Once you find potential clients, how do you reach them? What is the most effective method? Today, Stacy Rossetti explores two commonly used methods for reaching out to potential customers in the self-storage industry: cold calling and mailing letters. This informative podcast provides a clear overview of each approach, its advantages and disadvantages, and the situations in which each method is most appropriate. Stacy also shares her insights on the difference between primary, secondary, and tertiary markets. Understanding these markets is one of the essential keys before you get into storage investing. Learn how to find, fund, and run that storage facility with Stacy Rossetti in this episode!

—

Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

The Difference Between Cold Calling And Mailing Letters To Owners

In this episode, what I’m going to talk about is finding facilities. Since you guys are all new, how does Stacy find all these facilities to buy? Now we have a program in StorageNerds and it’s called Turnkey Acquisitions. I don’t know if you guys have heard of me talking about this, but I basically have ten virtual assistants that work for me and they do nothing but call owners and see if they want to sell. The facilities that we buy is cold calling. I’m going to talk about that. There are a couple of different ways that you can do that. You have to think about when you’re cold calling, it is different from going on Crexi. What I’m going to talk about is the difference between Crexi and cold calling. I’ll show you how we maneuver through those two ideas of how we find our facilities.

That’s the purpose of this episode. Typically, what I do is I try to find them, fund them, and run them every month. On Mondays, it’s Find Them, Fund Them, Run Them. The schedules got screwed up because I haven’t been here for a while. Know that there is a method to the madness. The three-step process that I teach is Find Them, Fund Them, Run Them. Hopefully, next episode if I can come, I’ll do Fund Them and then after that, I’ll do Run Them. I saw there’s a whole bunch of newbies here.

As of this episode, we own episode storage facilities. How does Stacy find all these fifteen facilities? Another thing I was going to tell you was that, in the Super Simple Self Storage Course, when you buy that, you get access to the first twelve facilities that I bought. I basically break those down into case studies. Those facilities are all facilities that were less than $1 million. It’s good first-time buyer facilities. On every single one of those, I did the case studies last quarter of 2022 of how I found them, how I fund them, and how I am running them now. If you’re interested in watching that, that’s a very good bonus session for the course. I already told you all that I do cold calling.

We do not use Crexi to find facilities. If you don’t know Crexi, it is the website that real estate brokers use to list their commercial properties. Any type of commercial property is listed on Crexi. I’m going to try to give you an overview of how we use Crexi. I’m telling you we like to do it the hard way. You have the easy way and the hard way. The easy way to go on Crexi and look for storage facilities. That’s the easy way, and then there are all these storage facilities.

The truth is when you go onto Crexi, the prices are ridiculous, especially nowadays because the interest rate is so high. Crexi prices are super crazy, most of them. It’s like 80% of them. On Crexi, your goal is to find the diamond in the rough. How can you find that diamond in the rough? This thing is a skill within itself. Google Maps and find facilities is the way we do it. I call it virtual driving for dollars. I’m going to tell you that way is the best way to find storage facilities, but it is also the most tedious way to find storage facilities. If you do not want to do the most tedious, then, everybody goes onto Crexi. Crexi lists the properties and there are 700 storage facilities for sale right now. You can go onto Crexi, contact the realtor, get all the information, and run a deal analysis.

That’s what you can do. That’s the easy way to find storage facilities. The hard way to find storage facilities is to virtually drive for dollars and then cold call, which is calling the owners. I’ve done every way. When you get into my coaching, we go over fifteen different ways to find storage. Some people like to send out letters. Some of my students do letters. What they say is that, “If you send out a letter to owners, then they’re going to call you back.” It’s not you calling them but they’re calling you. When they call you, that means that they’re interested in talking and maybe possibly selling their facility to you. You have to think of cold calling versus mailing letters.

Cold Calling

These are two different mindsets. When you’re cold calling somebody, they are not thinking about selling. In fact, I talked to an owner and there are some facilities up in the North Georgia area that we almost bought in 2022. We were working with him. We put an offer in. It was going to be an owner-financing offer, and then right at the very last minute, he backed out. We told him, “Whenever you’re interested in selling and if you decide that you want to do this, then call us back and let us know.” I randomly got an email, and he said, “I think I’m ready to sell now. I’m not putting in the time and the effort to manage these facilities like I should be,” which was the same thing that he had said in 2022.

I talked to him on the phone and told me that every week, he talks to at least 1 or 2 people that are trying to buy his facilities. He has six facilities in total. There is 1 of them or all 6 of them or whatever. Every week, he’s talking to somebody. What he said, too, is that when he talks to people on the phone, he’s asking them, “Why do you want to buy my facility? What interests you about this facility? Do you have a number in mind? What cap rate are you thinking? Would you be interested in buying?” He’s an educated owner that owns the property and he’s trying to figure out if the person that’s calling him on the phone trying to buy his facilities is legit and they’re not tire kicker.

What happens is a lot of people, it’s easy to call an owner and say, “Would you be interested in selling your facility?” They then say yes and then you do nothing about it. There are a lot of times we’ve talked to a lot of owners that have said, “Everybody calls me, they all want to buy my facility, but I hardly ever get an offer.” He’s like, “Are you going to give me an offer? I don’t want my time to be wasted.” This is something that I am hearing over and over from owners. What happens with my virtual assistants because they’re cold calling, they’re the ones that are trying to get in touch with the owners. Their job is to call them and get them to give all the information so we can send them offers.

There are a lot of owners out there that’s like, “If Stacy wants to talk to me personally, I will talk to her. I want to make sure that she’s going to send us an offer because I’m tired of getting 1, 2, or 3 calls a week. People are asking me if they want an offer and I send them the stuff and they never want an offer.” If you’re going to cold call, you need to be legit about it. Otherwise, you’re giving everybody else to give them an offer a bad rap. Owners are getting very annoyed because so many people are calling right now. When you have to think of that mentality of calling them, first of all, are you cold calling the owner? Are you going to be able to have a conversation with this person? Back in the day, I used to call up and be, “Would you be interested in getting an offer?”

They’d be like, “Sure. I’ll take an offer.” I’ll say, “Give me these things. This is what I need and I’ll make you an offer.” They would give me something, I would run the numbers, and give them an offer. Gone are those days anymore. That was pre-COVID. I wish it was back to pre-COVID, honestly. The last COVID screwed everything up. For the last years since 2020, everybody wanted to get into storage and everybody still wants to get into storage. I get it, but if you’re going to cold call people, be legit about it. Talk to the owners and know and understand what you’re talking about. The truth is that when you talk to an owner on the phone, the only way they’re ever going to sell you this property is if they know, like, and trust you.

Luckily, a lot of people know, like, and trust me or they want to do business with me. That’s because I’m very confident. I talk to them. I know what I’m talking about but they trust me. I got an email from somebody that was like, “Would you be interested in selling your one facility or whatever?” “It’s annoying. Why would you send me some random email? I don’t even know who you are.” Keep that in mind. This purpose right here is to tell you that you have to be smart about cold calling nowadays. You can’t randomly cold call. It’s getting harder on harder because there are too many hands in the pot. This is the mentality that we take here, which is the mentality internally. My virtual assistants have been doing cold calling for a year now.

Mailing Letters

They’re putting in offers for a year. I’m telling you, they know what they’re doing. They’re putting in offers every week. It took them six months to get to that point of calling and talking to owners and putting in offers and then relying on me to help them and guide them through that process. You could see over the course that they’re getting better at it. Know that cold calling is not easy. It’s difficult and you have to understand the entire process and how to talk to owners in order to do it. This is the hard way. Mailing letters is the easy way. You can buy a list of storage facility owners. The lists suck. They’re not good. Expect a 1% callback rate. If you send out 1,000 letters, you’ll get maybe 10 people to call.

Out of those 10, maybe 1 of them will be interested in working with you and stuff like that. You have to know that mailing out letters is easy, but when you get that call coming in, you need to be on top of it. You need to know what you’re talking about. You have to understand deal analysis. You have to be able to talk to them and get them to know, like, and trust you on the phone. Mailing letters is easy and then cold calling is hard. We choose the hard way. Why do we choose the hard way? It’s because nobody wants to do cold calling. Finally, virtually driving for storage. I’m going to show you all how I do this. All I do is go onto Google Maps and then I search storage.

Primary, Secondary, And Tertiary Markets

Before we go onto Google Maps, Marshall is asking, “How do you get the list of owners to cold call?” That is what I’m going to show you right now. What I want to do real fast is I want to show you guys the difference between primary, secondary, and tertiary markets. Before you start getting into anything with storage, you have to understand these three different types of markets. This is commercial real estate in general. The primary market would be Nashville. If you go onto Google Maps and search Storage Near Me and if you’re living in a major metropolitan area, you’re going to see the REITs. Primary is U-Haul, public storage, extra space, all these big players.

Typically, those properties are super expensive. I teach don’t even look in primary markets unless you can afford $3 million-plus facilities. If you can afford $3 million-plus facilities, maybe there’s a market out there that you can look in. If you can’t afford $3 million, you should be looking to either secondary or tertiary. Primary is $3 million-plus, and the population is super important. The population of primary markets is greater than 250,000. When you’re googling the population of Nashville, that’s a primary market. What I do is I’m in a certain range, which is what I call a sub-primary market. The sub-primary market is in between secondary and primary.

That’s supposed to be greater than sign, but I always mix up greater than and less than so everybody knows. In the sub-primary, the population is going to be around 150,000 to 250,000. The primary is 250,000-plus. You then have secondary markets. The price range between sub-primary is going to be $2 million plus. It’s a lot and sometimes it’s even more. It’s going to be more expensive. The secondary population would be 75,000 to 150,000 population, and then the price range is going to be $1 million to $3 million.

You have what’s called sub-secondary. The primary market is all cities with populations. This is Nashville and then the sub-primary is going to be the suburbs of Nashville. The secondary is going to be Clarksville. We’re buying a facility in Clarksville, Tennessee now, and then sub-secondary would be a suburb of the secondary market. The sub-secondary market is going to be 25,000 to 75,000 population. Also, the price is going to be $500,000 to $1.5 million. You then have the tertiary market. Tertiary market means country. You have two different types of country markets. You have the 25,000 or less and you have a 5,000 or less population. Five thousand is probably a couple hundred thousand and less than 300,000.

This is going to be anywhere from 700,000 to 300,000. This is less than $300,000. This is a little tiny facility. Now you have this idea. You’re asking yourself, “What can I afford to buy?” Reverse engineer where you should be looking. There’s no reason for you to be looking in a primary market if you can’t afford $3 million. There’s no reason for you to even be looking at a secondary market unless you can afford $1 million. If you can’t afford that, there’s nothing wrong with it. You’re looking at a different market, which is tertiary markets. What’s so funny is that back in the day, all these main players were all primary markets. The primary market started to get oversaturated. Now you’re seeing a lot of primary markets coming into secondary markets.

For instance, I live in Tallahassee. Tallahassee is a population of 200,000 to 300,000 people depending on the time of year. I don’t live in a primary market. In the very downtown part of Tallahassee, there’s one CubeSmart. I don’t even think there’s any U-Haul here or anything. When you start looking on Google for storage in the areas that you’re interested in, you have to be aware of who the players in those markets are. That’s the purpose of me showing you this. Who are the players? You’ll start to recognize that in a primary market, you have all the bigger REITs there. You might have some life storages that want to be bigger players and stuff. Maybe in these primary markets, they’re growing, but there are all these huge players in these markets.

Every once in a while, you’ll have massive or huge storage facilities that are one-offs or whatever. For instance, in Tallahassee, we have Storage King or something. Within the panhandle in the South Georgia area, they have 6 or 8 facilities, maybe 10, but I’m not sure. Now, they’re like us. They’re a good secondary market player. They’re in Valdosta, which is where we’re at. We’re in Tallahassee, panhandle Florida, and South Georgia. That’s where they are. This is the secondary market player. You want to pay attention to this. You want to know how much each of these facilities in each of these markets is going to be. There was a facility that came up for sale in Tallahassee in 2022 and it was $4 million. I had never seen a facility in Tallahassee come up or anything like that.

This is a sub-secondary to primary market, and it was a $4 million facility. You have to know that however much money you can come up with is where you should be focusing your time and your energy to look. You have to know if it’s 80/20. With financing, you’re going to have to put 20% down. If you can only come up with $50,000, then you should not be looking in secondary markets unless it’s a small secondary market or something like this. Honestly, I think secondary markets are becoming more expensive. It’s what I’m seeing now because of what happened over the last couple of years. If you can only come up with $50,000 and you can only afford $300,000, $400,000, or $500,000, don’t waste your time looking in a secondary market.

Look in tertiary markets. I’m talking about we are going to be building our lists of owners that we’re going to be talking to. When I bring students on because my turnkey acquisition is virtual assistants, what they do is they get the parameters of the student because we find our deals for my students. The students tell me, “I only have $50,000 or $100,000 and I want to be in Missouri.” If somebody is telling us, “I have $50,000 and I want to be in Missouri,” we’re not looking for a facility in St. Louis or these big areas. We can’t look in Branson, Missouri, because it is super expensive. We have to find little tertiary markets and we start talking to the owners in those markets for that student.

This is what you guys have to think about when you start building your list, “How much money can you afford? In which areas should I be looking?” When we started with my virtual assistant and they were building lists, they would have all these U-Halls and CubeSmart on the list. I was like, “It’s not that we can call the owners of those. We can’t call the owner and talk for U-Haul. Don’t put those on your list. Don’t call Monster or Life Storage. These are all big huge players. You can’t call me.” Let’s pull this up. This is where I am at, plan and book dinner. I’m in Tallahassee.

If we search for storage in Tallahassee, you can start looking at the facilities. There are two CubeSmart, a parkway, a budget, another prime storage in Fort Knox, self-storage in Tallahassee, and Storage King. This is not the primary market. Maybe I would call it sub-primary because if you’re in Nashville, you’re going to see CubeSmart, U-Haul, public space, and all the stuff there. You have a couple of other ones like auto self-storage. You can see it’s a massive, huge storage facility. We’re not going to be able to afford this. By looking through, you could see that this is definitely not primary but sub-primary. Now I searched to the West of Tallahassee. There’s a little tiny city. I always search for satellite imagery. That’s how I look. You can see B&S. You can zoom in and look to see the facilities.

This is supposedly B&S storage. Maybe that’s indoor. I’m not sure. Another storage facility is the GMS site. There are phone numbers but no website. Maybe this is a brand-new facility, the manager stocks, or the owner hasn’t figured out how to do this. Has anybody ever tried to put up a business profile before? It is not easy to put a business on because what you have to do is you have to go into Google and set up your business profile. They take you through this wizard thing where you fill a whole bunch of stuff out and then they have to do a video meeting with you so that you walk to the property and then you show them, “This is my property here. I’m here. Here’s my sign and my office.” They mail you a postcard and then you get a code.

You have to take the code and put it back. Once you put all that information in and do all that, then you have to go back in and you have to finish filling all this out. It’s not easy, especially if you’re 60, 70, or 80 years old, you’ve owned a facility for 10, 15, or 20 years, and you’re managing it yourself. Every storage facility we’ve ever bought that’s under $1 million never even had a mailbox. They couldn’t ever get a postcard, get the code, come back, and put it back in. They’re certainly not going to sit there and video themselves with Google with some customer service rep or something. A lot of these places are not even on or they haven’t filled all this out properly. That’s what I call virtual driving for storage and building your list. It’s super manual and tedious.

The Hidden Market

There are a lot of storage facilities that are not even on Google Maps. In fact, more than half of the storage facilities I’ve ever bought, probably ten of them were not even on Google Maps. You can get right into Google and check to see if it’s on somebody’s property, but there’s definitely a storage facility. You can drop yourself in and then look around and see if there is a storage facility and then you can add it to your list. In all my list of storage facilities, we classify them as if they’re on Google Maps, they’ve filled everything out and they have their website and phone number. That would be one type of lead if they’re on Google Maps. This one here is on Google Maps, but it doesn’t have everything filled out. It doesn’t have a website, ratings, or reviews.

That would be a different type of lead. When you find a facility that is totally not on Google Maps, those are what I call the hidden market. Those are the hot leads. A lot of times, you have to dig to even try to figure out who the owner is of those. Gadson is a bigger one. That’s a massive, huge facility. When you see storage facilities that are massive and huge, this is basically how it works. Probably he started out building this. These are several phases. This is phase 1, 2, 3, maybe 4. This is what he had first. He owned all this land and then he was like, “Own all this land. I’m going to start building me some storage.” He came in and started building all these because you can see the roof is rusted a little bit and he could afford some of that.

You see that a lot as well too in the tertiary markets. The question you have is, “Can I afford something like this? Can I afford this one? Should I call this guy? Is this something that I should call or not call? Should I add this one to my list?” What you’re going to do when you’re in these little tiny towns in the middle of nowhere, you want to make sure that there are no storage facilities that you miss that may or may not be on Google Maps.

I call this virtually driving for storage. It’s like, “Are there any storage facilities that I miss?” Once you start training the eye, you notice what storage looks like. Obviously, you could see storage looks like buildings unless it’s in a climate control building and then it looks like a big square or whatever. Those are harder to detect. Typical storage facilities, you could totally tell this is a storage. You can virtually look around and maybe see if there’s a storage facility that you missed. A lot of times, in these towns, there are always storage facilities that are not on Google Maps.

You want to make sure that you don’t miss those and you add those to your list. I call those the hidden market. It looks like a good-sized town. A lot of times, outside on the outskirts of the town, there may be a storage facility. You want to make sure you’re looking everywhere to make sure that you don’t miss anything. There might be something on the outskirts as well. A lot of times, if you stay along the main road, maybe you’ll find a small one somewhere. Once you take a minute and look through this, you say, “I think I got everything. This is on my list.” When you put all list, I’ll show you maybe next time what our list looks like. Usually, it’s the name of the facility and then it’s the address of the facility. We also write down the website, the phone number, and how many Google reviews it have.

Is it 2-star, 3, or 4 stars? How many star ratings? How many reviews does it have? That’s another way that we classify our leads. If it has a two-star rating and it’s on Google Maps, it’s obviously not being managed properly. We should be calling that owner to see if they’re interested in selling because they’re probably not into it. That’s virtually driving for storage. We spend quite a bit of time. My VAs job is to virtually drive for storage. Once you start getting into it, you train your eye to pick up on storage. It gets easier and easier to do this. It is tedious. C&H is a mini storage with 2.7 stars. There’s no website or anything. Essentially, what I would say is this is a good lead. C&H mini storage probably exists, but we don’t know where it’s at.

Finding Information At Crexi

It’s in Sneads, Florida. I’m going to look for it. What I’m going to do is I’m going to try to find the owner. I’m going to call the owner and see if he’s interested in getting an offer. How do we find owner information? We do that through Crexi. Crexi has two different types of search engines. One of them is all facilities for sale. You could go to For Sale and then you could see all the storage in Crexi. You could do All Types and then you could do Self-Storage and then Apply. You could then see all of the storage facilities for sale. There are 663 storage facilities for sale on Crexi. Remember that I told you this is also an easy way to find storage for sale. This storage could be a whole bunch of different things. Storage could be warehouse storage or whatever.

Work your way through it. I personally don’t look for storage on Crexi because I feel like the prices are way too high. I go to the owners directly because sometimes I feel like brokers get in the way of everything. I want to talk to the owner directly. I don’t have to go through the broker, which is very frustrating. For the one that I’m closing on, there was a broker. He was a very nice, good broker, but some of the time, I wanted to talk directly to the owner. The only reason I’m buying this facility is because a wholesaler brought it to me. Here’s the reason I use Crexi. You have to pay for this. It’s $150 a month. The reason I use Crexi is because you can get all of the information like the owner of a property. I pay for that.

You probably don’t have that. If you went to Crexi, you wouldn’t see that. Basically, we use Crexi to find owner information. Let’s say here’s the property that you wanted to buy. It shows you the contact information. If you click it, it gives you the phone number. If there’s an email address available, it also gives you the email address. This is one of the ways that we use Crexi. It’s not the only way, but it’s one of the ways. It’s a very easy way to find the owner’s information. The thing with Crexi is it not only gives you access to the properties that are for sale, but it gives you access to every property in the country. You literally can find any type of property on Crexi. What I love about Crexi is it gives you an email address as well.

It will show you all of the storage facilities that have ever been sold since 1960. You get access to that database. How powerful is that? There are 35,000 storage facilities that have been sold since 1960. You can click on it. It will show you this self-storage, 25 units, for $211,000. This one sold on March 31st, 2023. You can see the property history, the tax history, and the ownership. Honey Properties owned this. You click on it, open it up, and it gives you all the phone numbers and even the email address of this owner. How awesome is that? It’s powerful. If you want to use Crexi, email me at Questions@StacyRossetti.com, and then I’ll introduce you to Grant, who is our person for Crexi. He’ll make sure that $150 is the Stacy price.

Typically, it’s $200 a month. I don’t get any cutbacks or anything like that. He says, “Anybody that signs up under you will get $50 off a month.” You can have access to all this information plus so much more. Here are all the comps, demographics, population, floodplains, and climate. Anything that you need about the property, Crexi has it right at your fingertips. If you are serious about getting in and buying real estate property, you have to have access to every property in the country and all the people’s information.

That’s basically what the session is. It was about cold calling versus mailing letters versus virtual driving for storage. I’ve done all of those over and over again. Also, get onto Crexi and you can look up properties there. You can look up facilities for sale there if you want. That was what I wanted to show you all during the training session. Now I got to hop off because I got to go to my pitch for my fund. I have a fund, it’s called the Self Storage Fund of America. This is for passive investors that are accredited investors. If you want to buy a storage facility and you’re like, “This is a lot of work. I’m not sure if I want to do that,” you should put money into the fund and then I’ll do all the work for you.

I’m going to pitch that fund right now. The website is StacyRossetti.com/Fund. I typically pitch right after this session. If you want to tune in, you could do that. Jake is asking about the price and all kinds of stuff. That’s a whole other session. This episode was just about finding them. Next episode, cross your fingers, I’ll be here and I will do funding them. I’ll get into the deal analysis, finding money, and stuff like that. If you want to buy storage, get my deal analyzer and my course, and then come onto the Monday night sessions. Essentially, you should be rock and rolling by doing those three things. You can get my course, go to StacyRossetti.com. The course is called Super Simple Self Storage. I will talk to you later. Take care. I’ll see you later.

Important Links

• Turnkey Acquisitions
• Crexi
• Questions@StacyRossetti.com
• StacyRossetti.com/Fund