Explore a groundbreaking storage facility in Florida, where space optimization and operational efficiency reach new heights. Join Stacy Rossetti on a virtual tour as she showcases innovative strategies and cutting-edge technologies that have transformed the industry. Discover how this facility maximizes space utilization, offers diverse storage options, and implements advanced automation systems for seamless operations. Stacy also uncovers the comprehensive security measures ensuring the safety of stored items and shares their commitment to sustainability through eco-friendly initiatives. Whether you’re a storage industry enthusiast or seeking efficient storage solutions, this captivating Florida Storage Facility Case Study is a must-watch. Witness the future of storage as we unveil its state-of-the-art infrastructure, intelligent systems, and customer-centric approach.
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The Future Of Storage: A Deeper Look Into A Groundbreaking Florida Storage Facility
Greenville, Florida
What we’re going to do is I’m going to go over the Greenville, Florida facility. This is a small and very good facility. The reason I’m not buying this facility is because it’s too small for me. I’m moving on to the bigger deals, but there’s nothing wrong with doing smaller deals. The first ten facilities that we bought are all exactly like the one that I’m showing you. I’m here to help you get your foot in the door. That is what I’m here to do. I don’t teach how to buy big deals. You can go enlist it. If you want to buy a $2 million, $5 million or $10 million deal, there are other people out there that are doing those deals that will teach you. I am here to help you get your foot in the door.
I’ve been doing this for years. The truth is there is nothing wrong with buying a small storage facility. The very first storage facility that I bought is exactly like the one I’m about to show you. Now we’re on number sixteen. We just bought two facilities that were both $2.5 million each. I’m still not buying big storage facilities. I just buy mom-and-pop storage facilities in tertiary and secondary markets. A tertiary market means the country. The facility I’m going to show you is in the country. Secondary markets are going to be smaller towns in your states and stuff. The secondary market does not mean suburbs of major metropolitans. Those are called primary markets. I’m going to pitch this deal out. I’m going to show it to you.
Another thing I wanted to go over is a lot of people ask me like, “How do we find many deals?” In the beginning, what I did was drive for storage. That’s what I did, driving for storage. This is what I teach my students, “If you can get out and drive around, driving for storage equals market research.” Basically, driving for storage gives you an awareness of the storage market in the area that you’re interested in buying in. It gives you an idea of what types of facilities are out there.
I have driven all over the country in almost all 50 states because I used to live in an RV and travel full-time. We would be like, “We’re going to go to the Grand Canyon. Let’s drive for storage.” What we would do is we’d go on a lot of the scenic byways. We went on to the nice routes and stuff, but along the way, we would find storage facilities. That’s how I got started. All the ones that I find that I don’t want to buy that are in my buy box or not in the states that I want to buy or something like this, then I would wholesale those out. What I do is wholesale. That is what I talked about with the Watertown, New York facility that I pitched, and also the Greenville one.
Inside StorageNerds, my coaching program, I have a program called Turnkey Acquisitions. Turnkey Acquisition is where we find facilities for students. My virtual assistants will find facilities for students. For instance, we met with an owner. His name is Brian in Oklahoma. I have a student, Matt, who lives in LA and he works in the film industry, but he owns rental properties in Oklahoma, and he wants to buy his very first facility in Oklahoma. He hired my virtual assistants to find a deal for him. He’s too busy. He has to do all his film industry stuff.
We’ve been looking for a deal for him. We’ve had a lot of deals that we’ve almost got under contract or almost purchased, and something always falls through or whatever. This time, we have a very good deal in Oklahoma. We met the owner on Zoom. This is the second time we’ve met the owner. I like to meet all my owners on Zoom. I try to get them on Zoom. A lot of people are like, “I don’t even been on Zoom before.” Especially if you’re working across the country and stuff, it’s the best way to meet the owners and talk to them so they can see who you are.
If you're working across the country, Zoom is the best way to meet the owners. It's the best way to talk to them, so they can see who you are. Share on XYou are just a regular person. I do this with my investors, owners, and everybody. I do a lot of business on Zoom. We met the owner. We have a virtual assistant. Her name is Jeannie. She does a very good job of calling and talking to owners. This is the same process that you’re going to go through. I don’t do this anymore. I have all my virtual systems doing it. Essentially, Jeannie gets up every day. She builds her list. She puts 20 to 30 owners on her list and then calls those owners and talks to them. If she can’t get ahold of the owner, then she skip traces.
That’s what she does. She’s been doing this for a while. She does a very good job. She’s very methodical at it. It’s a lot of work to sit there, build a list, call the owners and talk to them. I had a coaching call with another student, Wade. Like everybody else here, he’s doing it himself. He was like, “I was nervous about calling the owners. I built my list.” He’s in Texas, and he is like, “I have a very extensive list that I’ve been doing over the past couple of weeks, 700 facilities.” He was going to start calling, and then he talked himself out of calling.
He’s like, “I freaked out. I decided not to do it. I didn’t call. I was too scared, but then I knew I was going to have a coaching call with you. You told me that I had to call the owners before we met. I got up this morning and I started calling owners. Guess what?” I said, “What?” He said, “The very first owner that I talked to wants an offer.” I was like, “I told you. All you got to do is call.” That’s what we did on the coaching calls. We worked through putting the offer in for the deal. My virtual assistants do this now for me. I don’t do this.
If I could teach somebody in the Philippines to call and talk to owners, you guys could do this too. They’re not even in the same country. She called and talked to the owners. She found this very good deal in Oklahoma. We met the owners on Zoom. It’s him and his son. They’re managing this thing together. He wants to sell the facility for $875,000. When we run the numbers, $825,000 is where we want to be. What would you guys do in this situation? Personally, I would pay $875,000, but my student wants $825,000. The banks are going to be doing $825,000.
Creative Deal Structuring
There are a lot of things that you can do. You could do creatively. I talked about creative deal structuring. I was like, “It’s 50,000. Come on, let’s figure something out, either lower the price, let’s do a note, or put more money down.” The owner’s like, “I don’t want to come down to $50,000.” The student is like, “I don’t want to come out of pocket any more money than I have to, whether it’s for the down payment or to make the DSR,” because banks want that DSR to be at 1.2% to 1.3%. All these local banks that he’s talking to are saying 1.25%. That means you have to lower the price, or you have to come up with some sort of creative deal structure.
The owner is like, “I don’t want to do that.” It’s this whole thing negotiating a storage facility or any property at all. It’s like an art. You got to give and take. I would’ve passed up a lot of deals for $50,000, but I didn’t pass any of them up. $50,000 is like, “Okay.” Some people get in their heads about this kind of stuff. It’s interesting. I love meeting owners. The owner comes onto Zoom. He talks to us. We’re trying to negotiate it out. We’re trying to hash it out. All you got to do is get the owner on Zoom, talk to him, and they’re willing to work with you. They’re just regular people like us.
I’m giving you the process and inside, internally, how it’s working for us so that you guys have an idea. I started out driving for storage, building my list, and then meeting the owners. Remember, I started looking for storage facilities in 2015 or 2016 when being on Zoom and doing things on Zoom was non-existent. GoTo Meeting was just starting. When COVID hit, everybody started going online. Ever since COVID, I’ve taken advantage of getting people on Zoom. As soon as COVID hit, I moved over to Zoom. I was one of those millions of people that were waiting on hold and trying to figure out how Zoom worked.
I figured it out and started taking advantage of meetings and talking to owners online. I’ve done millions of dollars on Zoom’s worth of business. Hopefully, you guys take this to heart. You got to talk to owners, get out there, build your list, drive for storage if you can, get some market research done, and know what your market looks like, the markets that you’re interested in. Get out there and call the owners. Like my student, the first one he called one and made an offer. He was like, “I can’t believe this.” He’s going to start freezing up. He’s like, “I didn’t know what to do. I told him I would text him everything I needed.”
I was like, “You’re fine. You’ve been texting back and forth?” He’s like, “We’ve been texting back and forth. I got so nervous.” I was like, “He doesn’t even know who you are. You are some bloke on the phone that wants to give an offer on your storage facility.” That was it. That’s the same process that Jeannie is doing with my student in Oklahoma. This process with Greenville, Florida, is the exact same process. All we do is build the list and call the owners.
I go deep into that in my course if you’re interested. Don’t forget. I got the course where it will walk you through that whole process as well so you can check that out. That’s the Super Simple Self-Storage Course. If you want to know what to ask the owners and this kind of stuff, I’ll get into that as well because that was one of the things like my student who was like, “I didn’t know what to ask.” I was like, “Did you have the seller call sheet?” The seller call sheet literally lists out everything that you’re supposed to ask for and gives you scripts. He was like, “No, I didn’t have that.” I was like, “You got to have that out when you’re calling the owners.” The seller call sheet is inside the course. You’ll be able to have access to that, so you’ll know everything that you need to ask the owners when you talk to them.
I want to show you the Greenville, Florida, deal that we have under contract. We’ve offered it to several students, and one of them is gone out and taken a look at it. He’s interested, and the other one is going to go out and take a look at it. He’s interested as well too. All they’re doing is working through getting the financing. I’ve introduced one of my students, the one that needs the financing, to a couple of lenders that will lend on the bill.
The other student that’s interested has private lenders. He has the funding. He has to get out there and take a look at it real fast. We may be able to sell it to a student, but I figured I would use it as an example for you to have an example of what we find and what types of deals are out there. We find deals that are $1.5 million, $1.6 million, or $ 1.7 million. We also find deals that are like $200,000 deals.
We use Google Drive to manage everything. You don’t have to use Google Drive if you don’t want to, but basically, the way that we do it is we have a folder. Inside that folder is where we put everything that we need in order to know whether or not it’s a good deal. This is the exact same stuff that you’re going to need in order to determine whether it’s a good deal. It’s the exact same stuff that a lender’s going to need. The whole purpose of the folder is to put everything inside of it and then share it with whoever you need to share it with so that they have all the pertinent information to decide if they want to move forward.
It’s more mismanaged facilities that we buy than income-producing properties. A mismanaged facility is a facility where the owner will not produce documents, P&Ls, and balance sheets. They don’t have anything. This one that I’m going to show you, I would consider this a mismanaged facility. This facility is full, but the owner that has it died. The wife is now doing it and managing it. She does not want to do it at all.
That’s how this one came about. She wants to get this thing off her hands. Her husband was doing the whole thing, managing it and taking care of it. Once he died, she has not been doing a very good thing or dealing with it. She has no documents. She has nothing to show. A lot of times, she’ll take like cash or checks. She doesn’t even have QuickBooks or anything. When we’re calling owners, a lot of times in tertiary markets, especially in like country and stuff, you’ll come across this. This is completely normal. When you get in bigger deals and stuff, you’ll find a lot more of the owners have more of the documents.
You saw the Watertown facility that I did, he didn’t have P&L. It’s a $1.7 million facility. It’s like 230 doors. He’s like, “I don’t do QuickBooks. I pay for everything myself. I can write you down all my expenses. I can tell you everything, but I don’t have anything to give.” He does have a tax return. He is like, “I can give you my tax return because that shows you that, essentially, it’s going through my bank account. I don’t have any P&L or anything like that.” Even with the bigger bills, you’ll always get stuff like this as well too.
You have to know. You’re watching me. Now you know that you do not want to be that person. When you’re going to sell your facility, you want to have a P&L and a balance sheet, and you want your occupancy to be as high as it possibly can in order to get the greatest amount of return on your facility. Eighty percent of all the storage facilities do not have this.
Let’s get back into it. Let me show you Greenville, Florida on the map. It’s a little tiny town in the panhandle of Georgia, right off the 10th. It’s right in between here. This is us. I live in Tallahassee. It’s right in between Tallahassee and Jacksonville. It’s closer to Tallahassee. It’s like 45 minutes away from Tallahassee and a little bit less than two hours from Jacksonville. If somebody has $200,000 that they want to lend, we would buy this or maybe you could work with one of our students, or you could buy it yourself.
This is a little bit too small. It’s only 50 units. It’s too small for us. We’re 200 plus now. We want to be in the $2 million to $3 million range. It is where we’re at on our facilities. We’re trying to get away from the smaller facilities and focus on bigger ones for us. That’s why we’re not buying it. I sold another facility over Chipley as well that we looked at, but it’s a little bit too small for us.
Pete doesn’t want the smaller ones anymore. He wants to have some bigger ones. We’re in the process of selling all of our smaller ones as well. That is our goal. All of the small ones that are less than 100 doors, we will be selling over the course of the next few years. We’re going to be focusing on buying some bigger ones. A lot couple of people have asked like, “Why aren’t you buying this one?” It’s too small. That’s where it’s located.
Let’s get into the executive summary. For everybody new that hasn’t followed me yet, we always put together an executive summary for all of our deals. The executive summary is like a PowerPoint presentation of the project or the deal. This is what it is. You always want to put this together if you’re going to be working with a lender, wholesaling deals, and stuff. A turnkey acquisition inside of StorageNerds is a wholesaling company. We are wholesaling the facilities that we find to our students inside StorageNerds. That’s why we put this executive summary together.
Here’s the facility. It’s 50 units. It’s got a lot of land. You could add on, and your play would be to add on as well. They’re always full, but she hasn’t raised the rent in a long time. Since the husband passed away, she hasn’t raised the rent or anything. She’s like, “If they pay, they pay. If they don’t pay, they don’t pay,” but it is full. This is what the facility looks like. It’s got the two buildings here. It’s got a big tree right in the front, and then it has the carwash.
This carwash has not been used in X amount of years. It’s broken. You don’t want to do anything with this except demolish this and put more units up. I’ll show you what it looks like over, but you would demolish this and then add more units. She says there are always full. Another thing that’s good about this property is that there is no other storage facility within 15 miles of this facility. She’s catering to everybody in the area that needs storage, and that’s why she says it’s always full. She’s like, “It’s just a small facility,” and she hasn’t raised rates. That’s what it looks like.
I’ve been to this facility several times. I know exactly what this looked like. It’s a huge, big piece of property. It’s on this major highway. This is Route 90. It goes parallel to I-10. It’s not right off of I-10, but it goes parallel. It’s a very busy road right here. If you had a nice big sign here and you added some more units here, this could be a very good deal. Here’s the population. It’s a little tiny town in the middle of the panhandle in Georgia. Anywhere in the panhandle is going to be a very good buy and hold.
The panhandle of Florida is the best-kept secret for real estate in the United States, in my personal opinion. Florida is the fastest-growing state anyways in the country outside of Texas, but there’s so much going on in this area. It’s booming, honestly. I don’t know why people think the panhandle of Florida is country. There’s a lot of space and stuff, but I feel like it’s a very good area for growth. We own two storage facilities in the Live Oak Lake City area, which eventually, we will be selling because they are smaller. Whoever buys these could also buy the other ones that we have as well. We have a little portfolio right here.
I get it is a small town, but the truth is within a 15-mile radius, you’ll be able to always have people coming to this thing. These are two lots. This is from Regrid. Regrid is where you can get property information for free. This is where all of our virtual assistants go to find the information. You want to have that on your list of places to go look for property. It gives you parcel data and stuff like this.
It always asks you to upgrade and stuff, but you don’t need to upgrade. You could click on Regrid, then you could come in and go to the map. You could put your address. I don’t use Regrid very often so do not ask me how it works. This is what all my virtual assistants use, but you put your address in here and then it’s going to pull up what I showed you on this map. This is what it looks like, all the parcel information, who owns it, and this kind of stuff, which is public data.
This piece of land is quite big. It’s two whole lots. The car wash is here and you have plenty of room and space to add more units. What I would do is do it in phases. I would add another building. This is probably going to cost you $25,000 to $30,000 to add a building right here. I know that because we’re in the process of adding a building to one of our other units. I got it quoted out. It’s 2,000 square feet for $25,000.
You could fill that one up. Even right here, you could take this tree out and you could add another building easily here. It’s quite a bit of land. I would do that in phases. This lot right here is also included. It’s not as big as this one, but it’s almost as big. You could add maybe two long buildings going this way or shorter ones going this way. I would do this in phases. I fill one building up and then I need another one and then fill that one up. The thing is that there is no storage facility in this area. You have the opportunity to add more units.
You probably know what Crexi is because everybody goes and looks for storage facilities there. We do not use Crexi for storage facilities. You can get a membership to Crexi and get all of the back office information. I could show you what it looks like here. 14012 US-90, let us see if it comes up. You can see here the two lots. This is the car wash one. This is the lot, and then this is the one right next to it.
You could pull out, and then here’s the address. Here’s all the parcel. This is almost the same exact stuff that you get from Regrid for free, but Crexi does cost $150 a month. The one thing that I love about Crexi is that it gives you even more data so you can see the owner’s information. Here’s the mailing address and the contact information. It gives you phone numbers, email addresses, tax information, and everything. Is it in the flood zone? It shows you that so you can know whether or not it’s in a flood zone and a whole bunch of stuff. It gives you school data. It gives you everything. That’s what it looks like.
You could see the other lot right here too. Luther Pickles is his name. He’s deceased now. You can see the same thing. This is the lot here and all the information, the same thing, location, lot details, and building information. Here’s the owner’s information, but then here’s the contact information again. You’ll be able to click that. Sometimes it gives you email addresses. Sometimes it doesn’t. It gives you a lot of phone numbers and everything that you need. It’s a skip-tracing tool. It’s an easy way to do a skip tracing for owner information. It’s not the cheapest. The one thing I love about Crexi is I can get any personal information by clicking on this here. Every property in the country is in Crexi.
I could get any property information if I wanted to know, “Who owns this big piece of property right here?” or something like that. I could click on all these and get all the information, like any property. You just click on it. Another thing that I love about Crexi is that you can get comps for the properties. If we went back to the one that I was trying to buy, we were able to get storage comps for it. Whatever property that you’re clicking on, it’s going to give you the comps for that area as well and a whole bunch of other stuff.
That’s why we always use Crexi to find. These are all comps of whatever property I picked on. It’s commercial comps and residential comps because you have access to every property in the country, plus there are one million other things that you could do with Crexi. Those are the main things that we use. I’m pointing that out. What our VA does is they go Crexi, pull out all the information and then put it into the folder. A lot of the time, that’s what they’ll do so that we have access to it.
Running The Deal Analyzer
This is our Deal Analyzer. You can go to the website and buy this Deal Analyzer. When when you buy it, you also get training videos on how to use it as well. The Deal Analyzer does not work in Google Sheets because it only works in Excel. Google Sheets is not as up-to-date and the newest technology versus Excel. Excel has a whole bunch of different formulas on there. For instance, IRR formulas and a whole bunch of other formulas that Google Sheets does not have. If you see an error message, I’ll show you a couple of things. Because the sheet does not convert over to Google Sheets, you have to use it in Excel, but at least you can get the gist of it.
As you guys know, these are the numbers. We ran our numbers here. It’s making $25,000. It has 50 units, and it’s 4,900 square feet. It’s full. Everything in yellow is what you need in order to run a deal analysis. In our Deal Analyzer, my virtual assistants know whatever’s in yellow. Another thing is, like you can see here, these are the expenses that we have to run the facility. We have property maintenance, which is the boots-on-the-ground person or you doing it and any repairs needed.
For instance, in this facility, if you weren’t going to do it yourself, which I’m sure most people don’t live in the area, then you would have somebody go out once a week, pick up all the trash that’s left by the tenants, and do any over locks that are needed or maybe unlocking anybody that’s overlocked. That costs money.
We have a formula for that. You can see the formula is 0.015 x C6. You can see our formulas in how we run our numbers on our Deal Analyzer. Staffing is the phone person or whoever’s answering the phones. Our formula is 400 x 12. It’s $100 a week to answer the phones for us. It’s 50 x 52. $50 a week is for the whatchamacallit, the overnight people that answer the phones. We have from 8:00 at night until 8:00 in the morning or something. We have an overnight company. In case somebody calls, then they’ll answer the phone for us. That’s $50.
That’s how much it’s costing us to manage our phones. If you’re going to have an office person that’s answering the phones or do the auctions if you do auction processes and stuff like that, whatever you need it, it’s office. Let us go to software and merchant fees. You’re going to use StorEDGE, ESS, SiteLink, Breeze, or whichever one you’re going to use when you have all of the automatic payments coming through, that percentage, which is usually 2.2% to 2.9%, depending on which company you use. Marketing is when you’re going to be using SpareFoot or Google Ads to fill the place up.
Probably in this area, you would start out not doing anything and then see if you get tenants or not. You could put a big sign up that says, “Now leasing,” with your new building or whatever and stuff and see if that works. If it doesn’t work, then you would probably put it on SpareFoot. You would start out with SpareFoot. It’s a company that’s expensive, but it’s a very good company to help you lease-up. Once you start getting leased up, you can move over to Google Ads. Google Ads are going to be way cheaper than SpareFoot.
We have expenses here as well too. We have a $1,000 cleanout. We have CapEx, which is nothing new, build cost or whatever, then we have $1,500 to close the facility or the deal. It’s not going to cost that much money to close it. This is at 1%. This is us not using a realtor. If you had a realtor involved or a broker, then you would’ve to put your 3%, 6%, 10%, or whatever it costs to close the deal. We’re going straight to the owner or to the title company. I’ve already paid the earnest money. They’re already running the title. The property taxes are about $1,000, utilities $1,000, and then insurance $1,000. It’s how much it costs for this facility.
If you do decide to get the Deal Analyzer, these are formulas, but anything in yellow, you can override. You say, “I could do this for cheaper. I’m not going to be as much as Stacy is.” You could go in and change the numbers. Now you can see that the value of this property is coming out to $200,000. We ran the numbers and started out with $150,000, but she said she wanted $200,000.
You can see in the Deal Analyzer that the way that we run our numbers is we do 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 different offers. You can see here that there’s a cash offer, and then we do three owner financing offers, then we also do a bank financing or a private loan is how we run our numbers. On this deal right here, you can see we ran it at 15% down and 9% interest. When you look at these numbers, these terms, you know that this is an SBA loan that we ran our numbers on. The goal is to do the numbers work with an SBA loan, or are you going to be doing a conventional loan?
A conventional loan is 25% down and 6.5% interest. We always run our numbers based on both outputs and then we could see what works with this. If we pick this up for $150,000, at 15% down and 9% interest, our cash-on-cash return would be 33%. If you look at this number right here, this is a price per square foot that should be based on the competitive analysis. She’s at $0.46 a square foot, but based on competitive analysis, which is looking at other storage facilities in the area and what they’re charging.
Remember that there is no competition within 15 miles. The closest one is 12 miles away. There’s a Madison mini storage that’s 12 miles away then there’s a Royal mini storage, which I think are all in Monticello. We have to go 15 miles away to see what everybody’s charging, which is very good because that means that you should be charging what you know your competitors are charging because there’s no other storage facility in the area. We looked at those three and you could see these are the prices right here.
The unit mix is 5 x 10s and 10 x 15s. The reason there are errors here is because I’m opening this up in Google Sheets and not in Excel. If you open this up in Excel, you’d be able to see it. She’s got 26 of these and 24 of these. She’s charging $40 and $70. The competition is charging $46.67 and $83.33, which comes from the average price per square foot of what the competition is charging. That’s how we get it. We’re coming out to the $0.66 a square foot.
If we look at the closest competition, it’s $0.66 a square foot. The value of the property if you raised the rent is going to be $281,000. You can see the numbers right here. We tried to get it at $150,000. She said no. She said, “You only tell it at $200,000.” We put it under contract for $200,000 because even at $200,000, it’s still a good deal. You could add all those units and stuff. Hopefully, you guys are seeing my thought process as I go through these deals and look at them. You could see that the value of the property is at $281,000 just by raising the rent.
You don’t have to raise it to $0.66. You could say, “All the people that are there, I’m going to raise your rents by $5 or $10, and in 6 months, raise them again another $5 or $10.” You don’t have to piss everybody off, or you could raise the rent. We test that. Sometimes we raise the rent and sometimes we do it in increments to see which one works better. It’s like six one way and half a dozen the other. You could see that we looked at the info. We did the input and expenses and looked at the unit mix and what they’re charging versus what the competition is charging. We input and start running the numbers and trying to come up with offers. In the end, we put it under contract for $200,000.
With a deal like this, you want to be able to run numbers on what you could be building. Let’s say you add a 2,000-square-foot building. It’s going to cost you $25,000. You would put that into your CapEx. It costs a little bit more than that. The metal frame itself was about $25,000 for 2,000 square foot building, and then you have to do the concrete, which is coming out to about $10 a square foot now. It’s going to be a little bit more than that. I’d say maybe $35,000 all in for a $2,000 building.
You would lease that up. You’d want to say, “How much money am I going to make if I add another 25 units?” Each building will have 25 doors on it, and then you would run the numbers and add that here as well. If I decide to pitch this, I’ll be running the numbers. Everything will be up to date on that, so we could see a whole bunch of different variations. You’ll be able to add a couple of buildings and raise the rent on this facility. The property is $200,000 for this thing.
We talked about the property report card is where we get the information from the county. This is Madison County, Florida, and then you can pull the records of everything. It’s the same exact information as Crexi and Regrid a lot of the time, but you can compare to make sure. We have already looked at the pictures and everything here. We saw what the facility looks like. We take all this information and put it into the executive summary.
Our virtual assistants gather all this information, and then once it’s done, they put it into the executive summary. That’s the process. A market cap rate is, in that area, what do properties typically go for? We ran it at a 7% cap, which is pretty good. Everything is about 7%. $25,000, 50 or 49 units. We’re taking it from $0.46 to $0.60 a square foot. The value of the property is $158,000. Once you raise the rent, it comes up to over $300,000.
Here are the expenses, utilities, and stuff. Here’s the unit mix. Total square footage, the rate we’re at is $0.55 a square foot. If we were full, we’d be at $0.55 a square foot, and you should be at $0.65 a square foot, which means that you could raise the rent by $10 and you’ll be good to go. Not a lot of people are going to leave when you do that.
That’s it. We’ll update it. If anybody’s interested in this deal, email me at Questions@StacyRossetti.com, and then we’re going to update the folder, get everything ready for the pitch, and most likely, if the students still want it, we’re going to pitch it out to the world as well. That’s it for the folder. Let me know what you all think about that deal.
James is saying, “I’m trying to get my first storage deal.” That’s what you’re here for. I’m here to help and guide you. Javonte says, “In this free in your simple course, I acquired your course and was curious because I assume the four cost me, which was confusing.” The course does not include the Deal Analyzer. It is separate. The Deal Analyzer costs a ridiculous amount of money to put this thing together. That is why I charge extra for the Deal Analyzer. It takes a lot of time and effort to put things together. I also try to make it super simple for everybody. That’s why it’s called Super Simple Self-Storage. The course is separate from the Deal Analyzer, and then you have the Free Wednesdays. I call this the triad. If you can come to the Free Wednesdays, buy the course, and get the Deal Analyzer, then you’re set.
Linda said, “Could this facility be set up to operate remotely?” Absolutely. You have to. Nobody’s going to be living in the area that’s going to buy this thing. Who’s living in the middle of the panhandle of Florida? Nobody. You have to run it remotely. That means you need a boots-on-the-ground and phone person. That’s all on the expenses that I put into it. That’s how you’re going to run a facility like this. It is a boots-on-the-ground person that can go out on a weekly basis, check the facility, clean up the trash, overlock people, call you up, talk to you, you tell them what you need or whatever. The phone person is the person that’s answering the phones, talking to the tenants, doing auctions if needed, figuring out over locks, and this kind of stuff.
“What phone service do I use?” We use Grasshopper. We have a lot of phone lines. We have 26 phone lines or something. I talked to my husband. His name is Pete and he’s going to change it to something else. We’re looking at a better phone system for us. In the beginning, Grasshopper worked great, but now that we’ve got a lot of facilities and phone lines, we’re moving on to a different one. Lori is asking, “What’s overlock?” Overlock is when somebody pays late on their facility, like, “Rent is due on the 1st. If you don’t pay by the 4th, then your unit is overlocked.” We’re putting another lock on it and you can’t get your stuff until you pay.
“I’m starting from scratch. What should I do?” You should buy my course, get the Deal Analyzer, and you should come to the Free Wednesday Sessions. Your first steps are going to be exactly what I was talking about at the beginning of the session, which is building your list, then calling and talking to owners. If you can get the tools, the course, and Deal Analyzer to help with that, you’ll be able to educate yourself and do this on your own.
If you can get the tools, the course, and the deal analyzer, you'll be able to educate yourself and do this on your own. Share on X“I’m interested in this self-storage. Would you be willing to sell it?” We found this facility for our students. I always offer the deals I find to my students first. If somebody doesn’t take this facility and say, “Yes, I’m interested,” then I’ll be pitching this facility out and trying to get somebody else to buy it. We have to close this facility in the middle of August 2023.
If you’re interested, email Questions@StacyRossetti.com. I’ll make sure as soon as I am ready to give access to everybody, I will give you access to the folder so that you can start looking at this. We can hop on Zoom and discuss it or something. We can work out a fee for finding the deal, but I’m always open to negotiations on any deal or anything that I ever do. Negotiate with me. Practice.
“Should I finish the course before driving storage because I can’t even send out offers anyways, not knowing anything?” No, driving for storage equals market research. Driving for storage makes you aware of what your market looks like. You should be getting out there and looking. We do this thing in our house. This is like a start-up and Lillian started getting 3 or 4 years old. Do you the game slug bug where you hit somebody when you see a slug bug? This is what we do with storage facilities. We’re always like that and smack each other and stuff because it gets you aware of all the storage facilities out there. You don’t realize how hidden they are or what’s around you.
Driving for storage makes you aware of what your market looks like. Share on X“How can we send you wholesale deals?” My email is Questions@StacyRossetti.com. You can email me anytime on that one, “I’m trying to get an SBA loan and building brand new construction self-storage. I’m trying to build 3,000 feet, trying to stay under a $150,000 SBA loan. Any advice for me because building a small facility and non-climate control one storage is perfect.”
The Two Most Important Things
The most important thing to know about building a storage facility is two things. 1) Do not spend a lot of money on the land. The land is going to break your deal. You’re thinking $150,000 to build the storage, but what did you pay for the land? That’s the key. 3,000 square feet is not going to cost you $150,000. It’s not going to be that. Maybe if you had to take some trees down or you want to maybe put some gravel and stuff. I would price it out and see. What you should do if you’re going to build is talk to some local builders that do storage buildings and ask them how much it’s going to cost.
This is what we do for StorageNerds. I bring in local builders. We have a couple of people that come in on a yearly basis. They talk about what they do for the process, and they manage a lot of that. You could always talk to some local builders and see what they say. The second thing is you want to make sure that you get a feasibility study.
A feasibility study is a study that tells you whether or not a building in that area is a good idea. It’s red, yellow and green. Red is like, “This is not a good space.” Yellow is like, “You should be okay. Be cautious.” The green is like, “Yes, this is a great spot.” Another thing about feasibility studies is that they’ll tell you exactly what you should be building. Should you boat and RV parking, covered or uncovered, storage, climate or non-climate, and then what units? 10 x 10s, 10 x 20s, 5 x 10s or what goes in that area. That’s the purpose of the feasibility study. If you are going to get an SBA loan, most likely, they’re going to ask for this as well.
“How do you drive for storage?” I go into this all up on YouTube. If you want to know how to drive for storage, go to my YouTube channel. There’s a ridiculous amount of videos, or search driving for storage on YouTube. You drive for storage and you make a list of the facilities that you find. I give into that quite often. I haven’t done driving for storage in a while. I’ll probably do that soon, but I’ve done a lot of them.
“Are they creative deals or finance deals?” I do a lot of creative deal structures. I’m super creative with my deals. I’ve done assumptions and bought owner financing. I’ve done every type of deal you could think of for creativity. I come up with a way to buy the deal. We had a two-day bootcamp on creative deal structures for all my students as well. I teach this in the course. It’s a little bit over. I appreciate you hanging into the very end. Go to StacyRossetti.com if you have or need anything. Everything I do is there. I appreciate it. I’ll talk to you next episode.
Important Links
- Turnkey Acquisitions
- Super Simple Self-Storage Course
- Regrid
- Deal Analyzer
- Questions@StacyRossetti.com
- YouTube – Stacy Rossetti – Self-Storage Investing
