The self storage industry is booming, and there’s never been a better time to invest. But finding self-storage facilities for sale can get challenging. In this episode, we’ll discuss how to expand your buy box and close your dream property. We’ll teach you the importance of looking beyond the property’s size and exploring creative deal structures, backed up with personal success stories of students who scaled. The discussion touches upon various types of real estate investments, including mismanaged facilities, income-producing properties, and new construction. We’ll explain how each one can impact your investment strategy and why you should keep an open mind. By making your buy box bigger, you’ll learn how to expand your horizons and seize opportunities that you might have overlooked. If you’re serious about investing in self storage, then you don’t want to miss this episode. Tune in now and open the doors to exciting new investment opportunities.
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Buy Box Mastery: Finding The Best Storage Deals And Closing Your Dream Property
What I’m going to go through in this episode is some ways to find storage and to look for storage facilities. We’ll get you started. My website is where you can go and get all the information that you need about me and what we offer. I got all different kinds of courses. I got the Deal Analyzer, coaching, and all kinds of stuff. Also, the website is where you can get access to my show if you want to tune in to my show. I get a lot of people telling me they’re tuning in to the show. You could always go to my YouTube channel. I got a lot of free stuff there too.
I always call this my triad. This is how to learn how to invest in self-storage immediately or get started and then do it. We have the Super Simple Self-Storage online course. If you buy that, it will take you step-by-step on how to get started in self-storage investing. It gives you a good overview of how to do everything. There are 100-plus videos in this course. We have the Deal Analyzer. This is a course too. This is where you get the Deal Analyzer and then you get a whole bunch of training videos on how to use it.
The truth of the matter is right now, the market is nuts. We all know this. If you are not making offers on storage facilities, then you are never going to find one. I have fifteen virtual assistants that do nothing but call owners. We are putting a ridiculous amount of offers in and we still don’t get a lot of stuff. We don’t get a lot of things under contract. You have to know that this market is nuts.
If you’re not making offers on storage facilities, then you’re not going to find something. You’re not going to find anything. Get the course so you can learn how the whole industry works, and then have a step-by-step process on how to do this. Get the Deal Analyzer so you can make the offers. You have to make offers. You then have this training. You have the weekly training. That’s the triad. You also have the Facebook group, which is called Super Simple Self-Storage as well.
You want to join the Facebook group, get the course, get the Deal Analyzer, and come to the Wednesday training. All four of these together are going to help you to get that first deal under contract. That’s the purpose. That’s what I’m trying to help you guys to do. I want to remind everybody about this so that you can get out there and start making offers.
The Buy Box
I’m talking a lot about the market, but the truth of the matter is is the market is nuts. I want you to realize how it’s working. I talked to a lot of people because the StorageNerds doors were open. I talked to a lot of people about their aspirations of buying storage. I get a lot of the same people having the same thought process. I want to clear this up. Everybody here has a buy box. If you could buy any type of storage facility out there, what would you buy? Explain to me the perfect storage facility for you.
Everybody has a buy box. The issue is that the market is nuts. We all know this. The real estate market is nuts. Interest rates are super high. There are your interest rates and also your down payment. This is if you’re going to get a bank loan. Interest rates are high and down payments are high as well. Banks are very conservative.
The real estate market is nuts and interest rates are super high. Share on XThe down payment is high. The down payment is going to be anywhere from 20% to 30%. Most of the time, it’s going to be at 30% down. I had a student close on a deal at 6.5% interest, but he said that his bank told him that he got in right at the last moment. They’re telling him that the next loans that are going out are going to be upwards of 8% interest. This is a conventional loan. Conventional loans are upwards of say 7.5% to 8% interest.
In Facebook groups, I saw one post that was like, “What terms is everybody getting?” Everybody is saying that the terms are horrible. Ultimately, when terms are high, that means that the banks are being ultra-conservative. They’re making sure that their risk is very minimal. What that means is if you are the type of person who is saying, “I have $100,000. I want to go and buy a storage facility. I have to get a bank loan in order to do that,” let me know if this is who you are.
A lot of students in the coaching program are like this. They have $100,000 which is a lot of money, but in real estate terms, it’s not a lot of money. If you only have $100,000 and you have to put 30% down, 30% of $500,000 is $150,000 down. If 30% of X amount of dollars is what you can afford, that means that your buy box has been minimized. Number one is your buy box for your down payment has been decreased. You can only buy so much money. Your money will not buy a lot. I have many students who bought loans at 10% or 15% down, but it became very hard. You’re typically at 30%. That means your buy box is becoming smaller.
I went over the Deal Analyzer and we ran numbers on the property that we closed. When you have to buy something with your interest rates being so high, only certain deals work because the interest rates are so high. That means your buy box got lower. You’re like, “I want a facility and I want it to be nice. I want it to be gated with security cameras. I want 100 units. This is what I want.” You could have gotten an SBA loan for $1 million at 10% down a couple of years ago.
SBA will do 10% and 15% down, but the issue with SBA loans is they’re at around 11% interest. The reason why is because they’re prime plus 1 or 2. It’s a variable rate. Conventional loans are fixed and SBA loans are variable. As long as the government keeps increasing interest rates, which most likely they will at least for 2023, then the interest rates are going to go up. Personally, we have an SBA loan that we are paying 11% interest on.
The only way that this works is if you are buying at $0.50 on the dollar or less. Think about that. If you only want to put 10% down and you want to pay 11% interest on your property, what that does is it makes your buy box even smaller. When I talk about the buy box, there are a lot of things going over there. One of the big things is if you are that person who has to get bank financing, either by putting 30% down and getting 8% interest or putting 10% to 15% down and 11% interest, if you are one of these people that has to do this, then your buy box has become very small because your money doesn’t buy that much anymore.
Because of that, there is a smaller pool of deals that work, due to your interest rates being super high. That’s what we’re seeing by putting all these offers in. What we’re seeing is that sellers of properties are becoming more flexible. We are putting a ridiculous amount of offers in. They’re becoming more flexible in the idea that they are open to getting offers on their deals. They are open to listening to you. They are open to at least getting offers.
In 2022, we were having a hard time even being able to put offers in. People were like, “No,” or they wanted super ridiculous prices. Going back to my amazing Deal Analyzer, this tool is there to help you put offers in. If you need to get bank financing on a deal, your buy box has become very small. Banks are not financing deals because they’re conservative. On top of that, numbers are not working with financing. They are working, but it’s few and far between.
The great thing about the Deal Analyzer and what I teach if you’ve been following me for years is that I teach to make five different offers. If you’re doing five separate offers, that’s a lot of offers to be running your numbers on. If you can do a cash offer, creative deal structures, and bank financing, if you could run your numbers getting a private lender, if you could run your numbers on fixed versus interest-only payments, and if you can create offers explaining all these different types of deals to the owner, your buy box has gotten bigger.
If you are making an offer and your offer is like, “Here’s my offer. It’s $1 million,” and that’s it, then you are making your buy box smaller. The market calls for a bigger buy box. I’m going to give you a whole bunch of different ways to make your buy box bigger. That’s the goal for this episode. It is so that you have more of a chance to find something that works.
You want to make your buy box as big as possible. Because of that, I push making five offers at the same time or making a whole bunch of different types of offers. When you make an offer to an owner, you can use this Deal Analyzer. You can use this process not only to go directly to the owner, which is what we do but also to make offers to brokers through Crexi or the MLS. You’re sending over your offer letter and, by law, they have to give that offer letter to the owner. You can do this with any type of way to find deals. My point is that our goal over the next couple of years is to make our buy box bigger. That’s what you need to be doing.
I talked to many people and their buy box is, “I have $100,000. I’m going to have to go to a bank and get a loan. I’m expecting to buy the perfect storage facility for that. I want it to be within driving distance of my house.” The truth of the matter is that is few and far between. Rarely in the next couple of years are you going to be able to find something like this. Let’s make our buy box bigger.
Location, Location, Location
The next thing with the buy box is location. Gone are the days when you need to have a facility right around the corner from where you live. This is not something that you need to do. In fact, we spent two days, because I had a two-day bootcamp with my students. It was the management bootcamp inside the coaching program. We spent two full days going over how we automate everything so that we don’t have to be there.
Remember that we have sixteen facilities in Tennessee, Georgia, and Florida. We live in Florida. We live in Tallahassee. My husband travels. He does go and check on all the facilities. We have boots-on-the-ground people who manage our facilities. For instance, in one of our facilities, we’re laying gravel. We’re getting all-new gravel. Pete is there managing that. He has to go to the facilities every once in a while. We don’t have to be there all the time, maybe once a quarter. Something like this is what he does.
I used to teach your first deal should be within two hours of you. This was back in the day when there was a plethora of storage facilities out there. There’s not a plethora of storage facilities out there anymore that are available to purchase. They are available for you to purchase within the terms of what’s being offered.
I am telling you that COVID was a blessing in disguise for the storage industry because everything went remote. We were already remote beforehand, but everything went remote. There’s no reason for you to have to be at your facility all the time. In fact, when you go to the storage facility, what do you do? You’re there maybe to fix a gate and then you leave, or you’re there to overlock and then you leave. You only have to do that once a month. You don’t have to be next to your facility.
COVID was a blessing in disguise for the storage industry because everything went remote. Share on XI want you to make the location of your buy box bigger so that you have more of a chance to find something that you can buy with the money that you have to buy. If you’ve got $1 million to spend, you can do whatever you want. Most of us, we have $50,000, $200,000, or maybe $300,000. I say 80% of everybody that I talk to, and I talk to a ridiculous amount of people about storage, all have $50,000 to $200,000.
Number four is the buy box location. The more open you are to looking at deals across the entire country, the more of a chance that you will be able to find something to buy. Look at deals across the country. That doesn’t mean that you have to buy that deal in that area. The more deals that you are looking at and running numbers on and stuff, the more of a chance that you’re going to become aware of what types of deals are available out there.
For instance, we have about $75 million in offers. We’re in almost every state. We’re in at least 20 to 25 states that we have offers out on. We’re looking at a lot of other states, but we’ve got about 20 to 25 states that we have offers out on. Since I see so many different offers across so many different states, I am becoming very aware of what is out there for sale.
Also, I’m becoming very aware of what the owners are asking, looking for, or wanting. I’m not going to buy all these facilities and we’re putting offers in all around the country. A lot of times, the offers and the price of the owner don’t match. Every offer that I put in and every deal that I look at helps me to become more aware of how the market is turning and what is happening in the market.
Become Aware of The Deals Out There
When I say in terms of, “Let’s make your buy box as big as possible,” what I also mean is that you need to become more aware of properties that are available and what the owners are looking for in terms of working with you. I want you to become aware of all of the deals that are out there and be aware of what deals look like.
You need to become more aware of properties that are available and what the owners are looking for and in terms of working with you. Share on XI would say 80% of you, in order for you to find a property, you’re going onto Crexi. When you go to look at the property, we all know that the properties on Crexi are super high. A lot of people don’t even put offers in because they’re afraid of that price. They’re afraid of whatever it’s listed at, or they’re afraid that there’s not a price and it says unpriced. When you look at Crexi or LoopNet, I want you to not worry about the price that the broker is listing it for. I’m sure I’m going to get shot in the foot for saying that.
What I want you to do instead is I want you to get my Deal Analyzer. I’m not trying to push my Deal Analyzer, but you need to run offers in five different ways and come up with a whole bunch of different scenarios. On my Deal Analyzer, red is bad and green is good. You’re running the numbers and coming up with the offer. Green says, “This is going to work.” You can then make the offer with the offer letter to the brokers on Crexi.
They may be selling the property for $1 million and you’re like, “I can’t afford $1 million. There is no way.” You say, “Let me get all the information from the realtor,” and plug all the numbers into the Deal Analyzer, which honestly, you don’t need a lot of stuff. You need six different things because there are a lot of formulas and stuff on the Deal Analyzers. It’s not a lot of stuff that you need that you can run the Deal Analyzer and make an offer. It’s just an offer. That’s it. You’re not under contract. You don’t have to do due diligence. It’s just an offer.
What that does is you’re also going to help the realtor. I’m guaranteeing you that most of the time, most realtors when they get offers in, they aren’t getting five offers in one on one time. That’s for sure. It also helps them to be able to get their mind open a little bit. I feel like sometimes, the brokers want that one offer and that’s it. It helps them as well. It educates them to say, “I looked at your deal. I ran the numbers based on what you gave me. This is where I’m at. These are my offers. I’m giving you these offers so that you can submit them to the owner. The price is not $1 million, but these numbers work.”
A lot of times, even with the creative deal structures, you can get close to $1 million. You could say, “I’ll pay $500,000. If you owner-finance it for 10 years, you’ll get to $800,000,” or whatever it is. It’s close. You do that as well and that helps the realtor and the owner become more aware of the possibilities of how they can get the deal done. That makes your buy box bigger.
Could you imagine if you looked at the deals on Crexi, got the information that you needed, plugged the information into the Deal Analyzer, made the offer, and then did that for all the deals on Crexi? One of my virtual assistants went on to Crexi and looked up all the deals that were still a year on the market and had not closed. They were a year on Crexi and had not closed. That’s a huge opportunity to take my Deal Analyzer, run the numbers, use my offer letter, make the offers, and see if something works.
I only make the offer based on what the numbers on the Deal Analyzer say that is going to work. It doesn’t have to be the sell price. It’s the price that makes the numbers work for you. In fact, we’re going to be doing this, but I feel that you will find some opportunities by doing that. Your buy box will get bigger. You may be sitting in an area where you look on Crexi and there’s no storage in your area. You’re dwindling down your buy box. You open it up and use tools that are out there, MLS, Crexi, LoopNet, or whatever it is, and make some offers.
The more offers that you make, the bigger your buy box is going to get. I can guarantee you because I had somebody who came into the Turnkey Acquisitions. He was adamant that he wanted to buy something in Texas. In Turnkey Acquisitions, we share all of our deals. Not only do you have one virtual assistant working for you, you’ve got fifteen virtual assistants working for you. He went in and looked at fifteen other deals. All of a sudden, he’s like, “I’m open to this deal. I’m open to whatever. I just want a good deal. I see all the types of deals that you’re doing. I see the numbers that are being run. I am open to a good deal. That’s what I’m open to.” He lives in Dallas.
That’s what I’m saying when I say get your buy box bigger. You don’t have to be remote. You don’t have to be right there. You can run your facility contactless. This is a term that came up during COVID. All you need is a call center and a boots-on-the-ground person, especially for these smaller facilities. If you are okay with having a facility not in hand’s reach and having a call center answer your calls and a boots-on-the-ground person handling the overlap and stuff, your buy box has gotten way bigger.
If you’re the type of person who is like, “I live in California and I only want something in California,” guess what? It’s going to be hard to find a deal in California, Nevada, or Utah. There are some states out there that it is difficult to find facilities in, and then there are states that it’s left and right, one good deal after the other. I’m not telling you what states those are because we’ve done all of our work to figure all those out, but you can do the same thing. Get out there and start looking at deals and making offers so that you can become more aware of what the market looks like.
We have talked about location, being aware of deals, remote, and making offers. Let’s make your buy box even bigger. You know how to make your buy box bigger. It’s the Deal Analyzer. You can buy your properties with cash, seller financing, private money, bank financing, and then some other creative deals. Do you want your buy box to be bigger? My buy box is the biggest it can be because of this. I will buy anywhere in the country and I can do all of this. I could buy anywhere or do anything.
Understanding Creative Deal Structures
You want to get to the highest level that you can get. Remember, you have the bank financing, and 80% of you have this thinking, “I’m going to go to a bank and get a loan.” If you understand these concepts, you understand how to raise money, you understand how to put creative deal structures together, and you understand how to partner and how partnerships work, your buy box will be too big. We have too many opportunities.
I’ve spoken about this and have taught about this a lot. I have a whole two-day bootcamp in May about this, where I spend two full days on this. You’ve got to learn how to pay for facilities with cash. People asked, “How does Stacy pay for her properties with cash if it’s $1 million, $2 million, or $3 million? How does she do that? How does Stacy get her deal seller-financed? How does she find deals for her students or get her students to seller-finance?” How am I 90% debt-free on my properties? How do I raise private capital?
The Financing Side
This is what you have to focus on if you want your buy box to be bigger and you want more opportunities to come to you from now over the next couple of years. I’m going to guarantee you, that the next couple of years are going to be even worse than what it is now on the banking side. The banks are getting super tight. There is still opportunity, but that opportunity is getting smaller. You’ve got to focus on this. For cash, I have a fund or I syndicate. I came back from a three-day conference in Houston, the Raising Capital Summit. We spent three full days with people like me going over deal after deal.
For instance, I listened to a lady. This lady was amazing. I thought she was amazing. I can’t remember her name because I listened to so many. I set an appointment with her because she said, “Set an appointment with me. We can talk about working together and stuff.” I was like, “I want to work with her.” She wasn’t an investor. She flipped homes. That’s what she did. She has a couple here and a couple there. She was like, “I want to get into multifamily,” which is typical. Everybody wants to get a multifamily. She was like, “I’m going to start a fund. I’m going to try to go out and buy this apartment complex.”
Her very first apartment deal that she did was a syndication. It was maybe $2 million or something. It wasn’t a lot of money. I know $2 million sounds like a lot, but it’s not a lot of money. It was a severely mismanaged apartment. This is the same concept for storage. This is exactly what I do. She went and set up a fund. She went out there and raised the money to buy this apartment complex. She picked that up for $2 million. In three years, she sold it for $8 million. It was a mismanaged facility. It was an amazing deal.
Her second deal was a $40 million raise. She set up a fund. My fund is a 25/75 split. I take 25% and my investors get a 75% split. We split that. Her fund is the opposite. She gets 75% and her investors get 25%. Could you imagine doing a $40 million deal and getting 75% of that deal? Could you imagine raising all the money yourself and then managing and stabilizing yourself? This one was a complete badass. I was like, “I need to figure out how she’s doing that.” That’s what I want to do. I don’t want to give 75% of my deals away anymore. I want to make 75% and give 25% away.
In my first fund, I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. I’m out there pitching and bitching. That’s what I’m doing. I’m doing my thing. It’s the same thing with her. She got out there and raised the money. The first deal was a small deal, and then she started building and getting bigger deals. This is how you’re going to do that. That’s how you do it.
This might be a foreign concept for a lot of people, but five years ago, I would’ve never thought I would ever be able to do that. I syndicated two deals. I co-sponsored a deal, I syndicated a deal, and I did a fund all in the last six months. If I can do this, anybody could do it. I had to educate myself. I had to learn. I go to Capital Raising Summits and educate myself. I will be able to do any deal that comes across my plate because I learned how to do this, which is to raise cash or raise money.
With seller financing, you all know that I pushed this, especially on the Deal Analyzer. We make three offers. We do three different types of scenarios. The truth is when you talk to the seller, you don’t know what’s going to make them tick. Is it the down payment? Is it the monthly payment? Is it the interest rate? Is it the purchase price? It’s the end price.
When you think of seller financing, you think of what is the end goal for the seller. What is their goal? What do they want? You then create a situation where they feel like they’re winning. It may be because they don’t want to pay their taxes. It may be because they want to make sure their wife is secure when they die on a monthly basis, which is exactly what happened to me in both scenarios. It may be that they want to 1031 exchange the money in the next two years or whatever it is. Figure out what the owner’s end goal is, and then you make three offers based on that. That’s what the Deal Analyzer does.
When you think of seller financing, think of the seller’s end goal and create a situation where they feel like they are winning. Share on XWith private money, my first twelve facilities that we own, I got 100% financing on those deals for the purchase price. I got 100% financing for the purchase price. I did not put a penny into any of the deals that I bought. What I tell my private lenders is that I will stabilize the property. I will come out of pocket on a monthly basis and annual basis to make sure that I stabilize this property. It’s going to cost X amount of dollars to do that. That is my investment in the property.
You can be 100% privately financed by creating a win-win situation for the person who’s going to loan the debt. You’ve got to learn how to come up with structures for partnering or debt. I do debt and partnering, but I prefer debt. I prefer syndication because I prefer working with my investors and stuff, but I’ll do any deal, honestly. Give me the money and I’ll figure it out.
Private money is private lenders. Private lenders are going to be your friends, your family, your colleagues, your acquaintances, and everything in your circle that’s near you. They’re not strangers. Strangers are not private money. Strangers are funding and syndicating. I had exhausted my circle. I was like, “I’m going to start me a fund.” That way, I can get out there and put my name out in the world. Start with your circle and go from there. Say, “I’m going to buy a storage facility. How much money do you have?”
When people ask me, “I’m interested in your fund,” or “I’m interested in working with you,” I’ll say, “How much money do you have? You tell me how much money you have and I’ll tell you exactly what we can do with it.” I have no qualms with asking people how much money they have anymore. I need to know so I can figure out how I can help you.
You want to get to the point where you can be the source of education for the investors, and you can direct them into the right category. The bank finance that we talked about, interest rates, down payments, and that kind of stuff is in one category. There are conventional loans, SBAs, and creative deal structures or other ways to structure your deal.
For instance, I got off with a guy who wants to join Turnkey Acquisitions. He is an investor that focuses on residential and he wants to get out. Pretty much most of the properties that he’s ever bought are subject-to. I don’t know if anybody here ever heard of the subject-to, which is typically our residential creative deal structure. Guess what? You could do those for storage as well. You can do it on any type of property. You could do a subject-to for land, commercial, storage, and anything that you want to do if you understand the concept.
Not the last property that I bought, but the property before that in May or April, I can’t remember, we assumed the loan. A lot of banks are not going to do loan assumptions because the loan is at 3% and then it’s 10%. They’re not going to let you assume any loans. This does not work with bank financing. If it’s owner-financed or it’s already being seller-financed, why can’t you assume that loan?
We talked to owners up in New York. They got the deal owner-financed. We’re like, “Let us assume that owner-finance deal. We’ll start to tell the owner to meet us. We’ll start taking over those payments and give you the chunk of change after that assumption.” That was $700,000. He was up $400,000, so we’ll give him $300,000 and then we’ll assume that loan.
The down payment is flip-flopped. It’s not for the down payment of the purchase. It’s the payment for the purchase, and then we’re assuming that loan. There are so many different structures. I love coming up with structures. You need to understand all of the creative deal structures out there so that when you do come across certain types of scenarios, you can think outside the box. You don’t want your buy box to be so small. You want your buy box to be big. Think outside the box and make your buy box bigger. That is your goal. That is your job for the next couple of years so that you can acquire property.
Everything that I’m telling you could be for residential, land, commercial, or storage. It’s real estate in general. We all know that the market sucks and it’s not going to get any better because it takes a couple of years to correct itself once we even stabilize. According to the Fed, they’re supposed to do another interest rate high by the end of the year. That means it’s going to take the next two years to stabilize everything. This is the time when this comes into play.
You’ve got to educate yourself on this stuff. You join StorageNerds. We talk about this on a regular basis. I talk about it in my course. I offer it in the Deal Analyzer. This is what we’re talking about. If you join the coaching program, May is our two-day boot camp coming up, but you’ll be able to re-watch the 2022 funding bootcamp. You could get all up into this. I go over all these different things so you better watch the replay if you join. You’ll also have me. You get out there and look for deals and I’ll be like, “Let’s try this. Let’s do this.”
Expansions And New Construction
That is my two cents on the buy box. That is the goal. Your goal is to make your buy box bigger over the next couple of years. For the types of deals, remember that there’s the income-producing, the mismanaged, and then there’s new construction. Those are the three main deals or conversions. Make sure that your buy box encompasses all of these. When I say new construction in conversions, you can also say expansions.
You don’t want to be like, “I want to be like Stacy. I only want to buy mismanaged facilities.” The reason is that mismanaged facilities are not hard to come by, but they’re hard to finance. That’s the issue. I could buy any mismanaged facility because I can do all this, but most people can’t until they educate themselves and do this.
For us internally, inside Turnkey Acquisitions, the mismanaged facilities are the hardest ones to sell. Although everybody says they want to do mismanaged facilities, you can’t get financing on a deal unless it’s seller-financed because banks aren’t going to be financing them. A lot of people cannot buy these facilities. Everybody wants to, but they can’t because you have to pay cash or you have to get it financed through a seller. A lot of times, banks won’t finance them.
Income-producing properties are great properties to buy. An income-producing property equals going to a bank and getting a loan, but then the interest rates are high and the down payments are high. The numbers are having a hard time working because of that. That makes your buy box smaller. If you say, “I want cashflow,” I rarely ever see deals with cashflow unless it’s over maybe $1 million. At $2 million or $3 million, you get cashflow. It’s a little bit harder with $2 million or less. $1 million or less is a little bit harder. If you are saying, “I only want cashflow,” then your buy box has shrunk to very small.
New construction is a great time to be building, especially in tertiary and secondary markets. It’s a great time. Remember, it takes you anywhere from 1 to 3 years to do this. If you start new construction now, you’ll be able to lease back on the upswing. There’s nothing wrong with building at all as long as you’re not in primary market or sub-primary markets. You want to be in a secondary to a tertiary market. That’s what I’m saying.
You want to be available and say, “Whatever type of deal it is, I’m going to make offers. I don’t even care what it looks like. I don’t care how big it is. I don’t care about anything. I’m going to practice making offers. I’m going to get more confidence in doing that. My buy box is huge. At the same time, I am going to focus on doing this and figuring out how I’m going to pay for everything.” If you can do that over the course of the next 6 to 8 months, there are going to be so many opportunities for you. If you keep your buy box small, you’re going to miss out on the window.
I like when people want bigger facilities because there is more opportunity. I was telling somebody that for the $1 million to $3 million, $2 million to $3 million, or $2 million to $4 million price range, there are some amazing deals out there. A lot of these bigger owners are open to financing. For instance, we have a deal in Montana. He was at $5.5 million. He dropped his price to $3.3 million and he’ll owner-finance. We made an offer at $3 million with owner financing. He dropped $2 million in the last couple of months because he’s one of those who was on Crexi for over a year and nobody bought it. He dropped $2 million, and we’ve made an offer even less than that.
Someone asked, “What’s your opinion on a small 32-door construction facility?” If you’ve got space to add on, there’s nothing wrong with minus a small storage facility, as long as you can add on. It’s a little difficult to make money without any expansion. That’s the thing. You can probably start and do it. One of our students, Matt, his very first facility is 30 doors and there was no space to move. He did everything by himself manually. He got in there. That was two years ago. He bought his sixth storage facility in StorageNerds. They’re all smaller facilities too. He’s like me a little bit in that way. He is getting a lot of owner-finance deals and stuff.
Someone said, “I went to the Raising Capital Summit.” If you can do this, I highly recommend it. It’s only once a year though, so you missed out. In 2024, they’ll have it. Go to CapitalSummit.ie. You could follow Tim. I’m going to get Tim to come talk to my mastermind. He’s a great guy. The thing about that summit was that I got to hear how everybody was doing it. How are they raising money? How are they doing funds? How are they syndicating? How are they talking to investors? How are they treating their investors? It was a fantastic way to see how to raise money. I appreciate you guys hanging in until the end. Don’t forget. You got to get my course and the Deal Analyzer. Go to StacyRossetti.com. Join the Facebook group. I will see you soon. Take care.
Important Links
- YouTube Channel – Stacy Rossetti – Self-Storage Investing
- Super Simple Self-Storage
- CapitalSummit.ie