In the past, managing storage facilities meant having staff physically on-site to handle everything from tenant rentals to security. But thanks to technology advancements, remote management of storage facilities is becoming increasingly popular. Stacy Rossetti, the host of the Storage Nerds Podcast, reveals how management software helps you in managing storage facilities remotely. It makes it more a passive income the farther the storage facility and Stacy’s weapons will give you the power to manage the facility wherever you are. So, are you ready to join Stacy in navigating into her weapons in managing remotely? Tune in to this episode and become the ultimate storage facility hero!

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Watch the episode here

 

Listen to the podcast here

 

How To Manage Your Storage Facility Remotely

I’m going to get into management in this episode. Every Wednesday, I teach. I try to do like one week to find them. One week deal analysis. One week to run them. One week funding. It’s like find, run,and fund them. I put some deal analysis in there. This time I’m going to do run. I’ll give you an idea of some management stuff and show you how we’re doing this, and how we do it remotely. A lot of people ask me that. Turnkey Acquisition is open so I’m talking to a lot of people. I talked to one lady. She was like, “I have to have something near me to manage it.”

First of all, she’s interested in the South Florida, Tampa and Miami areas. I’m like, “This area is not that good of an area to get started in. The reason why is because there’s a lot of people moving into that area, but there’s a lot of new facilities. There are a lot of REITs that are moving into that area. It’s one of the fastest-growing areas in the country. It’s like you’re playing with the bigger players and that’s your competition. She only has so much money. She can only afford a $1 million facility. I’m like, “There’s not a lot of $1 million facilities in South Florida.”

That’s one thing that I was talking to her about. I was like, “You should be open to looking a little bit further away. If you want to be in Florida, be North of Orlando into the panhandle, or maybe be into South Georgia or South Alabama because that’s where you can get an affordable storage facility.” storEDGE is super expensive. It’s not cheap and it’s going to get more expensive. Your buy box is getting smaller and smaller. If you’re not in the game right now, if you’re not looking and putting offers in, it’s going to be harder to be able to find deals.

The truth is that there’s only so much storage that’s out there. It’s not like housing. There’s not enough housing out there, but eventually, there’ll be too much storage. You want to get into the game now. You want to make offers. If you want to do this, you can learn how to manage everything remotely and you don’t have to have everything close to you. What I tell my students in StorageNerds is that the further away your facility is, the better. That means that you have to figure out how to manage something passively. I was doing a coaching call with two of my students. They live in Mexico.

 

Managing Storage Facilities Remotely

I was on a Zoom call and they’re sweating. They got their tank tops on. Every time I talk to them, they always have a tank top on. It doesn’t matter what time of year it is. They live over a peninsula area where Cancún or Cozumel is, but they have a property in the United States. All their properties are in the United States. They’re managing all these properties from Mexico. We were talking about this. They have to be able to manage everything remotely. They have to have their teams in place in order to manage everything. It’s the same concept with storage. Your facilities can be as far away as you can and then you have to create those SOPs to be able to manage those.

We live in Tallahassee. We have sixteen facilities from Florida, all the way up to Tennessee. My husband is in Tennessee. That’s only the second time that he’s visited the property. We bought it a few years ago. The reason why he’s in Tennessee is because we are implementing parking. He’s there managing and getting the parking all setup. We’ve got storage and then parking at that facility. We’re adding a whole bunch of new spaces. We are reconfiguring it and stuff because when we bought that facility, the owner was like, “Go find a spot.”

We are working on that. That’s why he’s at the facility. He’s not at the facility to do walkthroughs or anything like that. That’s what the boots-on-the-ground person does, but he’s there to manage the construction and stuff that we’re doing over there. He’s only been to that facility a few months ago. We did a lot and we did a lot of work that he didn’t have to go to. We had everything graded and we had gravel put down. He didn’t go to the facility for that. He is just there to manage some parking stuff that we’re doing. The farther away the better. That’s my personal opinion because then you have to make it a true passive income.

The farther away the facility, the better. Share on X

That’s the purpose. Everybody here, you all want to get into storEDGE so that you can have passive income. We live in Tallahassee. We have a facility in Valdosta, which is about maybe an hour and a half away. Every time my husband has to go and check on it, he’s like, “I’ll just swing by Valdosta. I’ll go and check on it.” It’s always that way because it’s right around the corner for us. He is always wanting to stop it. Be open to having a further away facility so that you can have it remotely. That’s what I’m even talking about in this episode.

It’s like, what does our day look like? I have people that like, “Can I just come and shadow you?” I’m like, “I just sit at a computer all day long. That’s what I do. What are you going to shadow?” The way that storEDGE management works is that you have software and your software manages it. There are four parts to management. The first part is going to be your marketing. You have to do marketing in order so you have occupancy. Marketing is a very important part of owning a facility.

If you are not good at marketing, then you are not ever going to be good at getting your facilities filled up and stuff. Marketing nowadays is online marketing. You can’t just put a sign up in your yard and be like, “Now the people are going to come.” You have to be good at marketing and finding tenants and being on top of that. One thing that we’re always focusing on is marketing. We do a ridiculous amount of marketing. That includes your Google business listing and SCO, your Google marketing and then your Google business listing. It is what we focus on and then we do some other stuff. That’s the main thing. I’m not going to get into that.

 

The second thing that we focus on internally for management is the phone calls. All the marketing that you’re doing is now bringing in phone calls. If you’re not bringing in phone calls, your marketing isn’t working. We have six big facilities. In 3 of our facilities, we had 10 to 14 move-ins. That’s a lot of phone calls because you don’t convert them. They’re calling to get the price, “If your price isn’t the right price, then I’m out.” The person who answers your phone is going to make or break your company. That’s the truth.

We focus on all the marketing to get the phone calls, but then when our team answers the phone, what is happening on the phone calls? Are we converting them or are we not converting them? When you look at phones, and I’m not going to go too deep into that because I want to show you storEDGE and what we’re doing in storEDGE, but when you do your marketing, essentially you’re paying money for leads. A lead is not a conversion. A lead is just a lead. A lead is somebody who’s calling and asking you about your facility.

When they’re asking you about your facility on the phone, then what is that phone call looking like? I can guarantee you, 80% of the people who answer the phone are answering the phone like, “Hello, we are B&B Storage,” then you’re asking them questions and they’re just giving you the price, “That’s $85. Okay, bye.” Internally for us, the phone conversations do not look like that. The job as the phone person is to convert. I had a meeting with the manager of our phone team. Every week we look at, “How many calls are coming in? How many calls are converting? How much money is that person making for us?”

“How much money is each person that answers our phone answering our phone making for us?” We do a lot of work on converting. We used to not be good at conversions. The thing is pre-COVID, this was not a thing. Even if you’re a mom-and-pop and you owned facilities, you weren’t worried about it. You could sign up and fill your place up. Now, the competition is so high that if you are not on top of making sure that the person who answers your phone is a salesperson and can get people to move in, sales go down.

That’s what happened to us. Essentially, we learned the hard way that like everybody who was focusing on getting better on the phones or the people who were taking all the leads. We spent quite a lot of time over the past years training our team to be good on the phones. What’s one of the biggest things that we do in our management company? You’ve got marketing and the phones. Let’s say that you buy a facility and you are answering the phone. If you’re answering your phone, how many times does somebody call you and ask for a price, and how many times do you get them to move in

You have to ask yourself these questions. If you have ten phone calls in a week and only one’s moving in, you suck on the phone. Maybe somebody else should be doing that. That’s why it’s good to hire a call center because what I’m talking about is what a call center does. Their job is to convert. It’s hard to pay a little bit of extra money to do that. I highly recommend it if you own it because their job is to convert. The good thing about hiring a call center is that you get to hear the recordings of the calls. This is something that we can do. We’re listening to the recordings. What can they do better? What are they not saying? What are they not doing correctly and stuff?

The third thing that you have that’s a big part of management is your software. I’m going to show you storEDGE because we use storEDGE and I’m not here to promote storEDGE. I signed up for storEDGE when there were three people working for storEDGE. It had not been taken over by Storable. When I got into storEDGE, there was a very small handful of software. There was ESS, which was very brand new. When I went to do a demo of ESS, it was too basic for me. I was like, “I can’t do that. My mind is way too complicated for this.”I also did a demo of SiteLink. When I did the demo, it was only a desktop version.

Management Software

Now it’s online. I haven’t done a demo of SiteLink. SiteLink is an older software that a lot of older people who own a lot of storage facilities are going to be using SiteLink. There’s another software called Storage Commander. They’re super old. Storage Commander has been around forever and they’re just now upgrading their software and stuff to go on to be online and web-based and stuff, then there was Storage. Storage had been around for maybe 1 year or 2. They had been developing the interface. When I got on the dashboard, it was nice and clean. I thought, “This is going to be a good one for us.”

That’s why I went with storEDGE. We were using storEDGE when Storable took over. We went through all of the growing pains that storEDGE had as it was taken over by Storable and then they were trying to figure everything out and stuff. We went through all that. We’ve been with them a long time. We’re beta testers with storEDGE. Every once in a while they’ll ask my husband like, “Would you be interested in trying out this new feature that we have and let us know if it works or doesn’t work and stuff like that.” We’ve been working with storEDGE for a long time.

If you want to do demos with all of the software out there, every software, then you could pick whichever one you want. I’m going to show you some of the features in storEDGE to give you a little bit of an overview of what we love about storEDGE. It’s not what we love about storEDGE, it’s what we love about how we can manage our properties and make everything as automated as possible. Honestly, I do not use storEDGE that much. What I use storEDGE for is super high level. I’m looking at numbers and then all my team is using storEDGE to move people in, do auctions, pricing and things like that. I do not do that. That is what our team does.

 

I can’t get into some nitty-gritty stuff honestly because I don’t know how to do that. I do know how to look at numbers. That’s what I like to look at. It’s like, “How good are we doing? How bad are we doing?” What I’m going to show you is the management software so you can get an idea of what you should be thinking about when you look at software and, “What does it look like to be remote?” Finally, in the management side, you have the boots on the ground people because you have to have somebody that’s like going, cleaning out units, picking up trash and fixing springs on doors or whatever needs to get done for your facility.

That could be you or somebody else. As far away as you can get, you have to hire somebody else to do that. The boots-on-the-ground part of management is a huge part of making sure that everything is up to date and making sure that you can keep units available. I’m going to show you a little bit of all that in storage. I’m going to use one of my deals. It’s our Live Oak, Florida deal. I’m going to show you what it looks like and then we’ll get into what I’m looking at.

As the owner of the facility, what do I want out of this facility? Let me share my screen. I’m going to get into the numbers and stuff here. This is Live Oak. This is what we call our Live Oak North because we have two facilities in Live Oak. It’s North and South. It’s the 8th of May. Rent is due on the 1st for us. You can have an anniversary date if you want to do that, but we have everything due on the first. We have 100 tenants in this facility. We have a waitlist of leads. We had thirteen leads this month. That is a ridiculous amount of leads for a little tiny facility like this.

The reason we have so many leads is because of all the marketing that we’re doing. It’s lead flow. You have to start with that marketing into the phone people so that you have all these coming in. You could see where 93% were occupied. We’ve got some seven units available. There’s one complimentary right here. You can see that twenty units are delinquent. This is as of the 8th. This is what the facility looks like.

On the left, that was the dashboard, and then I just clicked on units. Every software will have something like this where you have your map. I look at this map all the time because it’s visual and I’m a visual person. I like to look at colors and stuff. You can see here the only availability that we have is some 5 by 10. These little tiny ones and then we’ve got some parking. We just set this up. We’re like, “Let’s put some parking in here.” We’re thinking about adding a building, and then we’re like, “No, let’s just put in some parking.” We’re trying to get these filled up.

Think about that because we have storage units and parking. That’s two different types of marketing. Our parking is a whole different type of marketing in order for the facility to get tenants in versus storage parking. We do Google Ads for parking and for storage units. That’s what it looks like. You can see that there are four buildings and then there’s parking. These are 10 by 15, and these are 10 by 10. You can start looking at it. Start getting familiar with sizes and stuff like that. These are 10 by 20. These are 10 by 15. Red is delinquent.

If I had any gray, that would be unrentable. I don’t have any gray here. All of our doors are working. We don’t have any units that need to be cleaned out. We’re on top of this. We’re outside of getting people to pay. That’s the hard part. We’re on top of fixing springs and doors or if somebody moves out, making sure it’s clean or if we do an auction, making sure it’s cleaned out. That’s what it looks like in an overview. We can look at the past due. This is what I’m looking at.

For me, why the heck are these people past due? What is happening? Every time that you’re past due, you’re losing money. These two right here are 128 days late, these units, and this is what they owe us. We’ve lost $1,500 by these two people here. I’m like, “Why? What’s going on?” They are in the auction status. What happened? This is a good point. What happened is that we set up payment plans with them. We’re nice. We’re like, “You can’t pay. Let’s come up with something,” then they end up only paying a little bit.

StorEdge

Every time that they pay, they do not get put into the auction process. If they could come in and they could pay $20 or $50, we did that for a long time. We no longer do that. If you can’t pay what you owe, then unfortunately you’re going to have to get out. The reason why we do that is not because we’re mean, but because we have a waiting list. We have people that will move in and pay for us. They need storage. There’s a waiting list on both of our facilities. We have a waiting list. We stopped taking partial payments and now we only take payments in full.

What we do is negotiate with them. We negotiate with reviews. If you give us a five-star review, we will take off what you owe us in fees because there’s a lot of that out to $729. There are a lot of fees because we put a lot of fees on. If you go in and give us a five-star review, we’ll take the fees off for you. You only have to pay for the actual rental time. We do get a lot of reviews for that. Exchanging reviews for payments is a great way to get reviews.

These people are in the auction status. You can see here the status. You set all of these statuses here. It’s a back-office setup. storEDGE helps you to set all this up, but you can see these people are in auctions. These people are 68 days late, they’re auction prep, cut the locks and the second ad run starts. This is where we are being notified. We set this whole process up internally, but now my team is being notified that we need to have the ad going for the auction. We’re starting to get all this set up. What happens inside storEDGE is that trigger right there, this auction prep set cut lock second ad start run is a trigger to everybody on our team.

The trigger is to get the auction process started, but it emails out. There’s an email that goes out to the tenant, “We’re cutting your lock and we’re starting the auction process. If you do not pay, your stuff is going to be sold,” and they also get a text message. It’s triggering an email and a text message to let them know that this is the status that they’re in. Whoever handles the auctions, they notify them to start the auction process and start getting ready to put their stuff into the newspaper or whatever the process is. Every place is different for auction processes, but it’s a trigger. That’s how storEDGE works. It works on a lot of triggers.

That’s how my thought process is. Here’s another one right here. These are 37 days late. If you are on day 25, you are considered in the auction process. You can see here it is seven days late and they’re overlocked. That’s all we do. Our boots-on-the-ground person overlocks them. Day 25 is when we start the auction process. We start sending them the notices, “Just so you know, we’re going into auction. Now we’re cutting the lot. We’re going to take some pictures of your property and your ad is going into the newspaper. In the next two weeks, your stuff is going to be auctioned off. You better pay or you’re going to lose it.”

This one is the actual auction status. These are seven days late. This one is saying delinquency starting auctions. This stuff is how it is. This is what I’m looking at. When I look at this stuff, I’m like, “Why are these people late? Why are we losing money? Are we trying to collect the money? How much money have we collected?” That’s all I’m thinking about. That’s what I’m talking to my phone person about. I have a meeting with my staff. I’m looking at this and I’m thinking, “What is going on with all this red right here? I don’t want any red. Get the red out.” That’s what the past due is looking like for me.

Now I could click on this little auction section. You can see we’ve got two auctions coming up already. There are three units being auctioned on May 30th. Once every month we do our auction. These are already scheduled. We are already ready to get those going. In the meantime, during this whole time, it is the phone people’s job to call them and to make sure that they get paid. We got a lot of tenants. We have 3,000 tenants. The way it works for us is we have one person that’s their job, collections.

They’re calling and calling, “Can you pay?” We call mornings, evenings, afternoons, and weekends and we call like every time to see which times work because everybody’s schedule is all different. There’s a whole thing to try to get people to collect their money. In the meantime, we have one person calling. All the emails and text messages automatically go out. We use call potential. The way that call potential works is that if somebody calls in and owes us money, they get put into the collections line. You all know this process because you all called in and you owed money and they direct you to how you can pay by phone. It’s like, “You owe money,” like in a utility company or something like that.

Customer Service

“You owe money. In order to get customer service, you need to pay for your stuff first. Pay here.” That’s how it works for us as well. That phone line collects us thousands of dollars every single month. It’s one of the best investments we made. We’ve got customer support people and salespeople. We’ve got people that come in on the sales line because when you call us, it’s like, “Press 1 for sales. Press 2 for customer support,” and it will go to the people who are very good at converting. The people that are customer support are how it works for us or it’s going to go to a bad collection and then that person either goes through the phone line or they can press zero for help, and then that person will help them. That Is how it works.

When you have a small 1 or 2 facilities, it doesn’t matter who’s doing that or how your system is set up. What I’m telling you is what is important to be done. Somebody who is very good at sales is doing your conversion. Somebody who’s very good with customer support is handling customer support. Somebody that’s very good at collecting is handling collections. Of all of your phone that’s happening, all your calls and stuff, these are three very important factors that funnel into how you’re managing your facility. It’s super important.

We happen to have a lot of things like one person’s doing none of those. When you buy a facility, you are doing all this or you’re going to hire a company that’s doing that and you need to make sure that they’re good at what they’re doing. The phone people not only make or break whether or not you get conversions, it also makes or breaks whether or not you’re going to get people to pay you or to put bad reviews. We talk about in our phone meetings that we have every week about reviews. If somebody puts a bad review, “What is going on? What did we do wrong? How can we fix that? How can we make this right?” That’s important.

When I am in storEDGE, this is my thought process. You’re reading me discuss on a regular basis what I’m looking at as an owner of a property. This is what I’m talking about. I am looking at my units and if there are any unwinnable units. Let’s switch over to Live Oak South. Let’s see what this one looks like. You can see on this one we have some unwinnable units, 96 and 82 need to be cleaned. This is a spring that needs to be done. We’re putting our notes in here and then 96, cleaning. It’s completely full. We took pictures, we’re going to see if we can auction it off. 40 A is full of trash. We’ve got to get these units cleaned out is essentially what it is.

We put little notes in, but you can see these are what I’m talking about unwinnable units. We have one available. When I’m looking at this as an owner, I’m thinking, “We only have one unit available. We have six units that are unwinnable. Why? What is going on here? Why are these not fixed? This needs to be fixed because we’re going to have to turn people away if we don’t get them fixed. What the boots on the ground need right now in order to make sure that these units are empty so we can get them filled.” That’s what I’m saying to everybody because I’m the manager who always says all this stuff. I’m the owner. Pete is nicer about it, but I’m not. I’m like, “Where are the losing of money right now. Get this stuff fixed.”

That’s what I’m looking at, then I’m looking at all the red, “Why are all these people red? What’s going on?” We have some auctions that are coming up in 128 days. These are the same thing. Auction cut locks. Send auction notice over locks. Sometimes it takes people a long time to pay because it’s tight right now. If you are late, you can’t make a payment for some reason and you can only pay on your next paycheck, that’s not a big deal. Just let us know.

You’re going to start the auction process on the 25th. You owe us that money. Either pay what you owe and then we can give you a five-star review and we’ll get rid of your fees for you. If our fees are so high it equals one month of rent. We make a lot of money on fees. I don’t want to get rid of the fees, but we’ll work with you if you call us up and try to talk to us. That is what it’s looking like. That’s what I wanted to pull up and show you. I pull up and I look at the reports section. This is how it looks like in storEDGE. It all looks the same.

You can pull up your occupancy. You can pull up any move-ins and move-outs. You can pull up a rent roll or whatever it has here, a ridiculous amount of reports. You can pull up your management summary, which gives you an overview of how the facility is working. It’s got insurance. We make money on insurance. Everybody has to have insurance. How much money are you making on insurance? We don’t have anything under merchandise because we don’t sell any merchandise. We have the financials. It’s regular stuff. You can look at your general ledger, rent roll, refunds or anything like that. We’re looking at these reports on a regular basis.

Your management summary gives you an overview of how the facility is working. Share on X

I want to show you what a management report looks like. You can see what the numbers look like as well. You can see management. This is what a management summary looks like so that you can have an idea. It compares day to day. We’ve made $7,813 as of today, last month for the total month we made $9,231. We’re 93% occupied, and then we’re at 100% economic occupancy. Square foot, we have about 16% open. That’s because of its parking. The parking is what screws everything up a little bit. We have 5 leads month to date and 95 for the year to date. This is how much money that we’ve made. I made $40 grand months to date, plus fees, and insurance. Look how much money was made on insurance. It’s almost $5,000 just insurance. If you’re not doing insurance, then you’re screwing yourself over $46,000 a month to date. You can see the credit, the receipts, occupancy, 111 units and 93%.

If you're not looking at your pricing every week, you're screwing yourself over. Share on X

You see our potential is $96,000 a month then, but we have some vacancies. Our potential is around $96,600 a month at our standard rate. The way that storage works is there are six different rates that you can do. This is going off your standard rate. We are making more money than our potential. Why? How is that possible? This is because of what’s called dynamic pricing. Dynamic pricing is one of the most important things that you can do as an owner.

The only software I know of that does this, you guys tell me if anybody, any other software does this, but we can have six different rates, then we can do what’s called yield management. That’s basically like when you think of your unit. You have a 10 by 10 unit and your standard rate is $100. It’s $100 less than 80% full. You can do yield management. If it’s at 85% full, then the price goes up by 3% or 5%. If it’s 90% full, the price goes up by 5%. If it’s 95% full, that’s a really expensive unit and people pay that. If you’re the owner that owns a facility and no matter what, a 10 by 10 is always $100. Think about how much money you’ve lost because you haven’t done yield management on your facilities.

Yield Management

You do that for every single one of your units, 10 by 10, 10 by 20, 10 by 15, 5 by 10, and then you set up 80%, 85%, 90% and 95%, and then 98% is a super high price. It automatically handles that for you. What happens if somebody calls in and you’re at 93%, our 10 by tens are super expensive. We have only one 10 by 10. That price is going to be way higher than our standard rate. That’s why our potential is based on our standard rate, but the actual income coming in is another extra almost $1,000. That’s because of our yield management. That’s a very important part of managing properly.

ESS does not do this. I’m not sure what other software that they do. I’ve asked and done demos on almost every software. Most do not do this thing. Another thing, because pricing and occupancy are all part of management, but pricing and occupancy for your facilities is one of the most important things that you will ever do for a facility. It’s very hard for me to convey this to even my students. If you’re not looking at your pricing on a weekly basis, you’re screwing yourself over. We were meeting with my phone person manager. Live Oak North is the one that we looked at.

I was like, “Let’s raise the rates. We’re 93%. Give me a list of all the tenants that have been there for one year. When is the last time we raised the rates?” She pulls it up and then we’re looking at it together. My husband is a super smart guy. He had already set it up so that there’s an automatic 6% increase every 9 months. It’s been going on forever now. That’s why we have more rent. Not only are we doing yield management on our units, but we’re also doing automatic price increases on our tenants. Every 9 months there’s a 6% increase. We don’t even have to think about it. It’s just done. We had one person that switched on May 1st, they were charged $133 and they’re now paying $140. They didn’t even move out.

What happens is storEDGE automatically sends out an email and a text message 60 days before the rent increase, “Letting you know, you’re going to have a 6% rent increase. Your increase is going from $133 to $140. Please let us know within the next couple of days or so if you’re going to be staying. If we don’t hear from you, we assume that you’re going to be staying with us.” They stayed. They didn’t move out. $7 is not that big of a deal. It was a total automatic adjustment that we didn’t even have to do. That’s set up for all of our facilities.

I called my husband and I was like, “Is this all set for every facility?” He’s like, “Yeah.” I was like, “That’s amazing. I love you. That was super sexy. It was the sexiest thing you’ve ever done.” Its automatic rate increases every nine months with emails and text messages automatically going out. We don’t have to think about it at all. It’s also set up all the yield management for every single one of our units. Across the board on all sixteen facilities, we set those up. This is something that you have to always be looking at.

There are times when you’re decreasing your occupancy. When you start decreasing, something’s not working and we’re not converting at this facility or whatever it is. I wish I could show in storEDGE how this works, but I honestly do not know that’s like Pete and all his team, but I know this is what it does. We do a boot camp in September, and then Pete teaches that boot camp, then he goes into all this and shows you how to do all this. We have a facility owner mastermind. All the owners get to come. This is the stuff that we talk about.

This topic right here, everything I’m showing you is something that we talk about in our facility owner mastermind on a monthly basis because this is what’s important. The way that storEDGE works is that you can have up to six different prices. Think about that. You have your standard rate, “This is the rate of your unit,” then you also have your SpareFoot rate. It could be more or less depending on what you want to be doing, depending on the market and depending on your occupancy. You also have your promo rate.

You can have promos or discounts, and you can set up different rates for that. You have what’s called your managed rate, which is a different price that you could set up in case you want to increase or decrease the price depending on your occupancy or what’s going on in the market. There’s a whole different type of price that you could have. Think about that. You have 5 or 6 different prices.

You can also have your Google Ads rate. On one of our facilities, we have 10 by 20 that we cannot get filled up for some reason. We are doing Google Ads for 10 by 20 units and we’re offering a low price plus a discount and a promo. That is all set up in storage and it all funnels through with their Google Ads. You can do that for the whole facility or you can do it just for units. If you have six different prices and promos, yield management and rate increases, promos, discounts or whatever you’re doing, think about all that in your head. If you could not do that automatically, you’d be going crazy. Our website price is different than our Google Ads price. Those two prices are different from our SpareFoot price.

 

It’s based on SpareFoot, “What do they charge us? Google Ads, how much money can we spend?” Our website sometimes it’s the highest rate. If you come on our online, you’re going to pay a little bit more. If you call in, you may pay a different price. Our phone people can negotiate any price. They can be like, “What does it take for me to get this person in? I’ll give you a dollar move-in. I’ll do 50% off. I’ll lower your rate. I can match the price.” We end up having a whole bunch of different prices for all of our different unit sizes and all different prices for all of our different facilities based on the market. storEDGE can manage all that. That’s what it does.

I love that. That is my favorite part about management. This is all of our fees, but you can set up yield management. This is where you set up all your prices for all your facilities and then your dynamic pricing as well. I’m not going to get in there and screw it up, but I want to let you know so you could see how it’s managed. When I am looking at this, I’m looking at the unit, past due and I’m going to report. My husband is looking at reports, but he’s looking at yield management. He works on comms.

Comms is communication. All your emails and text messages, we have somebody in-house that does all that, but this is where that is. All the emails, individual mass emails are all done through here, phone calls, emails, SMS, your mail house and all kinds of stuff. He does a lot of the yield management. I look at the reports, past dues, runnable units and stuff like that. In storEDGE, that’s what we’re looking at as the owners. People who answer the phones are putting the tenants in. They’re in the tenant section trying to fill out the tenants and getting them to pay, calling, emailing, text messaging and stuff like that. That’s the management part that I wanted to talk about so at least you had an idea of what we’re looking at and what we’re doing internally.

DaVita is saying, “How did you decide that storEDGE is the best software?” I talked about this in the beginning, but there were only a couple of options when I started. Now you have a ridiculous amount of options so you could do a lot of demos, but for me, there were only three options, and I chose storage. Luckily, Storable is funneling a lot of money into storEDGE. It’s becoming like an enterprise system. It’s going to be their platform that they’re going to be pushing. They put in a lot of features.

When I started with storEDGE, it did not look like this. It was super basic. Over the course of the last many years, they’ve been updating it and listening to the owners. We’re telling them what we need. We’re telling them like, “This is what we need. This is what we’re looking for,” then they come in with their developers and they develop it. That’s why it’s such a powerful tool. Dynamic pricing and yield management are all something that was not there when I started with storEDGE, but it came as they started to grow. The auction is set up automatically storEDGE. The communication and yield management are automatic in storEDGE. It’s as passive as you can be.

The only thing that you need to do at a facility is overlock, which you could use. You could also use DaVinci Locks if you wanted to or SpiderDoor. It is what we use. You don’t have to do a lot of overlocking, then just cleaning out the units and stuff and picking up trash. People do this every day. They leave trash and stuff. That’s the big thing with the boots on the ground. That’s the management part. Bill is asking, “How many scheduled auctions get paid at the last minute?” Almost all of them. We have three.

At the end, only three out of the plethora of people auctions per month. Almost all of them pay at the last minute. I wanted to remind you that the doors to Turnkey Acquisitions are open. If you want to come into StorageNerds and you want to be a part of the coaching process and you want leads handed to you, that is what Turnkey Acquisitions does. If you want to buy a storage facility by the end of the year, either you need to be putting in a ridiculous amount of offers right now, or you need to be in Turnkey Acquisitions and you need leads handed so you can put offers in.

If you want to buy a storage facility by the end of the year, either you put a ridiculous amount of offers right now or be in turnkey acquisitions. Share on X

Bill is asking, “What’s the fee to you for the auction?” There’s no fee to us for the auctions. Auctions are free. You have to pay to put it into the paper, maybe some money because you have to do stuff the list amount. In some states, you do that and in some states, you don’t. There’s no real out-to-fee. The fee is past due loss. $729 has not been paid. If we auction that off, we’re losing $729. You don’t want to go to an auction. You want the people to pay, but if they don’t pay, you need to get the note as soon as possible.

“Do you break down the auction process from start to finish in your course?” That’s all in the course. My husband teaches the auction part, and he shows you how it does. He would do all that. If you’re interested in the management stuff, we’re going to have the boot camp in September and October 2024. Be on the lookout for that and I’m going to open that up to the public. Typically, I don’t, but I decided to open up the boot camp to the public.

The funding boot camp is May 18th and 19th. The other boot camp is in October. I appreciate you hanging on to the end. I hope this helps you. I’m here to help you and I’ll see you guys next episode with a new topic. Craig’s saying, “Where will I start?” Keep coming to the webinars if you can then get the course right. Go to my website and everything is there. You can go to StacyRossetti.com. It’s all there. Take care everybody. Bye.