From keeping units occupied to ensuring customers’ satisfaction, storage facility management goes far beyond simply renting out space. Effective management is essential for delivering exceptional service and maximizing profitability in this dynamic industry. Stacy Rossetti delves into the intricacies of storage facility management, sharing insights from her extensive experience. From navigating marketing strategies to optimizing phone operations and maintaining occupancy rates, Stacy provides the six most important parts of storage facility management. Through her practical advice, Stacy empowers aspiring storage business owners to navigate the complexities of the industry and succeed in their ventures.
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Six Most Important Parts Of Storage Facility Management
We’re going to go over something that I’ve never taught before. What I’m going to do is brainstorm with you guys on how I’m going through this process and what my processes are inside my company. I figured we could go through it. I can add to it, and we can brainstorm along the way. I teach every Wednesday here for free. For anybody who wants to ramble about storage, that’s what I do.
This is not a pitching session. I don’t teach the same thing over and over. Whatever is happening in my world in storage is what I’m teaching about. That could be based on what my students need or maybe something that’s going on inside our business. We have sixteen storage facilities. We manage them in Tennessee and Florida. I also partner in maybe 10 or 15 deals. They’re across the country. We have put offers in almost all 50 states. We have not put any offers in Hawaii yet, but we have done offers in Alaska.
We’ve done pretty much every state in the country. I know almost every storage facility in the country outside of maybe primary markets. We do not offer primary market facilities. We make offers on either secondary market or tertiary market facilities, which means it is like true mom-and-pop. There are people out there like me. That’s who we make our offers to.
We do have a couple of facilities in primary markets. The primary market is a different ball game. You’re not going to want to get your first facility unless you have some people backing you and stuff in a primary market, and they know what they’re doing. You’re going to start out in a tertiary market in the country and in a smaller populated area or even in a secondary market.
Typically, those are markets that are around 150,000 people or less. Most likely, it’s going to be somewhere 75,000 people or less. That’s what you can afford unless you can afford millions of dollars. The people that come into my coaching program can afford maybe $2 million or less. I have some people who can afford $3 million or less, but $3 million or less gets you into a small secondary market right now.
Commercial real estate is getting more expensive. We all know interest rates are high. We don’t know what’s happening with the economy and the market. We don’t know when the interest rates are going to be lower. All that means is when you have high interest rates, you have to get a better purchase price. A lot of people, through COVID, had a low-interest rate. They were paying high purchase prices, and now it’s the opposite. It’s flipped. That’s what we’re going through now.
A quick reminder that you can find anything that I do and teach is always going to be on StacyRossetti.com. You could go there. I do have a couple of things. I have a book that’s going to be launched. It’s going to be on Kindle. After that, I’m going to create an audiobook, and we’ll print it if people want to buy it. I don’t even know if people can buy this thing, or maybe I’ll give it away for free. I don’t know what I’m thinking about that.
For now, what I’m doing is Kindle, the eBook and the audiobook to see if people are interested in it or not. Be on the lookout for that. You can go to StacyRossetti.com and get on the waitlist. I was thinking about doing a promo where I hand that book out for free for maybe the first day or two. If you’re on the waitlist, you’ll be notified that you can get it. If you’re not, you will not be notified.
I have a bootcamp. If you want to get into this business and you’re not sure about how to do it, I would recommend you to come to the two-day bootcamp because, after two days, you’re going to be like, “I get the idea of what I should be doing.” You are in stage one. Stage one is where you want to get a facility under contract for the most part. If you own a facility, put it into the chat that you own a facility. If you own a facility, you’re going to eventually get another facility under contract. You’re going to go back into stage one, but for the most part, you want to get a facility under contract or at least learn how to find facilities, run deal analysis, make offers, and be able to negotiate.
That is what stage one is about. I teach quite often on stage one and the process. The process for stage one is in the online course. It’s a lot of videos that go through step-by-step. In the deal analyzer, I teach how to run deal analysis. If you come to the bootcamp, you get the deal analyzer for free as well as the course that comes with it, which is typically around $500.
In the bootcamp, we’re going to go over all the different ways that I have bought my facility. I own sixteen facilities. I haven’t put any money into purchasing any of the facilities. We come out of pocket for operational expenses, but we do not come out of pocket to buy the facility. I use other people’s money, or I do creative deal structure. That is what the bootcamp is going to be about.
If you’re reading this and you’re like, “I want to get into this business, but I don’t have that much money to do this.” That’s what this bootcamp is about. The truth is that you don’t need money. All you need is to learn how to be creative. If you can do that, the sky’s the limit. That is what this bootcamp is about. Hopefully, you can come hang out with me. It’s virtual. You hop onto Zoom, listen, take notes, get inspired, and become aware of all the different types of structures you can do.
Over the course of the last week, I opened up my turnkey acquisitions program, which is where you can hire my team to find you a deal. You don’t have to do anything except make offers, but we give you all the information to do that. That’s what turnkey acquisitions are. We got a good response. I’m excited about the next couple of months being able to help the people that joined. The doors are closed. If you go to the website and click on turnkey acquisitions, you can still apply.
I haven’t closed down the website yet for application purposes, but I will. If you want to get in, let me know and see. I’m not opening turnkey acquisitions up until 2025. I’m not going to be marketing for turnkey acquisitions anymore. The goal is to help the students who join turnkey acquisitions find facilities. That is the purpose of turnkey acquisition. You can check it out on my website if you’re interested.
I want to go over something I’ve been thinking about, but I haven’t come up with the structure yet. It’s part of the management process and what we’re doing internally to manage our properties better and be leaner. We own sixteen facilities. The way that I think is different from the way that you think. You don’t own a facility. You’re going to be thinking in smaller terms than me.
The truth is that the process I go through and everything I do should be applied to what you’re doing for your facility. That’s what I want to go through. We came up with this process and fine-tuned it. I’d share what I’m thinking with you guys. You guys can put your 2 cents in and let me know what you think, or maybe if you have any other ideas, I can add them to it.
We had a stressful week here in Tallahassee. We had three tornadoes come through. We got hit in our backyard. The tornado came through, but the winds came through. We had a tree that fell down. This is a massive oak tree. It got twisted, fell down, and barely missed our guest house. I was like taking my dog out for a walk. I was like, “What happened to this big, massive tree in our backyard.” We have a guy out there right now cleaning up this tree.
This is a whole process for us to figure this out. A lot of people had a lot of homes that were destroyed. Even my assistant, who works here in the office, lives in the area where the tornado touched down. The whole area that she lives in is devastated. I don’t know what’s up with the weather. You guys tell me. What’s up with the weather? Why is it crazy? What’s up with hurricanes, tornadoes, flash floods, and mudslides? I’m not quite sure what’s going on. We dealt with that, and it was stressful. It’s a stressful Mother’s Day for me.
Let’s do some management stuff. I’m going to show you what I’m thinking. This is how it’s working for us internally, how we are managing our facilities. How does somebody who owns a lot of storage facilities manage all these facilities? We have facilities in Tennessee, Georgia, and Florida. We’re managing those facilities. All the ones I partner with my students manage the facilities themselves. This applies to everybody.
I have a facility owner mastermind within the Storage Nerds coaching program. Once you buy a storage facility, you get to start coming to this owner mastermind. We had the owner mastermind and a good group of owners. We were going through all the challenges that everybody was having. We talked about the process and how everything flows as a management company or as an owner of a facility. This is where the idea started coming to me.
Marketing
There are a couple of things inside our company that we are spending a lot of time and money on. One of the main things that we’re doing is marketing. One of the biggest parts of owning a facility is what your marketing is. You all know that, but I want to reiterate that the best marketer wins. That’s how it’s becoming now. Even if you’re a little tiny facility in the middle of nowhere, if you are not marketing your property, you’re not going to get filled up.
The way that the market is, occupancy is low. In 2024, occupancy is going back up, but in 2023, it dropped dramatically. We lost a lot of tenants. We were having a hard time and struggling or trying to get people in. Until 2022, we never struggled with getting tenants. In 2023, it came to fruition that we need to be upping our ante and the marketing game.
Even in the smallest locations, why aren’t people moving into these facilities? You struggle with smaller facilities and tertiary markets, trying to get people to come in because it’s a smaller market. When you have medium- or larger-sized markets, you’re struggling with competition and trying to be the best facility in the area. That’s how we’re looking at it now. I’ll go a little bit into that. Each one of these needs to be like a whole session, but I’m going to do an overview. During our bootcamps is when we go deep into. We talked a lot about this deep into it.
Phone Management
Marketing is a big thing now. The second thing that’s important for us is phones. I always say this, “Whoever answers your phones is going to make or break your facility.” If you do not have a good person answering your phones, what you’re doing is you’re screwing yourself over. If it’s you, are you a good person? Are you a salesperson? Are you a customer support person? A lot of times, there are two different types of personalities. Think about that. You have sales and customer support under phones.
Another thing that you have under phones is what we call follow-up and collections. We have sales, customer support, follow-up, and collections. That is how we divide our phones up. If you have one facility and you’re the only person answering the phone, you do all this. As you grow and add more people, or if you get a call center and you hire a call center to answer your phones, this is what you should be asking them. Who answers your phones on leads? How do you handle your customer support? Is it the same person? Is it a different person? Who handles collections? If you miss a call or if you are on a waitlist or some admin and you have to follow up with the tenant, who’s handling all that?
We divide that into four different groups, which is how we do it internally. I’ll get a little bit more into that as we go through this, but that’s how we do the phones. The phones for us are important. The more time that we spend with each of the people who answer the phone and the more training they get, the better they get, which means that we get more conversions and we get fewer complaints.
We use a company that manages reviews for us. Our reviews are always 4 or 5 stars. It’s always great friendly service. The staff is great. Rarely do we ever get people complaining about customer support. You hear about it in the industry all the time. People are complaining about ESS, answering the phones, customer support, storage edge, customer support, and site links. If you own a company that handles customer support, it’s important, especially in the storage business. If you do not have good customer support, people are going to go on to the next facility and say, “Let me move my stuff over to somebody else.”
Gone are the days when people were loyal to one storage facility. They’re not. People are moving in and out. If there’s a better price or deal, people will move their stuff. We see it all the time. In our minds internally, we’re thinking, “Why are people moving out? What is the reason?” Customer support and marketing is where this goes. What we do is keep track of move-ins and move-outs. When they move out, what’s the reason? Every week, we go over move-ins and move-out per facility, and we see how many people are moving in and out.
We also look at the reason. I got moved into a house. I don’t need storage anymore. I found a better price or this situation happened. If you know the true reason somebody moved out, you can come up with an SOP, a script, or a way to talk to customers. You can save the situation, especially if they move out and they’re not happy, and they’re going to give you a bad review. Our goal is no bad reviews at all. If we get a bad review, we discuss it every week in our meetings. We haven’t had a bad review in a while, but we did get a three-star on one of our facilities. There was a reason for that. The gate wasn’t working properly.
What can we do to make sure that the customer is happy? Are we following up? Are we reaching out? Can we send them a gift card? This is a huge part of owning a storage facility, whether it’s 50 units or 3,000 units. This is a big part that we’re trying to focus on. The truth is that there is a lot of competition out there. If you’re not treating your customers the best that you can, they’re going to move on to the next facility.
There is a lot of competition out there, and if you're not treating your customers the best that you can, they're just going to move on to the next facility. Share on XWhen I started in the storage business several years ago, this was not a thing that you talked about in the industry. It was always more about marketing, where you’re going to buy your next facility, how long you’re going to hold it, what your numbers look like, and what your cap rate is. If you’re owning a facility, this is what you’re talking about.
Occupancy And Price
Marketing is one area that we talk about every week. Phones we talk about every week. Another thing that we talk about every single week in all of our facilities is occupancy and price. It mind-boggles me how many owners do not look at this on a weekly basis. We have almost 3,000 units. Because we have a lot of units, it’s a lot to manage.
One of our facilities is in the Atlanta market. We are running out of space to lease up. Let’s say it looks like this. Here’s your facility. You have all these units, and they’re all 10 by 10s. This one and this one are all unrentable. Why are they unrentable? There are a whole bunch of different reasons why they would be unrentable. These are all rented. Let’s say this one is late. These R late payments. You’ve got Xs that are unrentable, Rs are late, and the rest are filled. You also have a vacant, which would be empty. This is what your facility looks like. These are the four ways to look at your facility.
This is what I’m doing. I’m looking every single week at how many move-ins and move-outs we’re getting. Your move-ins minus your move-outs are your net rentals. How many net rentals on a weekly basis do we have? That is how you calculate how fast you’re leasing up your facility. If you’re plus eight minus four, you have a plus four rentals. If you’re plus eight minus nine, you have negative one net rent.
This is why it’s important to look at how many move-ins and move-outs you have so that you understand the concept of net rentals. Your net rentals dictate your occupancy and your price based on the competition. We do what’s called dynamic pricing. Sometimes, people call it guild management. We’ve got five rentals available, but we’re getting, on average, eight move-ins a week. How are we going to handle this? You have to be on top of how many unrentable units you have.
I asked why we have many unrentable units. The facility that we bought was severely mismanaged. It’s a 20,000-square-foot facility. It’s a big facility, but there are a lot of unrentable units. The reason they’re unrentable is because the springs are broken on the door, the latches are broken, the door doesn’t work for some reason, or there’s a roof leak. The other thing that happens is the ceiling is falling. They are full of stuff. They’ve gone through the auction process. They were one, but they haven’t been emptied, or they did not get bid on. There was no bid. You have to pay to get them emptied. You have to figure out how to get them empty.
This is my brainstorming. This is the stuff that we’re looking at on a weekly basis. I’m thinking about how many people are moving in and moving out. What are our net rentals? How many rentals do we have available as vacant units? How many people are late? Are they getting into the auction process? Have we called them? Are we on top of collections? Are we getting them to call? If we’re not getting them to call, we need to be calling every single day until we get them and get into the auction process.
We’re talking about unrentable units. How do we get the unrentable units rented so we are not losing money? Every week that goes by, you are not filling your units up, and you have units that are sitting there. All you’re doing is kicking yourself in the butt because you’re losing money. This is the process and mindset I’m thinking about on a weekly basis for every single one of my facilities.
It’s fun, and I love it, but it’s also stressful because you have to manage a lot of this. This is all logistics. When you have one facility or two, it’s not a lot of work. Once you start getting more facilities, it becomes a lot of work. You have to have people that understand these concepts so you can be on top of it. Every time we are not on top of this, all we’re doing is losing money. It’ll show you, in your management software, how much money you’re losing based on all of these reasons: unrentable, late, and vacant units. When I see those numbers, I’m like, “Get that fixed now.” I’m yelling at everybody. My husband, Pete, manages everything. I chime in and yell at people. That’s what I’m good at. I’m the director, and my husband makes sure everything is done. That’s the personality there.
I gave you an idea of what these unrentable units are looking like and what we’re thinking internally on how we can be on top of all that. This is for a mismanaged facility or income-producing property. These come up all the time for your facility. You have to be aware of what’s happening. You have to be on top of trying to get everything fixed so you don’t lose that money being vacant.
You have to be on top of your auctions. This is something we discuss every month in the facility owner mastermind. You cannot let an auction go for several months anymore. You have to get the people out if they’re not paying because it is costing you a lot of money not to have those people rented. We have one person internally who handles all the auctions. We do our auctions on a weekly basis. If not on a weekly basis, we also do it on a biweekly basis because we have many facilities.
If you have one facility, you do it on a monthly basis, but you have to be on top of it. You can automate this system, but every state has its own lien laws. You have to figure out whatever state you’re in. Your contract will state the process, and you have to adhere to that contract. We use StorageAuctions.com, which is a good company. We’ve been with them since the beginning. That’s where the auction started.
Boots On The Ground
We don’t have to go there except to take the pictures because you have to have the pictures to get your units auctioned off. That means that what you need is a boots-on-the-ground person. This is one of the other arms of management. This is a big part of how we run our business. Who is the boots-on-the-ground person? Are they capable of managing everything that needs to get done to make sure that we stay on top of our net rentals and get the place leased up? If somebody moves out, what’s the process? How often are we doing our walkthroughs?
We’ve got move-outs, walkthroughs, clean-outs, and maintenance. The boots-on-the-ground person is one of the most important people in the company. The truth is the boots-on-the-ground person is the hardest person to hire, find, and keep on staff, especially if you have only one facility and this person is part-time.
The struggle that we have internally is hiring a boots-on-the-ground person who’s going to stick around because if they’re only working 1 or 2 days a week, it’s hard to have somebody who’s going to stick with you forever. We struggle because we have many facilities. We struggle with boots-on-the-ground people. We’re always training a new boots-on-the-ground person, and something’s always happening.
We were going to create this game, and it’s called contractor bingo. It’s all the excuses that contractors come up with for not finishing their projects. We’re going to make it into a bingo card and play bingo. It’s the same excuses from the boots-on-the-ground people. We have one guy in one of our facilities. It was raining. He didn’t come. He only works on Thursdays and Sundays. On Thursday, it was raining. He didn’t go. He only went on Sunday. That means he did not go for one day. That’s one full day that nothing got done. It’s annoying to me.
This is something that you struggle with. Can we get everything done in one day? If it’s a big facility, you need more than one day because it takes a long time to go through, take pictures, do a walkthrough, open up doors, clean out units, and handle any trash. One day is not enough time to get everything done. On one facility, they’re going out once a week. What happens is they’re only going out once a week. Everything that’s supposed to get done on a weekly basis doesn’t. It gets pushed out, and all of this trickles out. You have unrentable units. You have people calling, and you cannot lease a unit to them.
That is a huge no-no. I do not want to be turning away anybody who calls up and wants to move in and can’t because of us. If it’s our problem, we are the problem. If there’s an issue, we’re the problem as a management company. You have to have a good boots-on-the-ground people. We have a boots-on-the-ground person and our boots-on-the-ground people.
When we go out and find them, our boots on the ground, people have to be a jack of all trades. They have to be able to do everything. They have to be able to work in all different types of weather. They have to be able to fix everything. They have to be open to mowing the lawn, changing a spring on the door, painting ballards, or getting on a roof and fixing a roof leak or the padding. Every week, there’s so much stuff that goes on that you need somebody who’s versatile.
This is a thing that’s changed for us as we started to grow. When we started, our boots-on-the-ground people were lawn maintenance people. They’d go out and do some handyman stuff here and there. What we learned is that your boots-on-the-ground person is going to cost you a lot of money if you do not hire the right person.
One of the training sequences that we do is that we teach our boots-on-the-ground people to change the springs down on the doors. Pete will go in and show them how to do it. What Pete will do is lock himself into a unit and have the person change the spring in the unit in the dark to be able to change that out. They have to be able to master that. That’s one of the big things that we do in training because changing out springs is a huge part of the job, especially if you get a broken door. Otherwise, you have to go and do it, or you have to hire a garage door person to do it. That costs a lot of money.
Our boots-on-the-ground people do everything. They paint, get up on the roof, and fix everything they can. That’s the type of person that we hire. We’re okay with paying a little bit more money if they have the skills to do all of that stuff. We don’t have to call around contractors and try to find a door person because we didn’t hire the right person to be able to do the job. Boots on the ground is a huge part of how our management runs and how we can make our management process as seamless as possible. It will be a huge holdup if you are not good at doing this and training them.
Comprehensive Overview
These are the five big parts of management internally. This is what we’re focusing on. We’re focusing on being good with marketing and having the best phone staff that we possibly can, somebody who is amazing at converting. We keep track of conversions and how many conversions each person does. We watch the phone people.
Whoever is doing the most conversions is how we change the sequence of the phones because they’re not on it every week or month. We’ll say, “This person was good for the first couple of months. Now they’re lagging. This person over here was second on the phone system. They’re doing way better than the first person. Let’s switch it up.” We’ll switch the phone sequence on who answers the phone and how they answer it. Some are better than others. Sometimes, you’re not in the mood. They’ll be pitching and trying to get people to convert. It’s okay. Let’s put you on customer support or collections. Phones are important.
The net rentals with the price and the occupancy. I talked about yield management. We get into yield management a lot in the coaching program. We go over it in the course, but we get into that. Once you get into ownership, you understand. Let’s say that all these units are vacant. We have a lot of vacancies. That means that the price of that unit is going to be cheaper than if you only had five units available or one unit available. That’s called dynamic pricing. That’s what we have to keep track of for each one of our facilities per unit.
If you’ve got ten different unit sizes, you need to be on top of looking at every single one of the prices, how much you have available, what’s the price, and how much you’re going to be charging based on your availability. Softwares like storEDGE automate that. A lot of software does not automate that. When you do demos on your software, you want to be asking about their yield management and dynamic pricing processes and how that works. We take full advantage of that inside of our storage software and dynamic pricing.
We have at least 5 or 6 different prices. That’s something we could talk about under the marketing. Everybody knows Google Ads and SpareFoot. You also have your website and your Google Business listing. That’s part of our marketing. We spend a lot of time every week. We’ll pick a couple of facilities every week to work on because we can’t do all of them. We’ll look at the website. How is the website looking? Is the flow of the website good? Is anybody complaining about the website?
I always have a meeting with my phone manager before this. She told me that somebody had called one of our facilities and the price on the website did not match the price in the rental center. The price on the website was cheaper than the rental center, but when they were trying to book it, they couldn’t get the cheaper price. They called in and complained. We matched the price and gave it to them. You have to make sure that it works like that. You have to make sure that the prices on your website are the same prices that you have inside your management system.
On the website, we have one price, and we have Google Ads. For any facility that’s less than 80% to 85% full, we do Google Ads for it. We have a different price for those people. There are a million ways you can do it, but the way that we do it is by doing sales calls and directing them to the website. You can click on it, and it’ll call us. A lot of people will do that. They’ll call right in. We look at how many calls we’re getting from this ad on a weekly basis and how much those calls are costing us.
We also have another ad that clicks here, and we could run it online. It’s all completely automated. You don’t talk to anybody. There are two different types of people in the world. People do everything online, and some people want to call in and talk to somebody. That’s why we do those ads. For each of those ads, we have different prices based on what we have available. Why would you do 50% off for your first three months for the entire facility when all you have left is four 10 by 10s. You’re struggling to get those 10 by 10s rented. You’re going to have a promo price for those units.
We look at it on a weekly basis. You’re trying to think, “What am I charging for a 10 by 10? Am I getting move-ins for that unit? If not, what price should I be charging for that 10 by 10? All the other unit sizes are doing fine. We’re full of all those. We’re struggling with 10 by 10s.” On one of our facilities in Georgia, we are struggling to get 10 by 20s. It’s got a good mix of 5 by 10s, 10 by 10s, 10 by 15s, 10 by 10s, and 10 by 30s. We’ve got a good mix of units, but for some reason, we cannot get 10 by 20s filled. We have lowered the price. We do promos. We tell the people on the phone that the price matches. We try to convince them to. Our Google ad is, “Get a 10 by 20 for the price of a 10 by 15, or 10 by 10.”
Our marketing is specific based on the unit sizes we’re struggling to fill. You can imagine. If you have a lot of different sizes and you’re looking at the occupancy, price, move-ins, and move-outs, it gets convoluted. A small facility is not that big of a deal, but a couple of hundred units is a lot of work to keep track of and be on top of. You want to make sure that you’re doing that.
We have Google Ads, sales, and direct-to-website. The prices are different based on what we have available. We have SpareFoot. SpareFoot has a completely different price than Google Ads. SpareFoot is expensive. We have a cheaper price in SpareFoot because you have to pay double or triple the amount. We’ll have a cheaper price if they come through SpareFoot. SpareFoot is complicated. If you bid higher, you could do maybe a different price.
We have different prices for SpareFoot. Our website has a different price. There will be a promo going on based on the units we have available. We have Google Business Listing. Google Business Listing is by far one of the most important things that you can do as an owner. Make sure that your Google Business listing is the most amazing and beautiful one you ever have because that Google Business listing is what comes up on Google Maps.
You can also do the same thing for Apple Maps. Apple has said that they’re putting a lot of money into Apple Maps because all these iPhones use Apple Maps, and they’re going to try to get it to where it’s their own thing. It’s going to be a competitor of Google Business listing. We’re looking at Apple versus Google Business listings. We’re making sure that we are updating those on a weekly basis with new pictures, posts, or blogs.
Another thing I didn’t put in here is SEO. We spend a lot of money on SEO. We don’t spend a lot of money. We spend a lot on another person. We have an in-house person that manages all of our SEO. If you are not focusing on SEO for your company, you are missing out because the truth is that, for the most part, 80% to 90% of the people who come in are going to be coming in online or through some online marketing that you’re doing.
If you are not focusing on SEO for your company, then you are missing out because, for the most part, 80% to 90% of the people who come in will be coming in through some online marketing that you're doing. Share on XRarely ever do we have walk-ins, drive-by, or referrals. Our sheet will have the name of the facility. We have the Google Ad sales, SpareFoot, Google Ad website, walk-ins, referrals, and drive-bys. Every week, for our facility, we’re saying, “We got three move-ins here, two here, four here, one here.” We rarely ever get any move-ins from walk-ins or drive-bys. Back in the day, you could put up a sign that people would drive by and they’d move in, but now, this never happens. Most of the time, the people that are going to be moving in are moving in from those three things or any online marketing you’re doing. That means that your SEO has to be amazing.
If you’re not working on that, understanding that, or having somebody help you do that, you’re shooting yourself in the foot. I can guarantee that we have been working on SEO for a while now. Our SEO is amazing, and it helps. That’s why we have many move-ins. We’re getting, on average, 10 to 15 move-ins on a weekly basis for each of our facilities.
Our twelve facilities are completely full now. We have four facilities that are not full. Those facilities, we’re getting, on average, 10 to 15 move-ins a week. The reason why is because of what I’m telling you. This is what we’re doing. This is how we’re doing it. Our marketing is on par, and we have to compete with CubeSmart and Extra Space in Clarksville, Tennessee, or Orlando, where we have facilities. We are competing with bigger players, and we are still getting 10 or 15 move-ins a week. It’s because of everything that I’m telling you.
Your website has to be good for people to follow through on. If it’s not, people are going to drop off. They’re going to find a website. Go to a U-Haul or Extra Space website and try to book a rental. It’s easy to do that. That is how your website should be. If it’s not, people drop off. They’re like, “No, I’m going to find somebody cheaper. I know because I do that. I’m like, “This is way too confusing. I’m out.” I’m looking for glasses online. I haven’t done that before. I started looking online at a couple of websites. I’m like, “This is too complicated with the whole thing. I’m out. I’m not using this website.” It’s the same concept but for your storage facilities.
You have a high-level brain dump on how we manage all sixteen of our facilities. This is what we’re focusing on and working on on a weekly basis. I’m trying to put a process together for all my students. I’m going to put a whole course together for them. I wanted to do a brain dump. You guys got the brain dump.
It is management. You’ve got marketing, phones, and net rentals with your occupancy, price, and auction process, and you’re able to stay on top of auctions. Auctions and bad debt are the two things that go hand in hand. We say people are one to 30 days late and 30 days or more late. If they’re 30 days or less late, they are being called every single day. Every day, they’re being called, emailed, and texted, “You need to pay.”
After day 23, they go into the auction process. From 30 days on, we don’t contact them once a week. We say, “You’re going into the auction process. You’re about to get an auction.” It’s a whole internal system. It’s an SOP that we’ve internally created because we have many tenants. On average, around the 15th of the month, we’re still at about 20% past due. We still have 20% of the people that haven’t paid. That is a ton of money. You’re having to call and say pay all the time. Our collections person, their job is, as soon as the person’s late, they’re on top of calling every single thing.
Hiring the best person hiring good phone people that you train is going to make or break your facility. The boots-on-the-ground person, if you don’t hire a good one, they’re going to screw the whole process up. That could be you for one of those things, or you have to find somebody to do that. Those are the two most important types of people in your company.
That is my brain dump. Any thoughts on that? Any questions? Somebody is asking, what is SpareFoot? SpareFoot is an online company that does ads for your facilities. They do a lot of SEO. They get you on the first page, depending on how much you bid. It’s all money. It’s a company that markets for tenants for your facilities. I’m going to say there are some competitors that are trying to get startups to compete with SpareFoot. Over the course of 2025, we’ll have more options outside of SpareFoot. For now, SpareFoot is a big company that does marketing for tenants and owners.
Anything else? Any thoughts on this? Any questions? I’m going to repeat myself. StorageNerds.com for the coaching. Stacy Rossetti for all my courses. The deal analyzer is how to run numbers. Everything I talked to is in the course. I teach for two days straight and go over step by step what you’re supposed to be doing and how you can think outside the box. It’s virtual. Hop on and hang out with me. I have a Facebook group. It’s called Super Simple Self Storage. Make sure you join that group and come in. Ask any questions you have. We’re always there answering all the questions. I appreciate you hanging in there till the end. I will see you guys at the next session. Take care.
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