If you’re looking for storage facilities or property, try looking at the secondary markets. Better yet, try searching for property on the tertiary markets of those secondary markets. Go drive around or go to Google Maps and just look at the outskirts of those secondary markets. You are guaranteed to find what you are looking for there because all the big players are already in those primary and secondary markets. Join Stacy Rossetti as she shares more about her Valdosta storage facility deal, which is in a tertiary market. Find out how she found the place and how the deal went down. This is probably Stacy’s most mismanaged property, you don’t want to miss all the details.
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Watch the episode here
Listen to the podcast here
Why Tertiary Markets Of Secondary Markets Are The Next Hottest Area To Buy Your First Storage Facility
How’s everybody doing? I am in my RV. We are in Destin, Florida. We’re going to go to the beach and hang out for a little bit in the process of moving down here and finding a house to buy. That’s what we’re doing. Everybody doesn’t buy any houses now but let’s see what I can come up with. Maybe I can get something good. What do you think? Is it time to buy a property or not? I’m not sure to buy a house. I don’t know. We’re looking and see what we can come up with.
Our facilities in Florida are in the Panhandle of Florida. They’re in the armpit? The little area. From Tallahassee over that area, the hurricane does not hit as much. Our facilities are these two facilities. Tallahassee is here. It’s like the armpit of Florida. Tallahassee is in an hour inland anyways and so are our properties. It rains but nothing ever happens in this area, honestly.
In 2017, Tallahassee got hit but everything wasn’t too bad because they’re so far inland. They’re not on the water like all the other properties and stuff that happened down here. We were supposed to be in the Keys hanging out. We canceled that because we closed on a property and we had to be at that property.
Tertiary Markets Of Secondary Markets
For the last weeks, we’ve been going through all of the different facilities that we own. We have 12 of them and we’re on number 10, which is going to be Valdosta. In this episode, I’m going to go through the process of how we funded and ran it. You can at least know the story. The title of this session is looking for facilities in tertiary markets or secondary markets. Valdosta has 75,000 people in it. For me, a primary market would be maybe 200,000 plus. I’d say the primary market is 100,000 plus, maybe 150,000. I’m not sure.
It depends on whether or not there are REITs and stuff. For instance, we’re moving to Tallahassee. If you click on Google Maps, search Storage Tallahassee. Tallahassee has 200,000 people. You could start looking at all the facilities and see if there are REITs. You can see there’s extra space storage here but then when you start looking at all these storage facilities, even though you see one extra space storage key, it’s like a secondary to the primary market player.
When you click on these facilities, you could see this big huge storage facility that got two levels. You can start looking. There’s a Storage King here. Storage King likes Tallahassee. That’s for sure. There’s an Otter Self Storage. I’ve driven by this one. This a massive storage facility here. The primary market is big players and facilities. For me, honestly, 100,000 or more, I consider a primary market. I don’t even look at these markets. The secondary market has 25,000 to 100,000.
We’ll go over to Valdosta here and Valdosta has 75,000 people in it. That may even be too big for a lot of people. We’ll search for storage near Valdosta so then you can start looking at them. You’ll see 10 Federal Storage. If you all know 10 Federal Storage, it’s not a REIT. It’s a fund. They raise $20 or $30 million. They go out and buy storage. They buy them, fix them up and make them super nice.
They’re like secondary-market players. You don’t see any CubeSmart or extra spaces in a secondary market. You’ll see a lot of one owner. They may be bigger facilities but they may also be smaller facilities. We have our facility. It’s in Valdosta but it’s in what I call the tertiary market of Valdosta. When you look at Valdosta, a highway circles where it’s at. This is the town. We’ve called every single storage facility owner in this town but they’re all bigger players.
We’ve called them all and asked them if they wanted to sell. The one that we ended up buying was a little bit out. Right across from us is Kings Gate, which is a bigger facility. Our facility is the little thing right here. Here’s this Kings Gate. You could tell that it was this monstrous, huge storage facility. They have 3 or 4 locations. I honestly don’t even consider them a competitor. We look at their prices and see what they’re charging but we don’t charge as much as they do. We need to be a little bit more competitive. This is Miss Lillian’s Self Storage. I would consider this a secondary to tertiary market.
When you drive from Valdosta up this road, it’s five minutes. It’s not honestly that far to get here or maybe ten minutes. I’m not sure how much it is. Probably not even five minutes. Everywhere you go in Valdosta is fifteen minutes to get there. When you’re thinking about where to look for storage, I want you to consider tertiary markets or secondary markets.
When you’re thinking about where to look for storage, consider tertiary markets in secondary markets.
The whole point of this webinar is to show you that you all know that the tertiary market is 25,000 or less population. A secondary market is 25,000 to 100,000. You have a primary that’s 100,000 or more. You can start zooming out and looking at wherever your area is located. What we do is pull up the population of Georgia by city.
You have Georgia-Demographics.com. There’s one of these for every state. You pull this up and take a look at it. Valdosta has 55,000 people but the Metro area has 75,000 people. It’s not like a super huge big town but it’s a good size town. You want to be looking at the cities that are not connected to the primary market and are on the outskirts of the secondary market. That’s what you want to do.
When I look through here, there’s Newnan Peachtree Corners. Peachtree Corners is a suburb of Atlanta. Mableton is a suburb of Atlanta. If you go out to find what’s Villa Rica and what’s the population of Villa Rica. Villa Rica is 17,000 people. That’s a little town. St. Mary’s only has 18,000 people. That’s interesting. Fayetteville, where I used to live, has 19,000 people. You want to get to know the towns and find these little tiny towns in your state that could be secondary markets. How big is Athens? It’s 128,000 so that’s a bigger one. They probably have a lot.
There are not any big box companies here. 128,000 people are not big enough for all these hedge funds to come in. It looks like they are coming in. I would consider this primary market then and this would be a little bit too big. It’s only 128,000 people and it’s already a primary market. They’re coming in. All these hedge funds are coming in and taking over. Let’s see what else we could do. I would probably be in these areas outside here. Athens is too big.
The Valdosta Facility
What else is a good town that we could look at? These are probably all small towns, honestly. There’s not a huge one. What about Albany? How big is Albany? Albany has 69,000 people. Albany’s bigger than Valdosta. That’s weird. I need to be looking in Albany. In Albany, I would be in these little tiny towns and all around here calling all the different owners.
There’s SimpleSafe Self Storage and Storage Rentals of America. SimpleSafe has a couch as the main picture so they have no idea what they’re doing for management. It’s a bigger facility but I bet in this area there are some probably good ones. I’m not sure. We’ll have to look through how many warehouses. They have a horrible picture like this. You should be calling them. They have no idea how to manage their Google Business Listing.
I would be all up in this area, secondary market but in the tertiary markets. We could go here, search this area and see if there’s anything. This looks like a good one. It’s got some indoor storage, a little commercial and a motorcycle. That’d be a good one. Let’s see what else. Finish Line Storage is here. It’s got a huge big office for two buildings. I’m not understanding why they have a big office. It looks like it’s got some indoor maybe and some parking. Call them up and see if they’re interested in selling.
Using Crexi
When you’re looking through and using Google Maps, Google Maps is so valuable to look for facilities. It gives you such a good idea of what you could do. SimpleSafe Self Storage is a little tiny facility here. I’m using Crexi. I was going to tell you all about this too. You can get my discount. I was going to offer this to everybody if you’re interested in getting my discount.
Searching through Google Maps is so valuable when looking for facilities. It gives you such a good idea of what you can do.
Let me show you what Crexi does. It’s more expensive if you don’t go through me. Crexi has an investor section to it that nobody knows about, except for my students. We’re all using this. You can put the address in Crexi. Let’s do SimpliSafe. Let me see if this comes up in Crexi because it’s a weird one. It doesn’t come up. Let’s try to find something else. Let’s try to find a normal address here. Sunbelt Business pushes self-storage right here. This is a big one here.
Let’s go into Crexi. When I pull up Albany, Georgia in Crexi, you can find that all the comps for every storage facility that’s ever sold since the 1960s pull up in Crexi. You can start taking a look at them and seeing them. For instance, one right here is sold for $70,000. He’s owned this since 1997. This guy is ready to sell this. It gives you the owner’s address. Here’s the owner. His name is Donald David and then you click on it. It gives you six results. He lives in Austin, Texas. Isn’t that crazy? Here’s his phone number right here. We could call him up and ask him if he wants to sell. This would be a good one.
Sometimes it even gives you the email address. It’s giving you six different results, what it could possibly be. Essentially, you call every phone number and see. What’s good is sometimes it gives you the email as well too. If they do have an email, it’s here as well. What we do for Crexi is use it to find comps. Eventually, one day I’ll have Grant work, come in and do a demo of Crexi because I’m not going to be able to do it as well as he is.
You can do comps of all storage facilities. You can look on Crexi for self-property but we use it for comps. We also use it for skip tracing. If you are interested, you are more than welcome. It’s $100 a month with my discount. It’s more money if you go through Crexi itself. It’s $100 a month for access to Crexi. If you’re interested in getting access to Crexi, then email us at Questions@StacyRosetti.com. That’s our email. I can introduce you to Grant and he can help you. You have to pay a year in advance for Crexi. There’s a whole bunch of other stuff where he’ll give you a demo and stuff. Essentially, you have to come with $1,200 to get it. It’s not $100 now.
We’ve been using this for a while. It works so well. I love that it gets emails as well too. What we do is for every property that we find, we keep the email and then we can put them on an email campaign too. This is awesome. I wanted to show this so you could use it. For instance, we’re looking in Albany for Royal Storage or lock-and-leave or whichever one.
You could learn so much about a property when you’re playing around with this. I love this so much. We’re here so we can start looking at all the facilities and getting all the information. This one right here is sold for $881,000. It was a three-property portfolio. 550 units for $880,000 was sold in 2020. That was a great deal whoever got that one. It’s worth a lot of money. That thing is probably worth about $5 million. We could contact the owner and see if he wants to sell this property here.
It’s probably because it’s three properties. Probably, you have to dig a little bit here and try to find the owner. History gives you all the demographics. It gives you so much stuff, everything here. I would email Questions@StacyRosetti.com and I’ll introduce you to Grant if you want to get a demo. A lot of my students have already signed up and we are using this. It’s super valuable.
I love that it has a flood risk because we’re in the process of buying a property. I was like, “Is this in a flood zone?” It ended up being in a flood zone. I was like, “I’m so glad I knew that.” It gives you a whole bunch of good. Albany is a secondary market. You want to find secondary markets and look in the secondary markets to see if there are any deals that you can find there.
If it happened to be too expensive and you can’t find a deal like, “I can’t afford a secondary market,” what you do is look for a property that is around the secondary market. I call it the tertiary market of the secondary market. I don’t know what you would call it but that’s what I call it. Let’s do Putney, Georgia. No storage facilities that come up in this area for some reason. Maybe it’s a weird area or what. Maybe they’re a little tiny town but you could look through.
I would get into Google Maps, look around and see if I can find some storage virtually like this. I’m not sure what this looks like. Maybe it’s some warehouses here but it may be storage. You could always stop, drop in and see. He has this little warehouse in the front. He probably owns this. He is like, “I have some extra land. Let me throw some storage units up.” That’s what he is thinking but see how easy it is? You got to get out there and look virtually.
What you could do is get into Crexi and pull the information up on this property. It will give you the phone number and sometimes the email. Try to contact the owner and see if they want to sell. That’s the process that we use to find pretty much every single one of our facilities. The story behind Valdosta is that I hired my very first acquisitions person for us to work for me and take over acquisitions because I couldn’t keep up. We had too much money and not enough facilities to buy. I hired an acquisitions person. I was taking him out and driving for storage up until I hired all my virtual assistants. That’s all I did, drive for storage to find all my facilities. I took him out driving for storage.
Remember, I lived up in the North Georgia Mountains but I was like, “I want to get down until the nitty gritty of Georgia and learn about the South of Georgia.” I wanted to buy something near the water. We drove all around from Valdosta and essentially, drove down to the State of Valdosta. I rent us some hotel rooms and then we drove all around that area from Valdosta to the water. I had Chris looking for property. His homework was to find property for me and that’s what he did. Here’s well enough. We came down to 75 and drove up here. We drove it for 2 days straight and hit 50 different storage facilities along the way.
One of the facilities that we found was the one in Valdosta because we drove and looked at all the different facilities in Valdosta. What happened was Chris was in the front seat with me and I called the facility. It was so funny because the person that answered the phone was the property manager. This facility does not need a property manager. That’s another thing too.
When you answer the phone and it’s a small facility and they have a property manager, you got anything to do with that property so you’ve got to try to figure out how to get ahold of the owner. I called the number on the sign. She answered it like this, “Hello?” I was like, “This is going to be a good one.” I was like, “I was trying to find out information about your storage facility.”
When you call a small facility and a property manager answers the phone, that means the owner doesn’t want anything to do with the property.
She was like, “You want a unit or what?” I was like, “Maybe. I don’t know. Tell me about the units and stuff. Do you have anything available?” She said, “I don’t know. I’m going to have to go there and take a look.” I was like, “This could not get any better, honestly.” I was like, “I’m interested in buying it. Do you think the owner would sell it because I’m right here in front? I’d be interested in talking to the owner about buying it.”
She goes, “Maybe. Here’s his phone number,” and she gave it to me. I called the owner and the owner answered the phone. His name was Sammy. I could tell he was old and couldn’t hear. I was like, “Sam, is that you? Sammy?” He’s like, “Yes, this is Sammy.” We were like yelling at each other on the phone. He was like, “Who’s this?” I said, “This is Stacy. I talked to your property manager and I got your phone number from her. I want to buy your storage facility. Would you be interested in meeting me? I’m right in front of your storage facility now.” He was like, “I want $300,000.” I said, “I’ll buy it for $300,000.” I didn’t know anything about it. I was like, “Would you be interested in meeting me? I can meet you now if you’re interested.” He said, “I live right around the corner. Come over to my house.”
That’s essentially how the conversation went. Chris and I drove over to his house and got out. He’s an older guy, probably 88 years old. His wife was out on a trip or something so it’s him by himself. I was like, “Sam, nice to meet you. I’m Stacy. This is Chris, my acquisitions manager.” He said, “Nice to meet you. Come on in.” We sat in his living room. We talked for two hours and he told me his entire life story. I said, “Tell me a little bit about the facility.”
This isn’t my newest deal analyzer because this is years old. This is the deal analyzer I just used. He told me he was making $37,800. I said, “Good.” He told me it was 105 units and a total of 9,800 square feet, almost 10,000 square feet. I know 10,000 square feet should be worth a lot of money. It should be worth almost $1 million in 2022.
Even when I ran the numbers, it came out to $570,000. I bought this in 2019 or I can’t remember. It was like pre-COVID though. He told me he was making $37,800 and I said, “Can you prove that?” He said, “I can’t prove it at all. I have nothing to show you. I don’t know who’s paying or what. I know that on the tax return it says $37,800.” I said, “Can I have your tax return?” He said, “You can’t have the tax return because it has all my other businesses on there.” It’s what an owner typically would say.
Essentially, when somebody tells you, “You have to pay cash for something like this because of bank,” you have to get them to owner finance. A bank is not going to finance a deal like this because you have no proof of income. We went out and started looking at this thing. It was so funny. Pete was spending time there. It’s two lots. 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 buildings and that was 105 units. This is something that Pete does. He draws this up. He went off of what he told us.
This is what Sammy told us. It’s a nice storage facility. There’s nothing wrong with it, honestly. I wanted to show you this folder too so you had an idea. This folder is if you’re privately funded. When we find somebody to lend on a property like this, we share the folder with the lender so the lender has access to everything.
You can see this or watch this video. This is the video that I made for the lender to go over the entire deal. What I do is make a folder, use Loom and make a video. Whatever I put into the folder, I will make a video and go through all this. We have a whole bunch of different deals. We have a lot of deal analyzers because in the end, what he told us and what was happening was two separate things.
He did not print this out. This is something that Pete put together. We had a whole bunch of deal analyzers. I’m pretty sure Pete drew a little map for us so that we could put it into storage and get it all set up. We shared this folder with Rick, one of my lenders. He said, “I’ll lend you the money.” When we talked to Sammy, we told him $275,000. He wanted $300,000 and I said, “Would you do $275,000? That’d help us out.” He said, “I like you, Stacy. I’ll do $275,000.” We put it under contract for $275,00 and he wanted to have his attorney close on it. We had his attorney close then we closed at the end of 2019. We’ve counted a couple of years.
As we did the due diligence period, we could not open up hardly any of the units because they were all locked. When units are all locked, that means that you should be getting income for that. You either have it vacant and you should be able to unlock it and rent the unit or it’s locked and somebody’s stuff is in there. That was not the case with Sammy.
When units are all locked, you’re supposed to be getting income for that. You should be able to unlock it and rent it, or somebody’s still there.
Come to find out, he gave us at closing a stack of his contract. We started calling everybody. Every contract we had, none of them except for one, had the right phone number on it. Probably, everybody had rented to in like the twenty years that he owned the facility. We had to skip trace, find every owner somehow and go through the whole auction process. In the end, almost every facility was full of stuff and nobody was paying.
We collected $400 for the first couple of months that we owned the facility. Essentially, it was mismanaged and he ran into the ground. That was okay because typically, expect that anyways. When we buy severely mismanaged facilities, we expect that we’re not been making that much money and we’ll come out of pocket to get it up and running.
He had no proof of income or rent roll. We went through, made a spreadsheet, tried to work through that and contact everybody. At this time, we started using StorageAuctions.com to go and we went through the auction process. We listed all the auctions on StorageAuctions.com, which was quite a lot of work. It took several months for us to do that because we had to figure out the owners of every single one of those units.
Another very interesting thing was that he told us 105 units and it ended up being 120 units. He didn’t even know how many units he had. In the end, it comes out to about 120 units at 10,000 square feet. He did know the square feet. It was almost 10,000 but he didn’t know the number of units that he had. Of all the facilities that we’ve ever bought, this was the most severely mismanaged facility out there. He said that a lot of people had called him and were trying to buy it. He said that he had always said $300,000. After that, nobody would buy it because he couldn’t show any proof of income or anything like that. That means you have to come up with $300,000 cash.
The truth is that it takes a lot of work upfront to do stuff like this. In the end, we got 120 units, 10,000 square feet for $300,000, which is good. It’s a Valdosta address. Since we’re in Valdosta in this secondary market, then the prices at that point before COVID, you could see on the deal analyzer. It’s going to be very interesting to look at the competition.
How Does It Compare To Competition?
We’re going to go back to Miss Lillian’s. I want to see what this one right across from us is charging. It would be good to know. KingsGateSelfStorage.com is what it is. Let’s see if they have unit sizes and prices. They’re charging small, medium and large. You can click here and reserve. They made this website up. This is a horrible website. You can tell when they have a website like they made the website. This is not like an ESS. Somebody made this website. It’s all bad. It doesn’t give the prices. You’d have to call to get the prices. They took the prices off because they don’t want anybody to be taking their prices and stuff. We can’t use that one as competition. Who else can we do the competition with?
Storage Rentals of America is out here. Let’s look at them and see what they are charging. Maybe they have their prices on there. We won’t be as expensive as them but you could see 5x5s are $39 and 5x5s small are $28. These are climate control driven with access. We have 5x10s at $37. We’re charging $30. This is $30 for us and then 10x10s, we’re at $100 or $99. We’re a little bit less than them. 10×15, this is climate control. Let’s see if we can find some non-climate.
Here’s a 10×10 drive-up for $46 and then 10x15s are drive-up access, which is $102. Maybe that’s what it is. We’re way lower than them on this price. You can see a 10×10 for $46 a month. When you look at those numbers, you can tell that’s a secondary or a tertiary market number. This one’s only $8 a month and that’s just parking or what? How do you have first-floor parking? 10x30s so parking. Drive-up access is $94.
When I look at these prices, these are going to be right around where we’re at because we’re less than $100. We’re even cheaper on these. You can look at this. If the prices could be here, we’re going to be more than this for this. When I ran the numbers, I ran it at $275,000 and we can change this to $4,800. I ran it out of the 10% cap. This is back in the day when you could get stuff for a 10% cap. I wonder where it would be at. Fifty percent is vacant. Let’s say we’re probably at 20% vacant. We’re at a 7% cap for Valdosta. Even if we didn’t raise the rates, if we’re still at $0.71, it comes out to $815,000. What do you think? Is that looking good?
I put it at a 7% cap. Do you think that area is a 7% or an 8% cap? What would you put it at for the market cap rate? I don’t know if we’re at $47,500. We’re probably more than that. Look up the numbers even if we were at $37,500. Let’s put it back to the 115. It’s coming out to $815,000 in value. If we can get it up to $77,000 a year, 115 units at $0.71 are valued at $813,000.
We ended up buying it at a negative 6% cap. We’re taking it to a 21% cap rate and then we’ll be able to sell it at a 7% cap maybe or maybe an 8% cap. If we sold it at an 8% cap, we’d sell it for $700,000. Does that sound about right to you? That sounds about right to me. It’s going to be $700,000 to $800,000 essentially. I was thinking of $900,000. I’m shooting for $900,000 on this facility. 115 units should be $800,000 or $900,000. Does that make sense to everybody? It depends on the market cap.
My point is to make sure that when you’re looking for property, you’re looking in the outskirts of secondary markets because maybe the secondary markets are a little bit bigger players like 10 Federal Storage, Storage King and Kings Gate. Every once in a while, you’ll find a little tiny facility in a secondary market. When you get out into the tertiary markets, you can find some good smaller facilities. I typically try and triple the value of my properties like that. My mismanaged facilities are my goal when I buy the property.
Q&A
I got lots of questions here so let me start with those. “How do you fill it?” We either use SpareFoot or Google Ads. We have both. The secondary market is more work to get filled up than the tertiary market. There’s a lot of competition and stuff. The primary market’s even harder. Our trick on SpareFoot so that it’s not so expensive is that we’ll put it at a lower price. With SpareFoot, it costs you at least two times the amount that they find somebody for you. SpareFoot market across all platforms. If somebody puts in storage Valdosta into Google, SpareFoot is going to pull up your facility and bring it to the top. People are going to say, “Yes, I’m interested in this one.” They find the lead for you.
It costs money to do that. I get it. They’ll charge up to two times. What we’ll do is charge half the price or something so we only have to pay SpareFoot so much money. After a couple of months of being in the tenants, then we’ll raise the rent and we’ll start raising the rents. We did one property like this where we bought an abandoned facility. The market rent was $60 and for a 10×10, we listed it at $40. We filled the facility up a couple of months. After it was almost filled, then we started raising the rent. We raised it to $10 or something. That’s what we do.
We had to pay SpareFoot $80 to get that $40 tenant in. SpareFoot is expensive but to lease up, SpareFoot is one of the best ways to go. Also on the side, you could start getting your Google Ads going. Google Ads should cost $10 to $20 per tenant to get somebody to be filled in. “Do I have an exit plan before I buy my stuff?” It’s either going to be to ReFi out, sell it or hold it. Those are my exit plans. Every single facility probably has different exit plans, depending on what it is.
Have an exit plan before you buy your property. Either refi out, sell it or hold it. Every facility has a different exit plan.
In Valdosta, what we’re doing is trying to pick up a couple of more facilities because we need to have many portfolios. Before we sell anything, it’s going to be a mini portfolio. You tell me if this is a portfolio. We’ve got 2 in Live Oak, 1 in Waycross and 1 in Valdosta. This is about an hour. In this triangle, we have four facilities but I’m not sure if I sell this if somebody’s going to want to buy those four facilities. Otherwise, what we were trying to do is pick up a couple more facilities in this area as well too. Maybe a couple in this area too but they don’t want to get down into Florida. That’s far as mindset. That’s our thought process.
You pay SpareFoot for the lead. They’re going to bring the lead. It gets put into your system, into your back office and then takes the money out of your account for that. It’s automated. “How much cashflow did you do in the last facility you bought after stabilizing it?” We’re shooting for 10% at cash on cash return or higher but we’re 100% privately funded. For us, our cashflow is pretty good.
That 115 units should be making a minimum of $75,000. It’s what it was showing on the deal analyzer. Honestly, it should be making more than that, especially because of COVID. The average price for a 10×10 is $0.88. Keep that in mind. That area is clear. The outskirts of Valdosta is a poor area. You could see that even with the competition, the prices were lower and stuff. From $0.70 to $0.80 a square foot is probably going to be at your highest. If we’re making $80,000 a year, essentially it’s valued at $750,000 to $850,000. We’re making $75,000 a year on this facility so we calculate our expenses at 38%. We have a lot of overhead. We have 1,200 doors. They cost more for us. We’re running our numbers at 38% for expenses.
You have your income minus your expenses is your NOI, minus your mortgage if you have a mortgage. That is your net income or cash on cash, whatever you want to call it. Your income minus your expenses is your NOI, minus your mortgage is going to be what your return is. You always want to keep that in mind and look at that when you’re looking for facilities. “Did you let the manager go or did you keep her?” We let her go. No way we’re going to keep her. She answered the phone, “Hello?” She didn’t even know how many units or anything. “When code calling, what is a good and quick way to filter whom we are talking to? Trying to figure out if it’s an owner or a manager?” It pretty much tells if it’s an owner or manager, honestly.
If they’re answering the phone like all professionals, then you can tell. The truth, if you can’t tell, then start talking to that person. Say, “I’m interested in the storage facility.” I always say, “I’m interested in your storage facility.” They say, “Do you want a unit? What do you want? I’m interested in talking to the owner and seeing if they’re interested in getting an offer.” Office managers will either be okay with that or freak out and be like, “No, they never want to sell.”
“Do most of the leads lease? Do you still pay if the person leaves?” No. If they do not lease, do not pay them. You only pay them if it gets rented or if the unit gets into your system as rented. “Is there an off-the-shelf property management program that is good for smaller facilities?” There’s either ISS or storEDGE. We use storEDGE.
I have lots of training in my course, on all the questions that you’re asking. Remember that you can always use the link. Every week, we have a link for a discounted price to the course. You will get access to me taking you through this but it’s step-by-step on how to get started in self-storage investing. Make sure you check that out so that you can get the $1,000 off.
The deal analyzer comes inside the course as well too. You can start that deal analyzer. It will come in. You can start running your numbers, playing with your numbers and learning whether or not it’s a good deal. There’s also a management section in the course too so all the questions about SpareFoot, managing, software and stuff like that are all in the course.
I’m going to jump off. I’m headed over to my fund. It’s StacyRosetti.com/Fund. If you’re interested in being a passive investor instead of doing all the work, hop on and listen to the pitch. It’s for accredited investors. If you’re a credited investor, hop on and listen to me. Everybody else, I will see you on the next episode. Take care.
