The storage industry is one of the fastest-growing sectors in the commercial real estate market. Storage facilities are in high demand due to the ever-increasing demand for space. Whether you are an individual looking for a place to store your belongings or a business owner in need of extra space, investing in a storage facility can be a wise move. If you consider investing in a storage facility or using it to diversify your portfolio, tune in to this episode. Today, Stacy Rossetti talks about how she acquired her first storage facility, found it, and is running it.
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Stacy’s Very First Storage Facility: How She Found It, Funded It And Is Running It
I’m in the office now. I’m not in my RV. It is breezing in this office. This is why I love living in my RV. I can always turn the air up or down if I want. My hands are so frozen now. I appreciate you folks coming and hanging out with me. Welcome if it’s your first time and also, if you own a storage facility, let me know please. I would love to get to know you.
A quick reminder that I teach every Monday night. This is open to anybody that wants to come. If you are interested in learning how to invest in self-storage, I am the person here to help you get started on getting your first facility under contract. That’s what I do. I help people get their first facility under contract, and that way, you can hold onto it if you want or keep it for a couple of years, then you could sell it, and 1031 exchange it or whatever you want to do. That’s my job. That’s what I’m here to help you to do.
I teach for free every Monday night. It’s available to anybody. Now, the topic of every Monday night is completely different. This is not the same. I know it says, “How to buy a storage facility in the next 90 days even if you never invested in real estate before.” The truth is you cannot learn how to invest in self-storage in one hour. Essentially, I teach every Monday, and then I have a different topic every Monday for anybody that wants to read. You got to hop on more than once.
I’m going to give you an overview of how self-storage investing works. What I’m going to do is I’m going to go over my very first deal. I’m going to talk about it. How did I find it? How did I fund it? How do I run it? I will show you the numbers. We have a brand-new deal analyzer that I’ve released to my virtual assistants, who are using it. We are working out the kinks and stuff. They are my guinea pigs on the deal analyzer.
Once that is done with the VAs, I will give them to my students. They will be able to use it too. Everybody here, who is not a student or a virtual assistant working for me, does not get access to this deal analyzer. I had a couple of people email me and ask, “How do I get access to the deal analyzer? It’s so awesome.” It’s an awesome deal analyzer but you have to be a student to get access to that. That’s it. That’s the only way you get access to it.
Again, I wanted to let you all know that ahead of time. Finally, I offer a deal analyzer in my course. It’s not the one that you are going to see here because this one only goes to my students but if you need a basic deal analyzer like run numbers, then the one that’s in the course will get you started for sure and help you to run numbers. It’s the one that we used to use back in the day. It’s our first deal analyzer. We also used it, and my students have used it to find deals. It’s available to everybody.
A quick note that we are going to be updating that deal analyzer to a better version of it within the next month or so, and you folks will have access to that through the course. This deal analyzer that I’m going to use now is only for my students. Right after this session, we will hop on a couple of minutes before the next hour. I’m going to hop onto my fund pitch. I pitched the fund right after this session, every single time, every single Monday. If you are interested in investing in self-storage passively, then you can hop onto the Self Storage Fund of America pitch and hear me out. You can decide whether or not you want to invest in that.
You have to be an accredited investor. You have to have a net worth of a million dollars or you have to have an income of $200,000 or $300,000. Depending on how you file. Join me. That’s what the fund is about. It’s a way to invest passively. If you are the type of person who’s like, “This seems like a lot of work,” then you should look at the fund. Finally, the Storage Nerds doors are going to open in a couple of weeks. On the 28th of August, we are announcing the doors opening to Storage Nerds. Storage Nerds is the coaching program.
My calendar opens up for 6 days over the course of 2 weeks. I take calls on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday for two weeks. If you are interested in the coaching program, then you should schedule time. You want to get onto the waitlist, and when you are on that waitlist, you will get access to my calendar. You will be able to schedule some time with me. We can talk about the coaching program if it’s the right fit for you. You will be able to talk to me. I’m the one that does all the calls.
That’s available. The coaching program starts at $1,000 a month. If you are like, “$1,000 a month, that’s too much or whatever.” There’s no need for you to schedule a time with me. I want to leave my schedule open to people that understand what the price is and does investment to get coaching. That’s where that it will do.
If you are not ready for that and still want to do it, you must get your ducks in a row. You got to get everything in a row and get your money in order and sorted out. I’ve talked to many students that are like, “I’m not ready this time but I’m going to be ready next time.” I talked to them, and they joined. It may take a couple of months. It’s okay.
I’m going to go over the first deal. Gary is here. Gary is in Olympia, Washington. Mike and Ashley are in Raleigh, so welcome. They are newbies. Rob is here from Florida. We have storage facilities in Georgia and Florida. That’s why I know that area. In the Panhandle, especially, I know that area very well. The Moines here. Scott is here, so welcome. Greg from Little Rock. Arkansas is a superhot area now, FYI.
We’ve got Pekins from New Jersey, and Dan and Cindy are from Austin. Austin, Texas, that’s where I’m from, so you know. I’m an Austinite but I live now in an RV traveling around. We are in Austin quite often. I have been looking at the Austin market but it’s very expensive. It’s 5% caps, FYI. Stephanie is in Oklahoma City. We will be in Oklahoma City for a friend of ours birthday. I’m going to check that city out because I heard it’s a very cool city as well too. Tanya says she’s here for the first time, so welcome. Lee is from San Antonio for the first time. Gary is here for the first time. Christina is from Winter Haven, Florida. Darryl is here from Detroit, Michigan. Does not own any facilities but looking to Austin.
Debbie and Felicia are here, so welcome. There are in Mexico. Josh from Phoenix is here, so welcome. Jason is from Virginia. Everybody is here. Ed is here from Oregon. We get a lot of people. Welcome. Thank you so much for hanging out with me. I’m going to go over my very first facility with you, folks. I’m going to use my new deal analyzer. I have not used my new deal analyzer on the facility that we have now.
We’ve had this facility for a few years. I have been investing in self-storage for a few years. We’ve come very far. We bought eleven storage facilities in the last few years. We are buying our twelfth. I’m excited about that. Pete, my husband, manages all that. I find and fund them, then my husband manages them. His job is as soon as we get it under contract, he takes over, then he sets up the company and gets all the management stuff ready. He’s doing that. He’s very busy with that. That’s it about me.
This facility I’m going to go over is a good first facility. Everybody here wants to buy their first facility and get their foot in the door. I’m going to give you an idea of what I did, too.
Rehabbing Homes
The first facility, if we are finding them, it was a little bit different because this was years ago. Going onto the MLS and finding anything was possible. Now you go into the MLS to find anything that’s a good deal. It’s not possible. What happened was I have been investing in real estate for many years. From 2011 to 2015, I was rehabbing homes. I was the crazy person that did like 10 or 15 rehabs at the same time.
It was nuts. I rehabbed a hundred homes in years. I do not recommend that for anybody at all. Do not do that because it’s too much work. Now that I’m in storage, why should you do rehabbing? Some people love it. What happened was I was rehabbing all these homes, and then in 2016, I got pregnant. It was Lilian, my daughter. At that time, I was doing 10 or 12 rehabs. I was doing a lot of rehab. I started freaking out about how much time it was taking me to do all these rehabs. I started talking to my realtor and telling him I wanted to start doing something else.
Back then, storage facilities could be on MLS, but nobody was buying.
He’s still my realtor as of now. I talked to my realtor. His name is Richard, and I basically told him that I wanted to start looking for some passive income. He started getting out there and looking for me. We looked at multifamily. We looked at all kinds of different deals. This is the one that he found. He called me up and said, “I found a storage facility. What do you think about storage?” I was like, “Storage sounds good.”
He was a great type of realtor to have on your team. I don’t have anything against realtors except for, sometimes, there are different types of realtors but Richard only works with investors. What he does is he gets up every day and looks for deals on the MLS. He will send you deals. It wouldn’t even be self-storage if it would be whatever. I got a deal from him, and he sent me these several times because he knows that I’m an investor. I’m an entrepreneur. He’s like, “Maybe she’s interested in this.”
Investing In Storage Facilities
It was for sale and a Marina. It was this long dock and all these boating spaces. There was office space and stuff like this. He’s like, “What do you think about this?” I was like, “This is not in what I’m doing in or whatever,” but he will send me stuff like that. It’s what he does. He sent me over to the storage facility. He was like, “What about this thing? It’s a storage facility.” This is back when the storage facilities could be on the MLS when nobody would be buying.
This is back in the day. This storage facility has been sitting on the market for years, and nobody has bought it. I was like, “Storage, that sounds cool. Let me go check that out.” It was only twenty minutes from my house. That was honestly one of the main reasons I went over and looked at it because everything else I have to drive to and go. In Atlanta, traffic is not good.
I drove over and took a look at it. I was like, “This is something I’m very interested in.” At least trying to figure out if it’s a good deal or not. I called up Richard and I was like, “Let’s meet the owner. I want to talk to him and get the story as to why it has been sitting on the market for years.” He scheduled a time with me to go meet the owner. I brought Pete with me, and I was pregnant at the time.
I had this big belly. I was with Pete. We walked the property. I also brought my lender with me because, at that time, I was about to finish up rehab. I was going to roll that money over into something. That lender was like, “I’m going to roll it into something but I don’t know what.” I was like, “What about a storage facility?” He was like, “Storage is fine.” I was like, “Why don’t you come over and check this down? You tell me if you think you would be interested in lending me the money on this.” That’s a tap or a trick, especially for people. I take my lenders to my places a lot of times.
Back in the day, I used to take my lenders too to show them what we were buying and stuff, which is good because they are part of the team. We walked around and met the owner. He went by Butch but his name was John. We walked the property with him, and he was 88 years old. He was like, “My wife wants to retire and go to Florida. We are finally selling but nobody wants to buy this thing.” I was like, “I will buy it for the right price.” He was like, “What’s your price?”
We started talking, and this is what he did. You drive up to the gate, and there’s not a super long road but a road. It’s towards the back. It’s like an industrial area. This was the fence. It’s all rusted and looks good. We’ve tried to get professional pictures that we could put on the website. Over here was a huge big mound of tires that took us a good year and a half, two years to get rid of because we called EPA. They came and got all of them.
This is a very long skinny building. You can see all the way. There’s one row. It’s 64 units. It’s what it is, 64, 10 x 10s. It’s a good size unit, 6,400 square feet. To the left is parking. There’s a ridiculous amount of parking in this. There’s the storage unit. It’s like a storage facility. It’s all asphalt. This facility parks a lot of trucks and stuff. The road gets torn up a lot. I will talk about that a little bit. There’s paving, and over time, it gets beat up.
This is the back part of it. There was parking on the side. We no longer park cars. The rule is no cars because people come and work on them. That’s horrible. That’s our rule. Our rule now for this facility is only big rigs, trucks, and RVs. This is an industrial area, so this area is in Fayetteville, Georgia, South of Atlanta. This would be considered a secondary market. It’s not rural. That’s for sure.
This is the suburbs. It’s a very good market to invest in. The funniest thing was when we bought this facility because, essentially, I searched Fayetteville storage to see what came up. There’s a CubeSmart, a Public Storage, and LiveStorage. When we bought this facility, there were no LiveStorages. There was nothing. All of these facilities are brand new. These are all gone up in the last few years, then you have ours, which is a beat-up old facility.
It looks a lot better now. We took these pictures for the website. We got the whole thing repaved. We put gravel down. It looks super nice. It has been all cleaned up and everything. I wanted to show you that when we bought this thing, there were no storage facilities in this area. It seemed rural but it’s not because it’s so close to the city. This area is one of those areas I was missed for a long time. That was Fayetteville, Georgia. If you all know anything, Fayetteville, Georgia, is super popular.
Peachtree City is over here as well. In between the Riverdale area, which is this missed area, but now, it’s growing, booming, good, nice area. We bought it at the perfect time. Once we sell, that would be a great time to sell too because we will have all these facilities to look at. Also, we are going to leave this open because we are going to look at the competition, what they are charging, and try to get some ideas of what the competition is.
Again, this is what it looks like, and this was a few years ago. We’ve cleaned this up, and it looks nice. Now, I don’t think we’ve gotten professional pictures yet taken of it but it gives you an idea. It’s a long, skinny storage building. This is a 3-acre lot, to give you an idea. This is a lot of acreage, and it’s 64, 10 x 10s. There are probably about 60 to 70 parking spaces. The same amount of units is the parking too.
You can park a lot of vehicles. When we bought this facility, essentially, Butch was like, “Go find a parking space.” Ours are aligned up. We had to come in on this facility and rearrange all the parking. It was a disaster. People were working on their cars and dumping tires. It was a huge dumping ground. It was a storage facility that needed a lot of work. Typically, storage facilities don’t need this much work.
I’ve seen a couple of storage facilities that need a lot of work but typically, not a lot of work is what they need for rehab. Rehabbing for us was clearing out all the tires, getting the trash out, and organizing the parking so that there are lanes and not like, “Go find a spot.” In the back, there was a tractor-trailer that had parked and left its trailer. There was also a mobile home in the back. They were paying for storage for these things, and we had them get those out.
We got ahold of the owners and were like, “You need to get these out now. Otherwise, we are going to get rid of them.” They were like, “Get rid of them.” That took us a good six months to get rid of them because we had to find somebody to pull all those out. We had to come out of pocket. We didn’t come out of pocket on that. We put those on storage auctions, and then somebody bid on it, and they came and paid for that.
We did that all before we paid because we didn’t want them to tear all the paving up. My husband worked very hard to get that stuff out, get the parking, get the bad tenants out, and the good tenants in. This facility needed a lot of work. We have been slowly doing that over the past few years. To give you an idea of what it looks like, we have this brand-new deal analyzer.
Finding a good deal is hard, but the deal analysis is the hardest part about buying storage facilities.
Remember, this deal analyzer is not available to you. A couple of people were like, “I want that deal analyzer,” and they started freaking out. I want you all to know that if you become a student, you have access to this but I want to show you how to run deal analysis. I figured, “I want to run my numbers and see where we are at based on this new dealer analyzer, so who knows where we are going to be at?”
Another thing too, in 2021 November was when Pete repaved this facility. It took him almost the entire year to prepare for that because we have parking. We were full of parking and units. We were doing well, and then we decided that we needed to repave. It took him forever to get close to the repaving. That was the hardest time in the last couple of years when contractors were too busy to do anything. We finally got several quotes. The quotes were completely different from each other.
We had one that was $25,000 up to $85,000 for the exact same thing. I have no idea how contractors even pulled anything out. We went in the middle wire. We decided to come in, and he repaved all the way around the whole facility and then put gravel down on the edges for the parking. That’s what we paid for. It was for $50,000 or $60,000. I can’t remember how much it was but it was right around that.
If you think about this, for the parking. The storage units are not that big of a deal because they are there but the parking, we had to basically move all the parking out and find a place for them to park while we pay. The contractor had to pay everything in a couple of days. He couldn’t take weeks to do this. He had me in and out because we had to go. We had to pay to move all of those cars out. We contacted all the owners. We told them, “We are going to repave. If you can move your car, can you move it over here?”
They happened to be right next to this building. Next to our facility, there was a school, and the school had a huge parking lot. We contacted the school, and it was during Thanksgiving. If I remember correctly. We said, “During Thanksgiving, you are not going to be in there. The school is going to be out. Can we borrow your parking for that week, and we will pay you to have everybody come over and park here? We will tell everybody before they come back from school.” They were like, “It’s fine with me.” We worked out some deal. I don’t know what it was.
Pete, first, what he had to do was get quotes on the paving and then had to move all those cars out. He had to also hire security for that. We had a couple of security guards, night and day patrolling, because it wasn’t all fenced in. It was this parking lot. They were there controlling. The contractor had to come in and repave everything. For instance, a couple of days to do that, and then they had to come in. They had to gravel a couple of days to do that.
For us to repave, this thing was a huge ordeal that took months of work to do. FYI on that, so everybody knows, but now, the place is totally brand new, repaved, and it looks awesome and amazing. I don’t know if we have any pictures of it, honestly. I’m sure Pete took a lot of pictures but it looks amazing. The reason we did that is that we do want to sell. We are essentially going to sell. We have five facilities in the Atlanta area like these, and we are going to sell those as a portfolio.
The Deal Analyzer
We want all the facilities to look as nice as they possibly can. We spent $50,000 to get it fixed up and a lot of time and effort. Hopefully, in the end, that would award us a little bit of extra money. “Lots of work. Fun.” That was really hard. This is the deal analyzer. Let’s try to figure this out and run numbers on this facility to see what it is. I’m looking at 2022’s income. As of now, we have $42,000. In 2021, we had $75,000.
We had a whole couple of weeks where we made no money. Basically, the whole Christmas from November to December. We didn’t make any money. $75,000, we will put that there. We will figure out the cap rate in a little bit. The number of units, let’s say, there’s a hundred. What we are going to do in this facility is to separate the storage units and the revenue. Let’s separate that. The RV revenue and the storage units.
We make $80 a month on 64, 10 x 10s. We will calculate this out. We are typically full for this. It’s $5,000 a month, which is what we are making. We make another, let’s say, $75 a month on the parking. We have 60 spots. $75 times 60 is $4,500. We should be making around $9,500 a month. $9,500 times 12, so $114,000. Let’s do $5,000 times 12, so $60,000, that’s what it’s going to be.
Let’s do 64 units, 6,400 square feet. Let’s do 8% vacant. On the current tab, what I’m going to do is add other income. We separate the RV income from the storage income because it’s two separate incomes. What did I say? We’ve made $4,500 times 12, is what? It was $5,400. I’m going to do a $54,000 here. These tabs here, essentially, this is your valuation for your current income and your valuation if you add any other income.
I want to make sure that those are included in the income. That’s why that is there. We are at $0.85 a square foot. Let’s try to figure out if we can increase rates. We did a price increase maybe months ago. We are not due for one yet, but what we are going to do is look at the competition and see what they are charging now. I’m only going to do one of these but at least we would get an idea.
Let’s pull out a little bit here and try to find a good storage facility. I’m not going to use Live Storage. I’m not going to use tri-level or anything like that. I’m going to try to find a competition. You won’t find a lot of huge ones of competition outside. I saw one. 92 Mini Storages. Let’s check this one out. This one might be competition. It’s got three stars. It’s in the back. This might be a good one to call and see if they want to sell too. I would say U-Haul things. Maybe it’s not. I want to check here. It does not have a website. Let’s find another competition. There’s got to be something around here, no competition outside the primary market.
I don’t want to do near me. I want to do Fayetteville, Georgia. We’ve got Fayetteville self-storage, self-storage CubeSmart. All of our competition has become so big. It’s the weirdest thing here. Everybody is getting big. Let’s do Simpson self-storage. Why is it so hard to find competition? Here’s one, Midgard. This one has a website. Let’s check it out.
Let’s look at prices. I look at this website and like, “This looks familiar.” Is this ESS? What is this one? Mod-guard. You can tell a lot by a storage facility is a big one. This is not going to be a good competition. Let’s go back. Fayetteville has become a primary market, honestly. It looks like we are the only one around that is not the primary market, which is good. That means somebody can come in, buy it, and do whatever they want with it. We are thinking about selling this one. We will find something.
I know there are a lot of storage facilities. There used to be a storage facility right over here too but it’s not here anymore. It must not be on Google Maps. What about Space Shop? This is a bigger one too but at least we can get the prices from them. What you also could do is, I’m not going to go now, but you could go into Radius Plus and log in. You could pull up competition that way as well.
I’m looking on Google but all we have is 10 x 10s. They are choosing. These are climate control. They don’t do anything that’s non-climate-controlled. Look how much they are charging for this thing. It’s crazy. Who can afford $350 a month for a storage facility? I thought, “I’m not going to pay that much.” That was not going to be a good one. We are going to find a good one. If anybody else wants to look and see if they can find something, I appreciate it.
Maybe you can find something too but what I’m saying is that everything is primary storage now. Let’s go over here to Jonesborough. There’s got to be something in Jonesborough. I saw one. It’s Metro. Dollarwise. I talked to the owners of Dollarwise, and they don’t have a Google Map. He wanted to sell his facility for a ridiculous amount of money. I was like, “No, I’m not going to buy that.”
If we look at the competition for this, I want it to be apples to apples. Let’s look at this CubeSmart and see if it is all inside. Is it indoors or do they have an outdoor drive? They have an outdoor drive-up. Let’s look and see what their prices are. This is climate controlled, outside drive-up, 5 x 10s. Here’s a 10 x 10 outside drive-up. $143 a month is what we should be charging for a 10 x 10? That is crazy.
I probably won’t go that high but that seems crazy, honestly. Let’s go back to my deal analyzer now and put it in. We will play around with the numbers. We have $110 in here. What would you all put? I come to the competition page, and I will put 10 x 10s here. It’s $143, but we don’t want to do that. I would put $143 here, and then all of the competition would be here, the name of the property, etc. Try to find the average price per square foot on these. It’s what I would do.
$143 is too high. Let me show you all that we did. This is a good idea. Let me do this. Let me pull up my tracker sheet here, the competition tracker. That’s what we need to do. Why didn’t I think about this in the first place? This is the sheet where we keep track of all of our competition. Let me pull up Fayetteville. Christie works for us and puts the sheet together. It’s an amazing sheet here. Essentially, all we are doing is keeping track.
This sheet looks like our deal analyzer. That’s how we keep track of our competition. As you can see, she’s keeping track of all the different sizes. She’s keeping track of the average price per unit. It’s what she’s doing. Let’s LeBron Fayetteville now. She’s pulled up all the ones that I looked at. Unlike Dollarwise, she doesn’t have anything there because she can’t get ahold of them. As you can see, our competition is nothing but the primary market. 10 x 10s are anywhere from $156 to $109, and the average comes out to $133 a square foot.
We are not targeting what we should be charging them. I’m going to yell at Pete. Let’s go back to the deal analyzer and the info sheet. We are going to put $130 and see what it looks like. If we were going to charge $130, what would it look like? We need to take it from $0.85 a square foot to something. I don’t know what price we should be at but we should take it higher. Our competition is nothing but the primary market. This is probably why we are always full because we are the oldest and cheapest in town. It’s how it is.
Now let’s get into the inputs. This has a million dollars on it. We bought this facility for $250,000. He did not owner finance it for us but he could have owner financed it. If the owner financed it for us, we would’ve put 20% down, 5% interest, and had fixed interest. I put $250,000. This is what I got from my lender. I will put this in. It’s perfect. I won’t put it in under owner financing. I will put it in under the bank financing. We put 0% down. We put no money into the deal. We got it for 10% interest. It’s interest-only payments for ten years. He said up to ten. We could do up to ten years. There’s no amateurization.
This is what we are paying. We are paying $2,083 a month. We can refi it but we are going to sell it. It’s what we are going to do. We never refi it or anything because we make so much money on this thing. The lender that’s lending to us is a good friend of ours. We worked out a deal. We make money thing. This is what our terms look like. We are at a 1,043% cash-on-cash return. Our net percent after our mortgage is 67% to 68%.
If we can take it to $130, that’s where our numbers can see. We bought it for $250,000. We are running it at a 7% cap. I’m pretty sure this thing could go for a 6% cap. Maybe even a 5% cap with all those LiveStorages around. They are charging ridiculous amounts of money. Let’s do $143, which is what our competition is charging. $143, our valuation comes out to $1.3 million. We bought it at a 35% cap rate. That’s at a 7% cap. Let’s see if we can get to a 6% cap. Six cap is $1.5 million. Now, it’s not going to get that much. It’s not going to get all the way up there but you can play with the numbers and see.
Let’s say if I keep it at $115 a square foot, it’s valued at $1.5 million. We bought it for $250,000 years ago. It’s a good deal. We made a lot of money on this deal. If we could get it to $115 a square foot, it’s worth $2 million. Isn’t that crazy? If we can make $60,000 income on our storage facility, the units themselves, and if we can make the $54,000 for the storage. That comes out to $114,000 a year, which is basically what it should be making. We are not making that now because we are still trying to get all filled up from the parking. We are almost there.
A lot of people laughed when we did the paving too which was fine for us, honestly. A lot of people were like, “I don’t need to do this anymore.” We were like, “Fine. Get out of here.” We wanted all those ugly-looking cars getting out there anyways. We are still working our way up but we should be making around $114,000 a year.
I will put this on the bank financing one. Our debt service ratio is 3.7%. Once we raised the rates to $115, it would be 4.56%, and let’s see our cashflow. This is about right. We are making $11,000 a month. Our operating expenses are about $1,700 or $1,800. Our NOI is $948, and let’s look at the bank financing. Our net monthly income is about $7,400. Our cash-on-cash return is 935%. We’ve got a good deal for our first deal.
I wanted to walk through and show you all how I do the deal analysis anyways. I wanted to run numbers on that. We are going to sell this property. I figured it would be worth at least $1.5 million if it’s making that much money. I figured that’s about what it would be. I’m looking forward to that. Looking forward to selling and making some money on it. The best part is that we have it on Google Maps. This is what everybody needs to be doing.
This is our first facility. We didn’t know what we were doing. We were trying to figure it out. Let me search this real fast, Ms. Lillian’s Self Storage in Fayetteville, Georgia. Let’s see if these all pull over now. It’s weird that nothing pulls up. You see the four. This one down here too. This is in Warm Springs, which is probably about an hour and a half South.
We have these five facilities here. Even if we sell these four facilities and do not include this one in, we are going to sell these as a portfolio. We are working on that now. This facility is the biggest one but honestly, all four of them are almost exactly the same. They are all about anywhere from 60 to 100 units. It’s probably going to be around 350 units with these 4. We are going to sell this as a portfolio. We are working on cleaning up for facilities. We’ve had all these for anywhere from 2 to 5 years. This Fayetteville is the first one. I did Fayetteville the first year, and then I did Noonan the second year.
I only had 2 facilities in the first 2 years. In the third year, I think about two. Those are the first ones I bought. It’s time for us to dump those, sell them, and 1031 exchange them or something else. I’m not sure what we are going to do. I wanted to show you all the portfolios that we’ve made. This is what you need to be doing. The reason I say that is because I have a student. The very first facility she bought was $275,00 like mine.
It was 125 units. She picked it up for $275,000. A great deal. It’s worth $1.5 million. She’s got room to grow and going to add on. The second facility that she bought was three facilities. It was a portfolio of 630 units. I partnered with her on the deal. I brought in a couple of lenders, and we all partnered on the deal because she didn’t have $750,000 to put down. We partnered on the deal.
She wants to sell the facility. She’s like, “The market is so hot, let’s sell them.” She took him, and within almost a year, she stabilized those properties like this. She’s only had those properties for a year and bought them for $3 million. She’s listing that portfolio for $700 and only had it for a year. I was like, “I need to be listing my properties out. If she’s going to make that much, I want to make that much too.” I always thought I was going to sell my properties one-off. I’m like, “We are done with that one. Let’s sell them.”
What happened? We talked to Marcus & Millichap. They were like, “If you can do portfolios, you will make way more money versus what you would sell them separately.” I already knew this anyways but they solidified that in my mind. We have North Georgia and several facilities in Central Atlanta. We have Central Georgia, South Georgia, and Florida. We have 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5 different portfolios. We don’t have East Georgia yet, but I’m like, “I need some East Georgia, too.”
We make many portfolios of maybe 300 units, and then you can buy, stabilize and sell them as a portfolio. You make way more money that way. That’s our plan and we are sticking to it. I hope that you all stick to that, too. I wanted to show you all, first of all, the deal analyzer and how powerful this deal analyzer is going to be.
I went over to the deal analyzer as well, too. I went over some owner financing stuff. Over the course of the next couple of months, I’m going to be doing case studies on all my facilities. Every week, I’m going to do a new case study, so you all can learn about all the facilities that I bought. I’m going to run the deal analysis and go over the numbers with you folks. Essentially, the hardest part about buying storage, first, it’s hard to find a good deal but it’s deal analysis. It’s like, “Is this a good deal?” Calling and talking to owners is one thing.
Finding owners that want to sell is one thing but that deal analysis that’s the key. You make money on the purchase. Luckily the market is taken off in the last few years. I got into the market when stuff was ridiculously cheap. All facilities I bought were less than a couple hundred thousand dollars, and they are all going to be worth about what you see now. That doesn’t mean there aren’t any good deals out there. We are buying a facility in our funds where we are taking it from $1 million to $3 million, and all we are doing is increasing the rates. There are good deals out there.
Make sure you are getting out there talking to owners and seeing if anybody wants to sell. That’s how we do. Suddenly, you need to run the deal analysis and look at the numbers. Over the course of the next couple of months, I’m going to focus on the deal analysis and help you understand that better. Anything that you have to say about Fayetteville? My first deal was a very good deal. I’m looking forward to selling that and making some money or anything else that you folks would be thinking about or need help with.
Somebody asked, “How do you purchase a unit without using your own money?” I have so many videos on YouTube about that. Make sure that you join and subscribe to my YouTube channel, and you can watch as many videos as you want there. I have been getting content on YouTube for several years now, so there’s lots of stuff there that you can look at too.
I appreciate you hanging out until the very end. I look forward to the next episode. We are going to go over Noonan. That’s the second facility that I bought. We will run some numbers and see how that one looks as well, too. I’m going to hop on my pitch now. It’s StacyRossetti.com/fund. I’m going to hop on there and see you there. Take care.
