Looking for a more efficient way to find self-storage for investing? In this episode, Stacy Rossetti introduces the online software she uses to scout markets and locations before investing in a facility. Radius+ is self-storage’s most comprehensive site selection and location intelligence platform. It is currently the industry’s most complete data source and analytical tool. Find out more about the tech that’ll make investing so much easier for you by tuning in!
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Using Online Software To Find Information On Storage Facilities And A Market To Purchase In
To all the newbies out there, I invest in self-storage and I teach people how to invest in self-storage. We own eleven storage facilities. We have been investing in real estate for many years. We’ve done over $20 million in transactions and that is growing. We also have four facilities under contract now. I have an acquisitions person. His name is Chris. He’s not on here. He is out and doing awesome. He’s doing exactly what I teach you. He’s talking and finding owners that want to sell. He’s making and putting offers in. He’s doing very well at finding facilities. I’m very proud of him.
He is the acquisition’s person and I’m the money person. I am the person that’s supposed to raise and find the money to buy all these storage facilities. We do that in a lot of different ways. We either borrow money from private lenders, partner with people or we have a fund that we’re about to launch. I’m very excited. We’re very close.
We’ve gotten to the point now where we need somebody that we can talk to about the types of strategies that we’re doing internally within Ms. Lillian’s Self-Storage, which is the company that we use for all of our storage facilities, and also now the fund. We’ve hired a CFO and he’s going to help us manage all this. I’m excited about that. That’s the big thing that we’re doing, besides launching the fund, we have a CFO. I feel like I need somebody to bounce some ideas off and make sure that we’re on the right path.
We’re getting to the point now on the eleven facilities that we have where we’re ready to sell some of our facilities and 1031 exchange them into bigger deals because we buy smaller deals. Our deals up until now have been $600,000 or less. We haven’t bought huge big deals. We’re getting to the point now that we have under contract our $1 million deal.
My husband and I are of the personality that slow and steady win the race. I am not the type of person who’s going to be like, “I want $100 million in assets.” We are old-timers and country folks. We want to RV, spend time with our family, travel and not work. Our goal is to not work. We don’t go out and buy huge big deals and stuff like that.
There’s nothing wrong with that because I have a lot of students that are like, “I’m going to get my foot in the door, and then I’m going to 1031 exchange that to a bigger deal. After that, I’m going to 1031 exchange into a bigger deal.” That’s what I want to do. I have one student that joined and he bought two deals in the first year and he’s already selling them, and 1031 exchanging them into $5 million deals. There’s nothing wrong with that at all too. Not working is my personality. I’m like to boss people around and tell people what to do and not work.
One of the benefits of Radius+ is it will help you find the hidden markets of the storage investing world.
What Is Radius+?
I was on a coaching call with Luther and he is the one that inspired me for this call. In this session, I’m going to talk about Radius Plus. Who knows Radius Plus and utilizes it to find storage facilities or run the deal analysis? If you are one of the people that get into the Radius Plus all the time and use it, say, “I love Radius Plus and I use it all the time and it helps me to analyze my deals.”
If you are one of the people that are like, “I have no idea what Radius Plus is. Please tell me what it is so I could utilize it to find my deals,” put that into the chat for me. I want to remind you that, we have a coaching program called Storage Nerds, so you can go to StorageNerds.com. That coaching program is closed for the next 90 days. I only open the doors to that three times a year.
On top of that, we have Super Simple Self-Storage, which is my course. Go to StacyRossetti.com and buy the course. That will help you over the next 90 days to get you ready for the May 1st opening. It walks and guides you through all the stuff that you need to know on how to get started. In Storage Nerds, the very first milestone that you achieve is to put your first offer in. When you put your first offer in, then you get a Storage Nerds T-shirt. Luther gets his first milestone T-shirt. Congratulations to him.
Tim and Tina here say, “We have done conversions for property and are going to offer on another one.” You’ve already done conversions. I love it. Everybody is saying, “No idea.” “I used it to check the price on the proforma.” “I’ve heard of it but have not used all the tools yet. We’ll soon evaluate the facility.” I’m interested but I haven’t used it.” “I heard good and not so good about it.” “Honestly, I want to find a way to more steadily do my research if Radius Plus can help.”
Radius Plus is one of the software that is very good at a lot of different things. It’s not the most extensive software out there but for us little people that are here to buy our first deal or do a couple of deals, Radius Plus works fine. There is another software out there called Yardi but it’s expensive. It’s for people that want to do huge big deals and stuff because it is super expensive.
How To Use Radius+
I will have them come in and do a demo for us because I want to see how it works and stuff. I’m very interested in having them do a demo for us, but we’ve been utilizing Radius Plus and I teach my students how to utilize Radius Plus. I figured that we would do that, go over it, and talk about what you can do about this.
“How do you find the $500,000 and $600,000 deals? It seems like it’s pay as you play.” Let’s talk about that. In order to get on Radius Plus, you sign up and you get an account, and they will give you five free credits to play around as you try. Your first five hours are free. A credit is one hour. After that, a credit is $20, which isn’t that expensive. How often you can be sitting there looking at bills? It’s not like in residential. In storage, every once in a while, you get a deal, you get on and you can look up the information. It’s $20 per credit but the good thing is that if you find facilities that are not in a Radius Plus, then you can add them and you can get a credit. I’ll show you how to do that.
Radius Plus pulls data off of websites or online data. It pulls all of the data off of other facilities’ data. There are good and pluses for that as well too. This session is going to be on how to utilize Radius Plus to find properties that you can buy. Somebody asked, “How do you find $500,000 and $600,000 facilities?” We call people up and ask them if they want to sell, that’s what we do. We then utilize Radius Plus to help us look at all the information that we need to know in order to run the deal analysis.
Everybody is always like, “How do you find these things?” The truth is we call owners up and see if they want to sell. That’s how we find things. The hard part is determining whether or not it’s a good deal. That’s what Storage Nerds is here to do. Hopefully, you’ll join that when the doors open because I will walk and hold you through that but essentially, you can utilize Radius Plus to look and help you run deal analysis.
This is what Radius Plus looks like once you join and come in. I have not picked a specific storage facility, what I did is I picked an area. I picked an area called Americus, Georgia, which is the place where we closed on a storage facility. We closed right before the end of the year. We’ve had this thing for a month. Americus, Georgia, if I zoom out, you can see where it’s in Georgia. Whoever doesn’t know me, all my facilities are in Georgia and Florida area. That’s why I’m focusing on there but you can use it anywhere.
You can see as you zoom out where these high central areas are. This is the Atlanta Metro market right here. There are a lot of storage facilities. Radius Plus pulls the data from the website, and then compiles it into what I discuss here, so you can take a look at it. If you are not in the Public group on Facebook, it’s called @SuperSimpleSelf-Storage. Make sure everybody joins that group. We can all talk to each other. I posted a picture. This looks like a lot of storage facilities. There are 51,000 storage facilities in Radius. That’s what they told us when they did the demo, which I thought was awesome.
Remember that Radius Plus pulls the data from websites. Not all 51,000 are on here because what happens is people can come in and add a facility. If you’re in an area like in the West Virginia area, there’s got to be some storage facilities in this area. “Is there no storage facilities in this whole area of West Virginia?” There’s got to be. This is considered super-duper extra rural. I’m guessing this is the rural area of West Virginia and there are probably not a lot of storage facilities, especially there are not a lot of storage facilities that are online and have websites.
They may have a website but they may not post their prices on the website. That’s another thing too and that’s how Radius Plus works. This is a good area. I wonder where are all the storage facilities in this area. There’s got to be some. This area right here, I called the hidden market. There’s got to be some storage facilities in this area. Radius Plus is not going to show you those because it can only show you the data that they have. Your job is to get into this area and look for Radius Plus.
Another thing too is a lot of it is declining market in West Virginia. For some reason, a lot of people don’t want to live in West Virginia. It may not be a good area to invest in. That’s why nobody is investing. This area right here, there’s no storage in this area. Pennsylvania doesn’t have a lot of storage facilities but there’s got to be storage facilities there. This is a super rural area of Pennsylvania and a lot of storage facilities don’t have websites. They’re not online and stuff. They don’t come up with this information.
You can find the tertiary markets, which I invest in secondary to tertiary markets. I like to find properties that I call the hidden market. One of the good benefits of Radius Plus is it will help you to find the hidden markets of the storage investing world. There have got to be some storage facilities in this area. This area must be a tertiary market that’s very rural and may not be online. I would utilize Radius Plus in this respect. I’ve driven all over Maine and there are storage facilities everywhere but it is considered very rural. This will help and guide you along the way to figure out where you should be investing in.
Radius+ will help and guide you along the way to figure out where you should be investing in.
When we look into Georgia, there are a lot of storage facilities in this area but when you zoom in, you can see where other good areas would be. Remember, I focus on first-time facilities. I’m the type of person that gets my foot in the door and helps you to get your foot in the door. Down the road, you might be able to afford $2 million, $3 million, $4 million facilities, and then you’ll get into the primary and secondary markets of Atlanta.
What To Look For
This is a 10-mile radius of Americus. You can do 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 10 miles. You can do all the different radius. You could see Warner Robins has got a good amount of storage facilities in a 10-mile radius. Macon has got a good amount of storage facilities. I bought this one in Americus, Georgia. We’re zooming in and going to take a look at Americus, Georgia, and see what it looks like, just to give you all an idea. If you see a lot of blues, this is what’s under construction and planned to be built.
Do you know how they find that information? They are pulling the permits. Permits are public data. They are going in and pulling permits for commercial and seeing which ones are for storage facilities. They can come in and post those here as well too. As you scroll out, you can get in and see if there are any blues or greens. This one was built in 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022. There are a couple of newer ones in Columbus, but there are a lot of older ones in Columbus. I see pre-2019 as older. There are a lot of it that have been built before the last couple of years, but then you can get over here and start looking and saying, “Where are some areas that have a lot of blues?”
There are a lot of blue going up in Atlanta. There are a lot of storage facilities. This is Ellijay, so this is permitted. It’s 15,000 square feet. This is a brand-new storage facility that’s permitted to be built right here in Ellijay. We have a storage facility somewhere at Ball Ground. Here’s another one that’s being permitted. It is under construction. This one incoming highway is under construction, 66,000 square feet. You could play around. The area that you want to be in, it’s going to show you what is happening. There are all different kinds of stuff coming up, under construction, planned, permitting, and then any of the newer ones. You could see what the competition is. Anything that’s pre-2019 would be considered a supply. That’s how they do it.
We are in Americus. This is our little tiny town right here. There are a lot of storage facilities in Albany. I like to look at the population and radius. This is the 10-mile radius. We’re trying to educate ourselves about the population. In this location, you can come and put whatever address that you want, and then it will come up and show you what storage facilities are in the area. I just put the city is what I did.
We are in the trade area section. On the right side is where it gives you all the information that you need as an analysis. It looks like in this 10-mile radius, there are five facilities. We’re going to be looking at who has a website and who doesn’t as well too. The EZ Storage & Suite is 23,000 square feet. It’s a pretty good size for a facility. We’ve got StoreMore with 4,800 square feet. As you can see, 5x10s are $69, and then it has $48. I’m not sure if that’s a discounted rate or what.
You could click on it and then you could take a look at it. It’s probably behind that building so you can’t see it. It’s probably in here or behind here. As you click on this, you can see it’s 101 Georgia Highway 27 E and here’s the address. It’s 4,800 square feet. There’s no contact information available but we’ll look and see if we can find one because they do pull up contact information of some properties as well. Another thing I like is you can find the owners of the properties inside of Radius most of the time.
Here’s the building itself and if there’s any other information, it would give it right here. Also, if you could get any information from the facility, you would get it right here as well. This one does not have a website. There is no information. This is a whole lot of nothing. Here’s Americus Self-storage on Brady Road. It’s 21,000 square feet. You can click on this, open it up, and then you see here are the six buildings, and then you could see the picture. It’s a good-looking storage facility right there.
Over here is Richard Stevens. It’s owned in his own name. You could call him up and say, “Is Richard there?” Pretend like I knew the person. They’d be like, “He’s not here. He’s not around right now.” “Can you leave him a message for me? I was trying to get ahold of him.” I do that too when I see the owners’ names. I pretend like I knew them.
This one is zoning and it’s industrial. The parcel number is here. The acreage is 21,000 square feet on 1 acre. It’s what the boundaries look like. If it had a website or any information, you could click on this. You also get to see the loan. You could see whether or not they have a loan on it, if they were paid for, what it’s assessed for, and their taxes. They’re only paying $386 on this. It was valued at $12,000. You know if you went out and bought this thing, it would probably go up in price because when you buy something, the taxes increase based on the price.
These are good information on Radius in knowing the storage in your area. Here is Security Mini Storage, which is 37,000 square feet. Self-Storage Americus is the one that we bought. It has our website up already and it’s 9,500 square feet. We’re charging $45 for 5x10s, $65 for 10x10s, and $80 for 10x15s. This is what we’re charging. You can click on this and get all the information. You could see who the owners are, commercial, property numbers, and all the public data are right here.
The rates are all here and what we’re charging based on the last data available. They just pulled this data, so it’s very new data. It’s pulling the information from the website, and then you could see what the property is assessed at, what the taxes are, and things like that. It’s all right here. We got all the facilities. In this 10-mile radius, there are five facilities. It shows you on the right that there are five facilities.
The total square footage is 96,000 square feet. Climate control is 4,809 and non-climate control is 91,000 square feet. There is more non-climate control than climate control in this area. It calculates the square foot per capita for you. This is a very important number in the industry. It’s 3.5 square feet per capita. How does it come up with that? It takes the total population and divides it by the total square footage. That’s what it does.
Just because we’re in this little, tiny town in the middle of nowhere, it doesn’t mean that there are not a lot of opportunities.
You could check out how is the economy doing. The average household is $50,000. The population growth is decreasing. People are not staying in this area. It is going down. The household is 10,000. You can see the household size, income, and all this stuff too. You can look at this and you can determine whether or not this is something that you’d be interested in buying.
One of the things that I look at is the square foot per capita. We also look at the total square footage of the area and then the population of the area. There are 27,000 people in this area and there are five storage facilities. When you go into Americus, it doesn’t look like it’s declining. I’ve been to the city driving around and there is so much new construction. They are putting in brand-new roads. It looks like it’s being built up but it’s a small town. The town itself is only 15,000 people.
If we’d go right in this area, it’s a 3-mile radius. You’ll zoom in to the population and you’ll see how it changes based on what your 1-mile radius is. You can look at the radius based on 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 10 miles. You can look at the population. This is the middle of nowhere. You want to do a 10-mile radius in something like this.
If I pick something in Columbus, I would want to do a smaller radius because if I did a 10-mile radius, you’d have twenty different facilities. The primary markets are within a 1-mile radius. The secondary markets would be around a 3-mile radius. The tertiary is a 5 to 10-mile radius. You can hone in. I could pick this one right here and say, “This is the one that I want to look at.”
I wanted to show you at least all the demographics and the information that you can get from that portion. Other than that, I’ll get into the other stuff as well. Let’s see if there are any questions coming up and we’ll answer those. “The hard part for me is finding the financing.” “Can you please provide the address for Radius Plus?” It’s RadiusPlus.com. It says, “Yardi is wow. I had worked with it when I’m working in large trust management. You can build it into your specs. It looks and works more like an MS Word.” Yardi is the top of the line. You get everything you possibly need but it costs a bazillion gazillion bucks. Radius is for us, the little people. If you can afford a lot of money, then get Yardi. More power to you. A lot of the bigger companies use Yardi and stuff. We’re mom-and-pop players.
“What is the minimum population that you will need to invest in?” The way it works for me is, is it a good deal? Is this a deal that we’d want to do? We invest in a little tiny town called Warm Springs but it’s surrounded by a whole bunch of other towns. The 10-mile population is a large population but the town itself is a super small town.
We’re in tertiary markets. We look at a 5 to 10-mile radius. I don’t ever say a town is too small, as long as within that radius, there’s a good population. We don’t go per town. We go per radius, which is what you should be doing as well. It depends on what type of facility, but we’re under 75,000 population. In a 10-mile radius, we’re going to be maybe 10,000 to 75,000 people.
“If you buy a one-hour Radius, can you use a half-hour and save the balance later?” No, you cannot do that. You can use one credit and it’s done. If it’s five minutes or an hour, you cannot do it that way. “Is there a military discount for your course?” No, I do not offer a military discount for my course. You want to go to StacyRossetti.com/flash-sale, then you can get a special discount on that. It’s not a military discount but it would be everybody’s discount. It’s $2,000 but it’s at a 75% discount on that.
“I want to know action but I’m trying to work through the financing, buying, and figuring out if the course would help or even if you have a book.” “Is Radius just for storage units or other types of business?” It’s just for a storage facility. I know you guys are asking about the financing, but we’re not talking about financing. I have done a gazillion bazillion videos on financing. You can check out my YouTube page and Facebook page. All these replays are live, so there are no replays for anybody unless you’re a student. All the students get to replays. Eventually, it will come out in podcast form. The replays are in the course as well.
We talk a lot about financing and how to find that stuff there. I was using Radius Plus for some of my coaching calls. One credit is $20. Five credits are $90. Ten credits are $175. Chris, my acquisitions person, uses Radius quite often. I’m going to go ahead and put a whole bunch of credits there for him so that he could get in there and use those as well. Radius Plus, we went through and you’re going to start using Radius Plus for analyzing deals. All you have to do is get in and put the address of the facility in, and then it’s going to pull up the radius. Essentially, that’s how it works in storage, anywhere from 1 to 10 miles.
There is not enough storage facilities in tertiary markets.
As it pulls it up, it’s going to give you all the facilities, so you can see what’s online and you could start running the numbers that way. On top of that, it’s going to give you all the demographics. In that way, you can start looking at what the square foot per capita is. You want to be under 8, that’s the norm but sometimes you can find facilities that are under 10 or something like this.
That number is very important where it said 3.3. In Americus square foot per capita is 3.3, and then also the population, and whether or not it’s declining, growing or stabilized. The whole demographics all together, analyzing and looking at it and saying, “This is something that I would be okay in investing in. It’s based on your type of facility, whether or not you want to do it.
We like areas that don’t have a lot of facilities but they have a lot of people. For instance, we are in an area called Franklin, Georgia. If anybody knows, it’s also a small area and not a lot of people. I do a lot of googling. It’s 912 people in this town. There are three facilities in this town, mine, and then two others. One owner owns two and we own one.
In this 10-mile radius of Franklin, there are 25,000 people. There is a lot of people, but the town of Franklin has only 900 people. This radius over here has a lot of people. That’s what we like. We don’t look just at the population of this little tiny town. We look at how many storage facilities there are and within a 10-mile radius, what’s the population.
Next Steps For Your Market
There are three storage facilities. That’s a total of 30,000 square feet in this area and we are full. We need to be building more because we have waitlists for these facilities. Just because we’re in this little tiny town in the middle of nowhere doesn’t mean that there are not a lot of opportunities. Franklin will help you to determine that and we also look at that. That’s our personality and where we look at.
There is a great opportunity in little tiny areas. Don’t discount all these little tiny areas. What that does is we are going to own all three of these storage facilities. We’re going to raise the rates and we’re going to push the numbers. Both of those are on 5 acres and there’s room to grow on both of them. We’ve already talked to the county.
I had Chris, my acquisitions person called the county and he asked them if we could build on it. They said, “If you need to build on, it’s 5 acres. You can do whatever you want. It’s fine.” They already said yes to building on. We will build on and add more units to these facilities here. We won’t do a lot of units. We’ll do maybe 25 at each or something like this. We’ll figure it out, and then we’ll see if we can get those filled up.
The one that we own, this Ms. Lillian’s Self-Storage does not have any room to grow at all. We’re like, “It is what it is.” It’s 65 units of those little tiny ones. It’s one of the first ones we ever bought. We bought that one for $189,000 a few years ago. Now, we’re going to have all three of these together. What that is, is us creating a little tiny mini portfolio.
Eventually, we’ll have 300 units and then we can sell all three of these when they’re completely full and at the highest number that we can get them at. We can sell them to somebody that wants to buy an income-producing property with a little bit of value add. They’ll be able to add more units, but that’s our goal.
This is what we’re going to be doing in Americus. In Americus, we have one in this area but the goal now is to pick up a couple of others and then create a little tiny mini portfolio. That’s what Chris does. The rule is as soon as we get something under contract, we call every storage facility within a 30-mile range. We ask them all if they will sell and let them know, “We picked this one up in Americus and we’re looking for a couple of other ones. Would you be interested in selling?”
We create these little tiny mini portfolios. The facilities in these areas, there are not a lot of money most of the time, unless they are 100% full at the highest price but they never are. We’re the ones that get the value add. We then sell them as a little packages. That’s our goal. We’re getting to that point now with some of the ones that we bought in the first couple of years. We’re getting ready to sell and 1031 exchange those into some bigger deals.
That is our strategy for getting into storage investing. I apologize about the Radius Plus thing. I’ll figure that out. I don’t know how to do it. I’ll get Chris to do it. At another time, we’ll also go through Radius Plus but at least it gives you an idea of some of the information that you can use to find properties. You can use Radius Plus to acquire properties and look at the demographics. Try to look in the Radius Plus and see where some of those hidden markets are.
That’s the whole purpose of that because we buy in the hidden markets. We buy in the areas that are not saturated, in the outlining areas or the middle states, and stuff like that. We create mini-portfolios. We’ll buy small facilities and then we’ll make up 300 units. Eventually, we’ll sell those off as a little tiny package once we get those up, running and stabilized. That’s our goal and strategy.
We got some questions, “I liked what I saw on Radius. I can see it as a big help on my research.” Yes, of course. “Would it be cheaper to build a new fourth site instead of buying these other two?” I would look at that, honestly. The thing with building is that it’s so time-consuming and it takes forever. You can’t just build something anymore. In these little tiny tertiary areas, if you wanted to build something in Americus, they are like, “Go ahead.” There might be a little bit of restrictions but not much. That’s why I like also these little tiny towns.
The truth is in those areas, it calls for a new storage facility. There are 25,000, 30,000 people in a 10-mile radius, and there are only 100,000 square feet in that area. That’s 3-square feet per capita and you want to be under eight, so you have a whole spread that you can build on. If you want to do new construction, and I’m telling you, there are not enough storage facilities in the tertiary markets. The primary market, you don’t want to be building and you don’t want to be doing that and let the big rigs do that.
Secondary markets in the burbs are too hard, too expensive, too much work, and then they all have all these rules about building. Secondary markets are cities that are by themselves like Columbus, Georgia, Augusta, Georgia, Albany, Americus, Valdosta or all these different towns. That’s where I’m investing in. Once you get into those markets and look at them, you see players like me. The ones that understand the market. The secondary market is where they can be. Sometimes, as little players, we understand that the tertiary market is where we want to be. Maybe we’ll get to the secondary market and maybe not. Who cares?
“What is the minimum number of units to look for that would be worth making money on?” Talk to Luther, which I taught. He has a great story. He’s one of our students. He got out and start talking to the owners. He lives in Alabama and goes to all these little tiny towns in Alabama. He found somebody that was like, “I don’t want to sell my facility. I just want to get it off my property. Would you be interested in taking it apart, and then you can have it and take it with you?”
This guy is going to give him this property for very minimal. He said, “You could have it. You could charge $10,000 for 36 units.” He’s like, “Take it if you can undo it and then find a place to rebuild it. You can have it for $10,000.” It’s 3,600 square feet and it’s $35 a square foot. It’s $126,000 to build 3,600 square feet. He’s going to go and buy a piece of property for $10,000 or $20,000 and build this facility. He’ll put it up and do it himself, or maybe get his family to do it or whatever. That’s a good deal. You’re buying and getting it at such a cheap rate. If you’re going to go out and build 3,600 square feet of space or whatever it is for $125,000, it’s going to take you a long time to pay that off.
You have to know 3,600 square feet is a small project that costs money. It’s going to take a longer time to pay it off. Your buy and hold time on that is going to be a very long time. 3,600 square feet, or 36 units or under 50 units are hard to make a lot of money on. You could also do what we do, and then you could do a whole bunch of little tiny ones everywhere, and then create this mini-portfolio. If you have 200 or 300 units, that has been worthwhile.
“It sounds like you’re willing to invest in markets with a declining population. Why would you do that in the long investments?” I explained this before. For us, it’s all about how many people are in a 10-mile radius and how much square footage is in a 10-mile radius. Just because one little tiny area is a declining market, it doesn’t mean that the entire area is a declining market. Also, if you go to the areas and see new construction, a lot has happened in the last few years. People are moving out of cities and moving into little towns.
When we went to Americus, we saw that they are adding lanes to highways. There are new constructions. There are new houses going up. It’s a hustling and bustling town. I can say that most likely within the next years, that number is going to be going back up. It’s one of these areas that it is coming back. I wouldn’t buy in an area that keeps declining. The truth is there is such a need for storage. I’m okay with taking that risk. It was only a couple of hundred thousand dollars.
“What is your average recouping value timeline?” Every deal is completely different. The truth is everybody asks me this question, “How much money could you make in storage?” The truth is it’s all based on your financing. You could have a wonderful deal and a horrible note and not make any money. I know somebody had a great deal, took a hard money loan, and screwed the whole thing up. Now he’s not making any money and freaking out.
If the numbers of the deal plus the terms of the note are very good, then you could be doing very well. It depends on that. I bought a $250,000 facility that’s now worth over $1 million. I’ve bought also a $100,000 facility. That’s worth $350,000 now. Everyone is completely different, it’s based on the location and a whole bunch of different things.
To give you some formula, just so you know whether or not you want to do this, I can’t do that because it’s about deal analysis and learning how to run numbers. It’s about your risk level. I’m okay with taking risks. I’m a risk-taker. Some people only want income-producing deals that are making money. They want that cashflow. They want to get rid of their jobs. They have to replace their income.
I don’t have a lot of bills or expenses. We live in an RV. We travel full-time. For us, we like to take bigger risks and live small. Later, down the road, it might be different. For us, it’s okay to do that. I’m on Long Island now. We had a blizzard. We got almost 3 feet of snow. It’s cold. I had to turn the heater off in the RV, so I could have this show. It’s a little chilly in here as well. It’s time for me to start wrapping up. I love talking to you guys. I love that you all show up and you’re present. I appreciate it. I’ll be here every Monday. I’m on the podcast. Thank you and I’m here to help you. I’ll see you next time.
Important Links
- Ms. Lillian’s Self-Storage
- Radius Plus
- StorageNerds.com
- Yardi
- @SuperSimpleSelf-Storage – Facebook group
- StacyRossetti.com/flash-sale
- YouTube – Stacy Rossetti Teaches
- Facebook – Stacy Rossetti
