How do you look for owners who want to sell their storage facilities? Host Stacy Rossetti reveals her strategies to find ten motivated sellers in one day. One of them is to hire a virtual assistant (VA) who can organize information in a spreadsheet. Learn why you need them on deck and how to guide them throughout the entire process. Do you want to hear more? Listen to this episode and find great opportunities for you!

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How We Found 10 Owners That Wanted To Sell In One Day

We are going to talk about what we did. I’m going to get into that. Somehow, we found ten storage facility owners that wanted to sell. I wanted to get in and show everybody how we did that. Also, I wanted to make a couple of announcements to get started. First of all, we are going to be launching the Self-Storage Fund of America. I’m excited about this. I have been working on this thing for a year. This is a year of my life trying to get this thing launched. The Self-Storage Fund of America is ready to start doing work and taking care of this. If you go to Self-StorageFundOfAmerica.com, then you can check it out.

I’m going to start pitching it. This is a year of my life trying to put this thing together. This is where I have learned over the years of investing in self-storage. The first thing is that a lot of people are like you and me. They want to get started in self-storage investing. They can only afford so much. A lot of people in their mind think, “I can only afford a couple of hundred thousand dollars or maybe up to $1 million. I can afford to put 20% down on my facility. Maybe I have $50,000 or $100,000.” In their mind, they are thinking, “That’s the 20% down and then I have to come up with the 80% in order to get the deal done.” That’s typically how most people think.

Most people can come up with $50,000 or $100,000. In the real estate investing world, especially in the self-storage investing world, if you can come up with $50,000, $100,000 or maybe even $200,000, then that limits you to how much commercial real estate you can buy. A lot of times, the first facility that you buy is a small one. I know this because this is what I did. My first facility was a $250,000 facility. I noticed as I have been doing this over the years is that most people want to get started with their first facility. It’s a small facility. It’s a couple of hundred thousand dollars.

The other perspective and the other part of the industry is the people that you hear all the time on all the podcasts. You hear all these big players out there with $100 million in assets. All they want are storage facilities that are 50,000, 60,000, 70,000 and 80,000 square feet. They are good at raising money, purchasing big deals and maybe syndications, having a fund and purchasing these $4 million, $5 million, $6 million, $7 million and $8 million facilities.

You have these two ends of the spectrum. You have the ones that are like us. They want to get their foot in the door and get started in self-storage investing. They don’t remember what to do. They know that they can afford only so much and they want to buy a smaller facility. You have the other side where it’s like, “Don’t ever buy anything small because you never make any money and you only want to go big.” There’s this sweet spot in the middle. I have learned this over the years. It works very well in secondary to tertiary markets but mostly in secondary markets. There’s this sweet spot of maybe $1 million to $3 million facilities.

Buy Dumpy Facilities

You know from following me that I buy mismanaged facilities. I focus on mismanaged facilities. We like to buy facilities that are dumpy facilities. They are not managed properly. Over the course of 1 year to 18 months or 2 years, we get them up and running. We double, if not triple, the value of those properties. That’s what we have been doing. In the eleven properties that we have, we will definitely be doing that. There are only 1 or 2 properties that we have that we will add units on. We don’t do a lot of value-add by adding units.

We value-add by cleaning the property up, managing it properly and getting the properties to the top price per square foot that it can possibly be, that’s our goal. You can do this in the $1 million to $3 million properties. They are out there and I find these all the time. I find properties that are $1 million, $2 million or $3 million. They are 50% to 75% full. They have a lot of opportunities to be value-added and even to double and sometimes even triple the value of the property. Those types of facilities that are mismanaged facilities that are 75% full or less are hard to fund.

 

When talking with clients or potential hires, let them see that you’re a real person by turning on your camera.

 

I know this because I have several properties. I have one property under contract. It’s about 180 units. It’s under contract for $1 million, which is a great price because it’s valued at $1.5 million, $1.6 million or $1.7 million. The owner does not have a P&L and balance sheet. He has no numbers to give at all because he has only been taking cash. I come across these types of properties all the time. Personally, I call this the sweet spot in the storage investing world. These types of facilities are very hard to fund.

What I have learned over the past couple of years is that in order to purchase properties like this, you have to be very good at raising money or you have to have your own money. A lot of people don’t have $1 million, $2 million or $3 million that they can invest in. They have a couple of hundred thousand dollars and that’s it. If you have a couple of hundred thousand dollars, let’s say you have $200,000. You can buy a $1 million property. That’s 20% down. It’s a $1 million property that’s an income-producing property. It’s not a $1 million property that’s a mismanaged facility.

That is what the Self-Storage Fund of America is for. I’m excited about this. It’s going to be able to fund the types of properties that I buy from the $1 million to $3 million range. They are going to be mismanaged facilities. Mismanaged facilities would be 75% full or less. My description of a mismanaged facility is that the owner will not provide or cannot provide a P&L, balance sheet, tax return or rent-roll. The reason they can’t provide that a lot of times is because they have been taking cash and checks and that’s it, or they haven’t been good at running the numbers and stuff.

In the commercial real estate world, your property is based on the income of the property. If you can’t prove that, the value is not there. The players in the industry have created this competition. Now, you have all these players coming into the industry. These facility owners and people that have these types of businesses know what the value of the property is worth. It’s just that they can’t show the numbers for that.

I created the Self-Storage Fund of America in order to buy mismanaged facilities that I know I can double, if not triple, the value of the property within 1 year to 2 years, depending on how bad the facility is run. These types of facilities require debt. I can’t go to a bank and get a loan. If it was 75% or full, then I could go to a bank, get a loan and maybe leverage the money even inside the fund. I have one facility, which is less than $1 million but essentially, it’s $400,000. I picked it up. He is only making $27,000 a year. He doesn’t have anything to show for it at all, but he is saying he is making probably around $2,000 a month or so. I come across these properties all the time. That is what the fund is for.

The Self-Storage Fund of America is launched as of Valentine’s Day. I’m excited. I’m going to start pitching it. I have never pitched a fund before. I’m nervous but I’m also excited at the same time. I’m not going to pretend to be one of these guys that know what they are doing with everything. I know how to run and manage storage facilities. It’s so funny because I hired a consultant to help me put this together. He was like, “We need to put the fund together based on what you do best. You buy mismanaged facilities. You turn them around and flip them. You make them worth a lot of money. This is what we are going to base the financial model of the fund.” That’s what we did.

We are going to launch this thing and I’m going to start pitching it. Make sure you are all on our email list if you are interested. You can at least hear me out and see if it’s something that you are interested in. You can hear me as well too, because I know a lot of you that are listening to me are all newbies. You are like, “I don’t even know what a fund is. I don’t know what I’m doing.” What you need to do is listen in and hear what I’m talking about, not only to the Monday sessions that I do every Monday but also to all the pitches that I do.

 

I’m always pitching all my deals. Anybody can hop on, read, see how I do that and see what I have to offer, even for this fund as well too. Read and learn. I’m going to be pitching that. We hired a CFO. He is going to hop on and help me pitch. We are going to go through and, for the first couple of times, answer everybody’s questions and get the kinks out of my pitch. That way, I can get out there, start pitching the thing and try to raise the money. That is one of the announcements that I have is the Self-Storage Fund of America. You are more than welcome to check me out.

Storage Nerds

StorageNerds is my coaching program. For Storage Nerds, we did an in-field training day. It was so much fun. I love getting out, driving around, looking for storage facilities and talking to owners. I’m going to tell you what happened and how we did what we did. We had some great results. We are going to be putting some offers in. I wanted to go over that with you as well too. I teach people how to invest in self-storage. I’m the person here that gets your foot in the door. If you want to be like me, live in an RV, travel around and own storage facilities, it’s awesome and great.

If you want to be like the bigwigs, get out there and own $100 million in storage facilities, more power to you. I have lots of students that I have trained on both sides of the spectrum. I have a student that’s putting an offer in for a facility that’s $50,000. I have a student that closed a facility that was $3 million. I can help you with all the different types of aspects of investing. Personally, we own eleven storage facilities. We focus on the secondary and tertiary markets. We focus on smaller facilities. It’s probably between 100 to 250 units, which is that sweet spot. It’s hard to fund a lot of these types of deals on the back-end. Those are the ones that I focus on.

I focus on mismanaged facilities, the ones that need a lot of work. My husband handles that. We do find, fund and run them. We are going to talk about finding them. I have an acquisitions person. His name is Chris. He is the one that finds them. We are in the process of building up our acquisitions team. I hired two VAs to help us build this up. Our goal is to offer a turnkey solution to our students. That’s the purpose of building the acquisitions team out. I’m excited about this too. All students that come in, we will get with them. We will find out what they want and what they are looking for. We will be able to help them find storage facilities.

That way, I can help my students become more successful. I want to have an awesome success rate in my coaching program. The way that I can do that is by helping them to find storage. Finding them is Chris and his team that we are building out. Chris has been working with me. We bought six facilities in 2021. He is doing an awesome job. We are going to build his acquisitions team, which is going to be awesome. I do the funding part. You heard me pitching the Self-Storage Fund of America. That is my job. My job is to find the money to do all the things that we want to do and then my husband runs them.

We are vertically integrated within our company. We have a management team that we are building out because we are growing so fast. In fact, we are in the process of creating a management company where they will be managing all of our facilities, plus the fund’s facilities. We are trying to figure that all out and how we are going to set all that up as well too. I have only been doing this for a few years. If I could do it, anybody can do it. It takes time and effort. As we grow, we are building out.

Why You Should Hire Expert Assistants

The thing that I do well is I hire people to tell me what to do. For instance, I hired a CFO because I needed somebody to tell me like, “Are these deals good for the fund? Are these deals good for Ms. Lillian’s Self-Storage? What is the best strategy for us?” I’m not the type of person who sits there and figures it all out myself. I need an expert to tell me. I have learned that over the course of the years. For the last couple of years, I have always had people tell me what to do. I listened to them and did it. That’s why I’m here.

 

Teach your virtual assistant to find storage facilities, not on Google Maps.

 

Let’s get into the in-field training day. I told you that we are building out the finding part of our company, Ms. Lillian’s Self-Storage, StorageNerds or Self-Storage Fund of America. We ended up hiring this person. Her name is Karen. She is from the Philippines. What I did was I tested working with her first. I gave her a couple of very simple tasks to see what she could do with them. One of the tasks that I gave her was to create a competition tracker sheet. I’m not going to show you that, but it was awesome.

She put this amazing spreadsheet together with all eleven of our properties, all of the competition, what they are charging for every unit, the pictures of the units and the website. She went all out on this amazing and beautiful spreadsheet. She sent me the spreadsheet and I was in awe because the one way to my heart is not through the stomach. It’s from the spreadsheet. I’m going to tell you all that. If you do a good spreadsheet, I’m going to love you forever.

She put this spreadsheet together. I opened it up and started looking. I was like, “This is the most beautiful spreadsheet in the world. I don’t want to let this girl go. That’s for sure.” I gave her another task. I tested her on that task and she did amazing. After she did this task, I was like, “I got to hire you full-time. You are going to be one of the people that helps us to build out our acquisitions department.” I hired her. She is from the Philippines. I found her on Upwork.com. It’s a place where freelancers come to look for jobs.

I had it like, “I’m looking for market research in the real estate field. I need somebody that can put a spreadsheet together.” What I usually do is sort them in order of hourly rate. She was one of the ones at the top with the cheapest ones. Anywhere from $5 to $8 an hour was my budget for this. I figured it would take a couple of days to do it. I found her and I said, “I would be very interested.” When she wrote me, it was to me because it annoys me when people on Upwork will have a generic reply to everything. You can tell that it’s to anybody and everybody.

She specifically wrote me a nice email. She was like, “Dear Stacy, I would be interested in working with you. I have done some market research before. I have done this and this.” It was a very specific email. She referred back to what I said in my post and everything. I was like, “I like to interview you.” I interviewed her. I set up a time with her and she came on. The one thing I love too is when people turn their cameras on to talk to me because most people do not turn their cameras on. It’s annoying to me because I always have my camera on and I want people to see me face-to-face.

In fact, I talk to owners online like this. Whenever there’s somebody that I want to buy a storage facility from, I ask them if they could hop on Zoom so I could meet them personally. Most of the time, they do. I’m like, “If we can’t be face-to-face because we are traveling or COVID or whatever, I want to still see you and I want you to see me. I want you to know I’m a real person.” That’s what Karen did. She came on immediately. She had her camera on. She was sitting there waiting for me.

It’s in the Philippines. Our meeting was at 3:00 in the afternoon my time, which was 3:00 in the morning her time. She was up and ready to have the interview at 3:00 AM her time, which is also good. We talked to each other and I wanted to hear how her English was. I spoke to her and her English was very well. In fact, she already had a couple of sales and marketing jobs and has done some cold calling. She already knew how to talk on the phone and everything. I said, “This is your job. This is what I want you to do.” I showed her exactly what I wanted. It took her a couple of days to do it and it looked awesome.

 

I’m pleased with her job and her work. I’m looking forward to working with her. She could be a great asset to the team. She is very excited about coming full-time. When I talked to her, she was like, “I’m looking for work. I need money. I need to work. I will do the best I possibly can, but I need an income to come in.” I said, “Sure. Yes, let’s do it.” I talked to her and $7 an hour is quite good over there. I had an interview with another person. He was Nikolai as well too. I talked to him. I said, “Is $7 okay?” He said, “That would be awesome. Can I get $7 an hour?” He was so excited about $7 an hour. Anyway, $7 an hour is quite a lot of money over in the Philippines.

Finding Areas Of Interest In Google Maps

Karen is now working for us. I’m going to show you exactly what she did. I’m showing you how we found ten owners in one day that wanted to sell. This is exactly our process. I hired somebody to do this. First things first, what I did was I gave her the area where I was interested in buying storage. I did that on Google Maps. I went to Google Maps. What I wanted to do is I wanted to set up the route which we are going to drive and find all the storage facilities for my in-field training day.

For StorageNerds, which is my coaching program, we do an in-field training day once every couple of months. It depends on where I’m at where we are going to do the in-field training day because I live in an RV and travel full-time. We happen to be in the Austin area. I’m originally from Austin. We were going to hang out here and visit family for a little bit. This is in Open Air Resorts. This is an RV park that we are at. We are in the Spicewood area outside of Austin. Pete is not here because Pete is taking Lillian to a ninja class. Lillian is my daughter. We own Ms. Lillian’s Self-Storage.

Pete is with Lillian at the ninja class. She does a ninja class. It’s not karate chopping, but it’s the ninja course where you jump around and climb up the walls. That’s what she does. He is there and I’m here. What I wanted to do for the in-field training day was we had sixteen people who came into Austin to spend the day with me. I wanted to create a route for them of storage facilities that we can go to that may be interested in selling. That was the goal of this project that Karen is helping us with and finding owners that want to sell.

What I told Karen was, “I wanted to start in Liberty Hill. I wanted to drive to Buchanan Dam and Marble Falls and then back home to Spicewood.” This is our route right here. We started in Liberty Hill. We went through Bertram, Burnet and Buchanan. I told her to go to Llano, “We can go to Llano and then go to Marble Falls and head back up to drop everybody off.” That was the route. I gave her this route and all of the towns that I was interested in buying them. It’s Liberty Hill, Bertram, Oatmeal, Burnet, Buchanan Dam, Bluffton, Llano, Kingsland, Granite Shoals, Horseshoe Bay, Marble Falls and Smithwick. It’s these towns here. This is the area that I was interested in.

Once I gave her this, I said, “All I need you to do is find all the storage facilities on Google Maps, get me the contact information and put it into a spreadsheet.” Let’s say, for instance, we do Liberty Hill. I told her, “Go to Storage Near Me and find all of the storage facilities.” This is Liberty Hill. Liberty Hill is a secondary market because you can see Public Storage is here. It’s creeping on up. When you see Public Storage and Extra Space Storage right here, you know that is a primary market and then you start getting out there. These are one-owners, Easy Stop Storage and RightSpace. CubeSmart is coming out here.

It could be a primary to a secondary market because Austin is moving this way. This is the area where there’s so much construction and growth. You all know your areas. You know the areas around you. You have to look at the areas around you. You need to figure out this space. You have to figure this out for you, “Where is the primary market, secondary market and tertiary market?” I knew that this is a secondary market and then going out to Bertram is going to become a tertiary market. This is more tertiary to tertiary. There are a whole bunch of nothing in between here and the lake.

 

There are at least nine facilities in Atlanta, and only one of them is on Google maps.

 

These are open and beautiful rolling hills in this area. This all will eventually become developed because I’m in the Spicewood area. Spicewood and Marble Falls are the next areas. Over time, this area coming out to Buchanan, Horseshoe Bay and this lake out here are all going to be growing. This is a great area to invest in. You all know these types of areas in your markets. This is the same thing with these types of areas. I’m in the areas where I know that eventually, they are going to be good in ten years, “What is this place going to look like in ten years?” Typically, I’m going to hold onto a storage facility for ten years. Ten years is not a lot of time.

This is what she did. She said Storage Near Me and then she started to put all of the Liberty Hill storage facilities that were on Google Maps onto a spreadsheet. This is what she came up with. She has Liberty Hill, Bertram, Burnet, Oatmeal, Buchanan, Bluffton, Llano, Kingsland, Granite Shoals and Marble Falls. It’s all the areas and towns that I gave her. I said, “I want to know every storage facility in this area.” She went in and found all of these facilities from Google Maps. She put them onto the spreadsheet. On the spreadsheet, she has the name of the storage facility, address, contact number, email address and website.

If it has a website or not, I like to put that. If there’s an email address or not, I like to put that. She will look that stuff up. If it doesn’t have a website, that is a clue to me that maybe it’s not managed properly. For instance, look at this Liberty Hill Boat and RV Storage. There’s no website. It has a one-star review. After we put the spreadsheet together, Chris called. On this one, there’s no answer. That is a clue to me that it is a good storage facility to call. She went through Liberty Hill, Bertram, Burnet, Oatmeal, Buchanan Dam, Bluffton, Llano, Kingsland, Granite Shoals and Marble Falls.

Llano has one. She may have put this one down with Blue Canopy. It has no answer. The voicemail is not set up. How many stars? Zero. If you go to Llano, Bertram and Burnet are here. Buchanan Dam is here, which is a beautiful area. Over here is Llano and then we have the Kingsland area, which is a little bit rundown. There are a lot of storage facilities in Kingsland, though. Marble Falls is growing fast. Granite Shoals is maybe a suburb of Marble Falls because it’s a little bit less nice. Over here along the water, there’s Horseshoe Bay. Cottonwood Shores is very nice. It’s growing quickly. It’s right around this water.

If we go here to Llano and then we will say search nearby, this is the only storage facility that’s coming up. We could go to Llano, Texas. We could do it nearby and then we could do storage. Llano is not a small town. Blue Canopy is the only one that comes up. One thing I was going to add for her to search as well too was the population. I look up the population a lot in towns. It’s a pretty big city for a little tiny town in Texas. In this area, that’s a good-sized city. It seems like it’s not a lot, but it’s a good-sized city.

When we looked at the spreadsheet, I was like, “Llano only has one storage facility. There is no way. That’s a big town.” I said, “Chris, you’ve got to start looking on satellite imagery and you’ve got to start looking for storage.” Essentially, it’s what I do. I call that the hidden market. What you do is you are going to go into these towns where you don’t find that many. You are going to try to search around and see if you can find some storage. You are going to get in here on satellite imagery. It’s a little tiny town. It’s not like it’s going to take that much work and effort to try to get out there and try to find.

Chris got in here and he started looking around for storage. He found four other storage facilities here by looking through a town like this and seeing if he could find one. For instance, here’s one right here. This is a storage facility. There’s a storage facility right here. That’s a good-looking storage facility. It’s called All-Star Storage. It’s got the phone number there. This is an older-looking storage facility. It has a good size. It’s paved. There’s no fence around it. We put this on the list. We have it on the storage, but we printed it out to drive by and check it out.

 

Find Storage Facilities Not On Google

I have not taught Karen how to look for the hidden market on Google Maps yet, but I will be teaching her. The next step is to teach her how to find storage facilities that are not on Google Maps. That way, she can add them to her sheet here. That is what Chris does. Chris’ job is to find off-market properties or hidden market storage facilities and then put them on the spreadsheet. That gives you tips on how we did that. After he got the sheet from Karen, Chris’ job was to call every single one of these facilities. It took Karen a day to put this list together. Seven times eight is $56. It cost us $56 for her to put this list together for us of every single storage facility on Google Maps that she could find. She did a great and fantastic job.

Eventually, we will get Chris and Nikolai to be calling and talking to the people, especially in the first step to see if anybody wants to sell. Chris is good on the phone. People love to talk to Chris. People like him. He is a very personable person on the phone. If you are not a personable person on the phone, then you need to find somebody that’s personable. I was talking to one of my students. He drove around and found all the storage facilities within the area. He found a good handful of them. He tried to call them and they all said, “No, we don’t want to sell.” He gives up.

What I told him was like, “You are probably not good on the phone. You are probably not the person that needs to be on the phone because if people are saying no to you, then you are not doing it correctly. You are not the right person on the phone. Find the right phone person.” Chris is very good on the phone and he called all of the owners. There are 60 people on this list. He called them all in one day. His notes are here. From Marble Falls, he called every single one of these, all six of them. He left voicemails. He left a message with the manager, “I’m not interested.” He got an email from somebody, but they weren’t interested in selling.

He always tries to get the email so that he can send them a quick email as well too. We will send letters to all of these people is what we will do. That’s what I wanted to show you here. We haven’t added it to this list yet. We call, text and send a letter to them as well too. We could probably have like, “When is the next follow-up?” We can put this on here. As we use this sheet, we will add more stuff, “When is the next time that we are going to follow up?” We will keep track of it that way. As you can see right here, “This Homestead Climate Controlled, Nash Builders is the owner. Look them up and contact them to make an offer.”

We have how many stars? Google reviews, bad or good. It’s what we do. They have got 3 stars, 1 good, 1 bad. Our job is to look at all the information that Google Maps provides us and utilize that data to the best of our ability to be able to find owners and contact them. In Marble Falls, self-storage is not interested. It’s 3.8 stars. They have got three good reviews and one bad review. She is going through and adding all these. Karen is doing all that for us. That’s what I was going to do. I was going to do population also. I’m going to tell her to do the population and storage facility.

Usually, what Chris and I do is rename this and then we put the population right next to it. We will put the number of the population there. I’m going to remind her and say, “You look up every single one of these and let us know what the population of that town is.” That population is the town. You saw 4,000 people for Llano, but within a 10-mile radius, that population is going to be even more. It’s going to be a lot of them. It’s 30,000 or 40,000 people. That’s a little tiny town. At least, it gives us an idea.

Also, what I wanted to show you were a couple of towns like Bluffton. She could not find any storage facilities on Google Maps. This one was left blank. In Oatmeal, there was no storage facility. We found four storage facilities in Llano that were not on Google Maps. Also, it’s one of my students because I gave them homework. Their homework was to find off-market properties. He found three other facilities. There’s a total of at least a minimum of nine facilities in Llano and only one of them is on Google Maps. Do you know how much of an opportunity that is? It’s a great opportunity.

 

It’s a lot of work to call storage facilities, but that’s the best way to find owners.

 

Call Your List

Oatmeal is a little tiny town. There’s no storage in this area. Bluffton is a little tiny town and I have driven up this road to Bluffton. We didn’t look up a lot here, but there is a lot of boat and RV parking here, which is not on Google Maps. Especially when you get around lakes and stuff like this, there’s got to be some sort of boat and RV parking along here, but it doesn’t come up on Google Maps. That is what we did. We have a list of all these storage facilities. It’s 60 of them that Chris calls in a day. He was like, “I called 60 storage facilities.”

What I said was, “Wasn’t Karen’s spreadsheet the most beautiful spreadsheet in the world?” He was like, “I called 60 storage facilities.” I was like, “We have such a great team, don’t we?” That’s a lot to call. I have called storage before. It’s a lot of work to call storage facilities and I get it. Nobody wants to do it, but I’m telling you, it’s the best way to find owners. We are going to go back to Liberty Hill. Chris has highlighted all the potential storage facilities. All the owners that said yes, I would take an offer or something good.

We see Storage King. He left a message with the manager. This one will sell in a few years. The owner’s name is Susan. She has an auto-shop and storage. Highlight the ones that you think would be good for us to go by on our route. He left a lot of voice messages. It’s a wrong number. This one has no reviews. International Storage System is not in service. That would be a good one to start, maybe to skip-trace or try to figure out how to get ahold of.

It’s LibertyHillParking.com. Scott is building the property. He is going to start with storage space and then try to add some new ones. He talked to Scott. Scott was like, “I’m building right now.” He got to talk to the owner. For us, those are pluses essentially. I keep telling him like, “Anyone that you think might be good for us to go check out and for my students to go check them out?” Sunny Hill RV Boat and Storage, its owner Bob called him and waiting to hear back. William is the manager and he said, “The owner has entertained offers in the past.” That was what the notes were.

I said, “Any of them that you think maybe a good one that maybe the owner would take an offer, put it into a different color.” That’s what he did. From there, I went through. Every single one that he put in orange was the one that we decided to go and check out. He said, “These are all facilities that would be open to having an offer.” This is by us calling and saying, “Would you be okay with us sending an offer which is what we do?” Out of all of these names, I said, “Is there anybody that would let us come to their facility, go around and check it out? Does anybody want offers immediately?”

Out of all of the names, he found five facilities that would want to have an offer immediately in the next couple of days. Out of those five, I said, “Which of those will allow us to come to the facility and he will meet us there and talk to us?” Out of those five, two of them were owned by one person. He wants to sell both of them. He was out of town, so he couldn’t meet us. In one of them, the owner said, “My son is going to be there working. Swing by any time and he can give you a tour, but yes, we do want to sell.” We did. We stopped by, talked to the son and got a tour of the facility.

Matt and a couple of people were there. Also, one of them met us. He was like, “I live five minutes away. Let me know and I will swing by and introduce myself. I wasn’t even thinking about getting an offer, but if you want to sell, I’m always open to getting an offer. Let me know when you get there and I will meet you.” I told Chris, “Tell the owners we are driving for storage and we are talking to as many owners as we can. I have all my partners, lenders and everybody with me. We are out looking for storage. If you are interested, then let us come over and talk to you.”

 

One owner was like, “Yes, I live five minutes away. I will take an offer, meet you and show you around.” We met him and spent half an hour there. He showed us his facility. He has got climate control and not climate control. His name was Ron. He told us the history. He was the nicest guy in the entire world. He was very friendly, which is most storage facility owners anyways. He was like, “I was never thinking about getting an offer. If you want to make me an offer, make me an offer.” He gave me his unit sizes, but he says that he has no idea what his total square footage is. He doesn’t know what he is charging. He says he is all over the place, but he will entertain an offer.

Right next door to him was another storage facility. She wants to sell as well too, but she can’t meet us that Saturday. We will be working on putting an offer in for her. One guy also had a boat and RV storage place. He had already accepted an offer. He was like, “You called me just in time. I’m taking offers right now.” I said, “Chris, can we go by and give us the code? We will go by, take a look at it and give you an offer.” He said, “Yes, that’s cool.” Chris and I are working on that offer.

I took the students to that facility. It was a boat and RV storage. We walked around, counted all the bases, calculated all the square footage and asked some of the people that were there. There were a couple of people there parking their RVs and stuff because it was a nice covered boat and RV storage place. We asked a couple of people like, “What are you getting charged per month?” They told us it was $100 per day. We calculated $100 and the whole thing up.

By being there, looking at the facility, counting all the bases up and running the numbers that way, we figured out what our offer was going to be and we were going to put the offer in. That’s with the owner not giving us any information. There’s a little bit of information. When we put the offer in, we are going to say like, “This is our offer based on these numbers. This is what we are calculating. Let us know if you are making more or less and we can renegotiate the offer. For not knowing any information and just driving around and looking at your facility, calculating all your square footage up and your numbers, this is what our offer is.”

Why You Need The Right System

We will put the offer in. In fact, we do that quite often. We put an offer to see what happens. This is how we have gotten so many storage facilities on the contract. I wanted to show you how we found so many owners in a day. Karen put the list together. Chris called the list. After Chris called the list, we met and then we decided which facilities we were going to go to. I picked the ten facilities of the owners. Out of all of those people, we found ten facilities that want offers.

Out of those ten facilities, five of them wanted them immediately and then two of them could meet us. We concentrated on those five. For our in-field training day, we drove to all five of those facilities. All the students got to walk around. We got to run numbers and try to figure out what offers we could put in. We did not make it to all five facilities. Even though we were in the entire day driving around, we only made it to five facilities and got to talk to two owners. It was a great day, but I still have five more facilities that I have to go to and come up with offers. That’s what I will be doing.

I wanted to show you how I find my facilities because everybody that I talk to is like, “I can’t find any facilities.” If you create a system exactly the way that I did it, you should be able to find facilities to buy. If you cannot talk on the phone to the owners and get facilities to give you the information that you need, you are not the right person to be talking to on the phone. Also, another thing is if you say, “I have been looking for facilities, but I can’t find anything to buy,” that means that you are not doing it correctly and you should work with somebody that can help you to put the system together and do it correctly.

The truth is that we are finding owners that want offers. Whether or not those numbers match up, whether or not we come to an agreement, that’s a different thing. We are finding owners that want us to give them offers. This is exactly how we did it. That is my spiel and I’m sticking to it. Make sure you check out StorageNerds.com. The doors are closed to StorageNerds because I’m concentrating on helping my students to find deals and put them under contract. The doors will be open in May 2022. You can get onto the waitlist. Make sure you get onto the StorageNerds Waitlist, number one.

Finally, don’t forget about my course, Super Simple Self-Storage. Everybody that comes to the webinar that is not a student that is not part of the program gets a discounted rate. It’s StacyRossetti.com/flash-sale. That’s the sale price for anybody that comes to the webinar. This is the only time that I ever announced that. Also, don’t forget about the Self-Storage Fund of America. We are launching that. Make sure you hop on, help me to raise the money and listen to my pitch. Help me to better my pitch because that’s what I need to do is get better at pitching.

I appreciate you hanging out. I look forward to seeing you at the next session. I have one question, “I found a fifteen-unit facility in a town with a population of 1,000. Is it even worth it?” No, it’s probably not. What is the price, first of all? Typically, you can’t make as much money as what they want to sell it for. Even if it has a lot of land on it, what is the price of the land? Can you add on?

Typically, you can build something for $35 a square foot. Calculate the difference between the $35 a square foot and then what you have and see if it’s maybe cheaper to build. Typically, on these smaller tiny ones, it’s very hard to make money on those. You still have to run it. It’s your time and effort. You can make way more money on a medium-sized facility. The smaller ones are hard to do.

“How do I come up with the money for my first deal?” There are a lot of sessions that I have done either on the Facebook page, Facebook group or YouTube. There is a lot of stuff on how to find the money. I’m not going to get into that, but there are a lot of different sessions that you can go over. I get very deeply into how to raise money in the course because you need to learn how to raise money in order to leverage yourself on all these deals you are going to find. For all my students, that’s what we will be talking about in the mastermind. The topic is how to find private lenders for the mastermind. I will see all my students in our mastermind session. Everybody else, I will talk to you next episode. Take care.

Important Links

• Self-StorageFundOfAmerica.com
• StorageNerds
• Upwork.com
• Ms. Lillian’s Self-Storage
• LibertyHillParking.com
• StorageNerds Waitlist
• StacyRossetti.com/flash-sale
• Facebook page – Stacy Rossetti
• Facebook group – Super Simple Self-Storage
• YouTube – Stacy Rossetti Teaches
• https://www.StacyRossetti.com/self-storage-webinar/
• https://www.StacyRossetti.com/super-simple-self-storage-details/