note through the contact page