Your facility is finally under contract; now, what’s next? Stacy Rossetti talks about managing self-storage facilities, from finding the perfect property management software to becoming a marketing whiz in the digital age. Join us as she breaks down the critical steps in onboarding a self-storage facility, how to choose the right property management software, engage with tenants, handle contracts, and set up an efficient website – the cornerstone of online marketing. Tune in now and bring yourself closer to your self-storage goals!

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Closing The Deal: Your Facility Is Under Contract, What’s Next?

We’re going to talk about onboarding in the storage world. Onboarding is stage two. There are four stages of owning a storage facility. Stage one is finding a facility, making offers, and getting the facility under contract. We’re not talking about this at all. I talk about this quite often during the Wednesday training, but this episode, we’re not talking about that. We’re talking about stage two, which is funding and onboarding. I have to come back, and I cycle through all the different stages and topics. Eventually, I’ll talk about funding.

The goal of stage two is to close the property. What do you need to do to close the property? Stage three is what we call transfer ownership. This is where you’re chasing owners. You’re trying to get them into your software, get their payment information, and get the contract signed. It doesn’t sound like a lot, but that’s like a lot of work. It takes a lot of time and effort to transfer ownership. This is where you’ve bought the facility. That’s the stage.

Stage four is I’ve got all the tenants into the software. I need to take advantage of what this property management software has to offer. The software, nowadays, has all different kinds of things that you can do to automate your business. The goal for stage four is to automate systems. In the weekly Wednesday trainings, I talk about all these. I only do one little topic every single episode. In the course, you have all of this at your fingertips. You could go through all four of these stages in a weekend if you wanted to. If you want to get it done now, buy the course. If you want to come with me on Wednesdays, you could do that.

Onboarding: Stage 2 Of Self-Storage Investing

We’re going to talk about onboarding. We’re at stage two. We’ve got the facility under contract. We’re working on getting the funding. We have to be prepared for the closing day. You don’t want to do what I did at my first facility. I got the facility under contract. I was like, “Let’s do a little bit of due diligence.” I already had the money all lined up because I had a private lender. I waited 60 days to close and I closed the property.

At the closing, the owner came and handed me this big stack of leases. He’d handwritten every single one of the leases. He didn’t have anything scanned. He didn’t have any numbers. He didn’t have a P&L balance sheet. He had a ledger and a book. He handed me a big stack of contracts and his ledger. He was like, “This is it, Stacy.” That was closing day. I had nothing ready.

This was several years ago. It’s a little bit different now. Everything is a little bit easier because of COVID. I was like, “I need to figure out what to do.” I had to figure out certain things to get all the things and facilities set up. That is what we do now, pre-closing. That’s what we call the onboarding state. We’re going to onboard all this. We’re ready on closing day. The goal of closing day is to be able to take payments from your tenants.

Let’s go into the onboarding. The onboarding goal is to take payments. As a storage facility owner, your job is to take payments or income to come in. The truth is that, in commercial real estate, the value of your property is based on how much income you make. If you are not making an income, your property is not worth a lot of money. If you’re making income, your property is going to be worth more money. That is your goal for onboarding. Everything up until closing day is getting to be able to take payments.

What that means is that you need to have property management software that can help you manage your property. Everything is completely virtual and electronic. If you are not in the virtual, electronic, automated, systematized systems world, you are not going to get the value of your property that you thought you were going to get.

The truth is, in order to sell your property at the most amount of money that you can possibly get, your job is to have a P&L, a balance sheet, an occupancy report, and your rent roll. If you can have those up to date and you can have those where you can look at them and understand what’s going on, you’ll be able to give that to your buyer. They’ll be able to take it to their lender’s bank or private and convince them that your property is at the value they’re buying it at.

If you don’t have all that stuff and you can’t do that, that means you get a deep discount. What I do is I’ll buy properties that don’t have all that information. We’ll stabilize those properties. It includes two years of tax returns. If we have two years of tax returns, we can go and take these to the bank. We can get a good loan on this thing.

Choosing The Right Software

The goal is to take payments. What that means is that your first step is to find the software that you want to use. Your property management software is going to be one of the first things that you do. You need to be doing a lot of demos. I’ve told the story before. When I got into storage investing, I didn’t do anything until we closed on the property. All of a sudden, I started getting calls from tenants. They were like, “I want to make my payment and stuff.” I was like, “No, I can’t take your payments now because I don’t know what the heck I’m doing.”

I did not take a payment for 90 days. It took forever for me to figure everything out. I was horrible. Don’t do anything that I did. What I did is I was like, “I need to have software to manage all this.” I started doing all these different demos. Back in the day, there was only SiteLink, storEDGE, and ESS. ESS stands for Easy Storage Solutions.

SiteLink was the premier software to manage your storage facilities for the longest time. There were hardly any other competitors out there. If they were, they weren’t up to par. There was not a lot of software even back in 2015 when I was looking at properties. When I did the demo for SiteLink, you had to have a desktop because that’s how the software worked. Now, SiteLink is web-based. It’s a little bit different.

When I did the demo, I was like, “I don’t want to have one computer that I have to do all my work on. I want to be able to do my work wherever I’m at. I want to be passive, travel, and still manage my facilities.” SiteLink was not going to work. I did the demo for ESS. It was a brand new software that had come out. It was clunky. You could tell that they were still trying to figure it out. They are still trying to add new features. I was like, “No, this is too new.”

I did storEDGE. It had been on the market for a couple of years. When I started working with storEDGE, there were three people working for this company. It was a small company. I would talk to the same three people over again. I knew them all by name. I’d be like, “You call Nathan and talk to Nathan.” That’s one of the things I liked about it. Number two is when you go and look at the dashboard of storEDGE, the way the dashboard and the whole software are set up is user-friendly, especially at that time. It was that middle ground.

SiteLink was for bigger facilities. It was older. You had to have somebody in the office with that computer with SiteLinks. That was back in the day when people were working at the office. Now, that doesn’t happen very much except we’re on the primary market facilities. ESS was new, so I went with storEDGE, and it worked out well.

What happened is that these three companies over the course of the last couple of years, all got bought by Storable. You could Google Storable so you could see what Storable does. Storable is this massive company inside the storage industry that is vertically integrated. What they do is they think, “What does a storage facility owner need?” They create or buy the software that these owners need.

For instance, I found out that storEDGE bought an RV parking software. We all know RV parking is a big thing. Storable was a progressive thinker. They’re like, “What do they need? They need that now. Let’s buy that company.” They vertically integrate everything. They do not only use property management software, but they also do software for call centers. They do marketing for storage facilities, merchant accounts, insurance, tenant insurance, and facility insurance. Anything that you can possibly need to run your business, Storable will offer this. They are only growing and getting bigger because it’s like, “We need this. Let’s buy it.”

That could be a good thing or a bad thing. We have a lot of stuff going on with Storable. You only have that one company managing the bulk of your properties. We have the software, SpareFoot, insurance, and tenant insurance. We use Gates software. We sure are giving Storable a lot of money. If something doesn’t work, you’re relying on them. It may or may not be a good idea to go with it.

StorEDGE is the software that Storable is putting a lot of emphasis on. They are putting a lot of money into development. It’s like an enterprise solution. Anything and everything that you need to automate your business are included. They allow APIs to come into the software. That API can do a whole bunch of different things, like auctions and lien processes. They have a mail house where they can mail out letters for you. They have owner transfer letters or auction process letters. Any type of process or step that you realize once you go through all of stages 3 and 4 are all included in storEDGE a lot of times.

All the others are software out there. There is some other software. There’s Breeze, Hummingbird, and StoreEase. I’ve done many demos. Each of them is for a specific type of owner. Hummingbird is a little bit more expensive. It works with bigger facilities. A lot of smaller ones are like, “No, I want to use this software.” They’ll pay the extra money for it.

Unit Trac is geared towards little tiny storage facilities, and it’s cheap. When you have a small facility, you don’t want to have huge big expenses because it eats into your ROI. When you get a facility under contract, the first thing that you need to do is do demos of every type of software out there. You need to figure out what type of software best fits what you want to do. All of them have different nuances and features. You’re like, “That sounds good over there.”

 

There’s not one software that does all of it. It’s the perfect software out there. There isn’t. You’re going to have to choose which one you want to pick. What you want is to pick the one. You think forward-thinking. You’re like, “This is the only facility I’m ever going to have. This software will be perfect for that.” If you’re like, “No, I want to own five more of these.” You need to think ahead.

The thing is, once you get into the software and you get everybody to sign the contracts and get their payment information in, you can’t transfer that stuff over to another software. It doesn’t work like that. You’re going to have to start all over. You might be able to import their name, address, and phone numbers, but the contract is not going to go into their system, and the payment information never transfers over.

With the property management software, your job with all of these is going to be to get a demo. That is number one. You’ve got to schedule demos with every single one of these software. You can figure out which one is going to be the best work for you. That’s step one. When you demo your software, you want to make sure that they’ll go through all the basics. One of the main questions with the software is, does it do dynamic pricing? Does it do auctions? Does it handle the auction process? Can you do QuickBooks or some side of some accounting? Do you have a mail house? How can we notify our tenants of auctions? What’s the communication between you and the tenant? Is there emails or text?

What you want to know is not only email and text, but is there a way for marketing for new tenants? How do you handle leads? There’s a lot of stuff, but when you’re doing your demos, these are the things I wish I had. You don’t think about it when you’re asking the questions. When they’re doing a demo, they’re doing the basic stuff.

All the software can handle tenants and get new tenants in. What do you do to manage the business? That’s what you want to do. The daily tasks of the business are what you want to automate as much as possible. It’s not like basic things. If it’s a smaller facility, you’re not going to get as much out of the software because you’re only going to pay so much money for it and what you’d pay for an enterprise solution that offers this. You’ll have to decide. Are these things that you want or not?

Who Is Answering Your Phones?

Another thing that I like is the recording of calls. In storEDGE, it records all the calls. You can go back and listen to whoever’s answering the phone and hear how they’re talking to the people. Are they doing their job properly? The truth of the matter is, and this is another part, this is number two, who is going to answer your phones? This person who answers your phone is the most important person on your team because they’re the ones who are going to make or break whether or not you get what you need and get your units filled up.

The person that answers the phone can be a call center, but you can ask the software like, “Do you offer a call center?” Some of them do offer call centers, or you’re going to hire a virtual assistant to answer the phones. It’s like somebody there to answer the phones. You can have somebody in or outside the United States. Are you going to answer the phones? Is it going to be you? Who is going to answer the phones?

I talk to people all over the country who do this. It’s preference. You want to make sure that whoever is answering the phone, you understands that that person is going to make or break whether or not you do well in this industry. You need to make sure that you’re always training these people. We talk to our phone staff on a weekly basis. I’m asking them, “When somebody calls up, is it a sales call, or is it a customer service call? If it’s a sales call, what did you offer? Did you offer some a promo? Why did they not move in? What was the reason for them not moving in?” You separate your calls into leads, sales calls, and customer support. You have to have game plans for those.

 

That could be you if it’s a small facility. It could be a call center. You have to make sure that you’re asking. If you want to use a call center, you need to talk to the call center to figure out what their vibe is there. There are all kinds of call centers out there. You have to talk to the right ones. I can’t remember any of the names, but there’s a whole bunch of call centers out there. I know ESS has one, and XPS has one. There are a couple of others out there that I can’t remember right now.

A VA is a virtual assistant. A virtual assistant is somebody that you can hire in the country or outside the country. It depends on how you want to run your business. You know who you want to answer your phones, but virtual assistants typically work part-time or full-time. You can also pay them per call. You say, “Answer my calls. Whatever you call and answer, I’ll pay you $1 for it.” Whatever it is. You can come up with something.

Make sure you’re getting somebody who speaks English well and is good on the computer because they’ll be putting tenants in. Always remember that if you have your own employees, if somebody’s working for you, if they’re not doing well, it’s because of you. It’s not because of them. It’s because you did not train them well to do the job. The more you train your employees and the better you become connected to them and treat them like family, the better they’re going to be. If you’re not putting any time and effort into helping them out, they’re not going to be good. There’s a lot of work to do that.

Boots-On-The-Ground Person

Numbers 2 and 3 are the boots on the ground person. You got to find somebody to be the boots-on-the-ground person. The boots-on-the-ground person is the person who’s going to go out to your facility once a week. They’re going to pick up all the trash all the tenants left because there’s always trash that tenants leave. They’re going to overlock any facilities that haven’t paid. They’re going to unlock any facilities of over-locks that have paid. They’re going to do some maintenance items.

This could be you. If it’s a small facility, you’re like, “I can’t afford it. I’m going to have to be the boots-on-the-ground person. It’s only an hour away. I’ll be the one that goes out and checks on the property.” I could have a good handful of students in the StorageNerd Coaching Program. They take care of their facilities themselves, or you can hire a boots-on-the-ground person.

We use Indeed. It’s free to post on Indeed. You could post a part-time job and say, “I’m looking for somebody who’s looking for some part-time work. You have to go out once a week and maintain our facility. You have to be able to overlock units, do a walkthrough, and let us know which doors work and springs we need and if there are any maintenance items. You have to be able to clean up trash and take it to the dog that day. You can’t leave any trash there.” You leave a little add-on to Indeed and start doing interviews for them. Typically, it’s around $20 an hour, but it depends on the area and the location where you’re at. We pay ours around $20 an hour. They go out and keep the place maintained and cleaned.

Getting Your Contract Ready

The fourth thing that you want to do is get your contract ready. Your contract is the most important thing for your software. You want to join the self-storage association in your state, like the Florida Self Storage Association or Tennessee Self Storage Association, and get that contract. Once you join that self-storage association, you can get the contract free. Every state has its own different contract. You get the contract and use that contract.

 

What you do is you’re going to hand the contract over to whatever software that you choose. They’re going to import that contract into your software. They’re going to set all the fields up. They’re going to set in the name, address, phone number, email, fees you’re going to have, and anything else that goes on the contract so that they can electronically sign it.

Property Management Software

What you’ll do is you’ll hand that over to the property management software. They will implement that and put that in. That’s part of their onboarding process to get it set up for you. You can hire an attorney. There are several attorneys in the industry. All they do is have contracts for every single one of the states or some states, whatever states they work in, and they’re specifically for storage facilities.

If you want to do that, you’ll get a specific contract for your state from an attorney. Whereas if you go to your state SSA, you’re going to get a generic contract. If there are some nuances or things that you want to add, you may want to go to an attorney, hire somebody, and say, “I need to get that contract for Tennessee. I need to add this because mine is a little bit different.”

You want to make sure that when you get the contract, you read it. You need to go through it because the contract is going to spell out all the rules and the laws of your state. The auction process is that those rules and laws of your state are written into the contract. You want to make sure that you understand it. Every state has a different process for the auction process. All the rules and regulations of your fees are in the contract.

You need to read your contract. You need to actually go through it because the contract is going to spell out all the rules and the laws of your state. Click To Tweet

For instance, in the State of Georgia, if you don’t pay on day one, you’re considered late and you could charge a fee. Whereas in Tennessee, it’s six days. You want to make sure that you read that contract because that contract is going to tell you what fees you can charge for certain types of events that happen throughout the month if tenants don’t pay.

Your auction process, fees, and the type of insurance that the tenants should have, depending on the state, are all written in your contract. If it’s not in your contract, you want to add an addendum for that. You have to set this contract up so that you are being protected as the owner of your property. That’s the main thing. You’re going to hand that over to your property management software, whichever one you pick. They will import it and create the field. It becomes an electronic document that the tenants can sign.

For your software, they’re going to have their onboarding process depending on which software you pick. I’ve only used storEDGE. I don’t know all the onboarding processes of any of them, but they will have this onboarding process. The onboarding process takes forever. If you do not want to wait until two weeks before you close on your property, pick a software because what’s going to happen is on day one of closing, it’s not going to be able to work.

You want to get that software picked early in the game when you know for sure that you’re going to close on that. You’re going to say, “I’ve already been doing demos. I’m going to pick this software.” What they’re going to do is they’re going to have a way for you to give them all the information they need to onboard their property.

When you get your facility under contract, you want to ask the owner. You say, “I need to get a list of the names of the tenants. I need their name, phone number, and email address. If I can get that beforehand, I can fill out the spreadsheet and forms that are needed and get that to my software to get it onboarded so that they will have that ready in the system. I can work on getting the contracts signed.”

Some owners will give that to you early, and some owners will not give that to you early. You may be stuck in the onboarding process because you can’t get the information you need from the owners. It depends on the owners. We’ve had it where day one, we’ll give you the information. After closing, we’ve had it over 60 days beforehand. They’re like, “Here’s all the information. Do what you need.”

That’s something that you want to make sure. You want to know what your onboarding process is for the software you choose, and make sure that you ask them, “How long does the onboarding process take? I need to make sure that I’m ready and I can go through all this process.” For storEDGE, it could take somewhere upwards of 4 to 6 weeks for the onboarding process. I don’t know the other ones, but it’s going to take around a month or so. Give yourself some time to onboard your software.

You want to make sure you want to know what your onboarding process is for the software that you choose. Click To Tweet

Once you onboard the software, you’re going to have the tenant information, the payment information, and the contract ready. This is where you’re going to be calling. This is stage three. You’re not going to have any of that. Your job is to get ahold of the tenant, get them to get into the account, and put their payment information in, or you’re going to have to call and get them to give the payment information. That’s what you’re going to need to be ready for day one. This is what you’re doing in week one of your ownership of your facility or the first couple of weeks.

Choosing The Right Insurance

Number six is insurance. There are two different types of insurance. There is the property insurance, tenant, and title. Title insurance is where your attorney or your title company is going to provide this for you. This protects your property or any issues for your property. It protects your lender and banks. You don’t have any say in this. Take the property insurance of whatever your attorney or title company says. You can maybe choose the company, but a lot of times, I don’t even ask. You get this. I’m not going to speak a lot on this.

With property insurance, you’re going to have to get quotes on property insurance for fire, hurricanes, and floods. This takes forever to get. There is no insurance company that can give you a quote for a property in a couple of days. It takes a week, 2 or 3 weeks, sometimes to get a quote for insurance on a property. Make sure you give yourself time. A lot of times, if you have a bank, they’re going to require you to have property insurance ready to go beforehand. You want to give yourself some time to talk to a whole bunch of different insurance agents and get a couple of different quotes where you can compare apples to apples and choose the right insurance for you.

Tenant insurance is where, if something happens to the contents inside the unit, the tenant is covered. This is a whole bunch of different types of insurance out there. You want to talk to all the different types of companies out there. There are Storage Protectors, Bader, and Storsmart. There are all kinds of different companies out there. You’re going to talk to each one of those. You’re going to ask them to explain how it works.

You also get a cut in the tenant insurance. You could maybe make some money on this. It’s like, “How much are you going to pay me if I sell this tenant insurance?” This is another way to make income. It’s not a lot of income, but it’s a little bit of income. Talk to all the different companies and hear them out. Get the quotes back, and look at everything.

It takes a long time and effort. Give yourself some time for property insurance and tenant insurance. Don’t wait until the last minute for this, and start getting your quotes immediately. If you go to my website and you click on the Deal Analyzer, there is a checklist. It’s called the onboarding checklist. It is inside the Deal Analyzer. There are 50 things in there that you need to do before closing. That’s where I’m getting the thoughts of what we need to do for onboarding.

Online Marketing

Number seven is your website and the way that you market online. If you’re not marketing online, you’re not going to be a competition. You’re not competition to me if you’re not marketing online. All the bigwigs are marketing online. If you’re not doing this, you’re missing out on the opportunity. You need a website.

If you're not marketing online, then you're not going to be a competition. Click To Tweet

The software company that you pick provides a website. You have to choose. Do I want to go with them and use their website? Do I want to create my own website or hire somebody to do this? There are all different kinds of aspects out there. Ask them what the price is. The only thing that I don’t like is if you go with the website of the software company, that means that your website looks like everybody else’s website.

You may look at the website, and it looks different because your facility, units, and pictures are there. The way that Google works is that your website is typically a template. All they see are all these different storage facility templates there. They say, “It’s all like a bunch of BS.” It’s harder to rank when you use a website from a property management software company unless you are good at doing Google Ads, backlinks, and SEO because that is how you’re going to play the game.

I’m writing Google Ads, SpareFoot, and SEO. These are the three things that you have to focus on when you decide, “How am I going to market to get tenants?” Putting a sign out in front of your storage facility isn’t going to cut it anymore. It doesn’t work. When somebody looks for a storage unit, all they do is go on their phone and write storage near me. Whatever pops up is what it is.

You need to make sure that you’re on Google Maps and Apple Maps. Apple Maps is pushing to be as big as Google Maps is. They have a whole process for getting on Apple Maps. You have to be doing Google Ads, SpareFoot, SEO, Google Maps, Apple Maps, and some Facebook marketing. Whatever market you’re in, it depends on what market. If you’re a primary market, you need to do all of it. If you’re a secondary market, you should be doing all of it. If you’re tertiary, maybe not some of this stuff, but the more you can do, the better.

This is what you have to think about. How am I going to market for tenants? You have to make sure that when you’re doing your demos with your software, this is a question you ask. What about your website? How does the online marketing work? Do you guys do anything for this? You have to think over the next several years. How are you going to get tenants? You have to plan this out in the onboarding phase. Start thinking about what you’re going to be doing and planning this out.

That’s the first seven things you should be doing to onboard your facility as soon as you get a facility under contract. There’s a list of 50 things that you have to do in the Deal Analyzer. I gave you the first seven. You’ve got to demo property management software. You’ve got answering phones. Who’s going to do that? Who’s going to be your boots-on-the-ground person? Get your contract ready, and make sure you’re working the onboarding process of your software. You are working on your insurance and getting them going. Your website and online marketing, and what you’re going to be doing for that. That is the onboarding process.

I want to remind everybody. Go to StacyRosseti.com. You can always sign up for the Wednesday webinars there. Go to the Facebook group and sign up for Super Simple Self Storage. Buy my course, Super Simple Self Storage, and the Deal Analyzer. You can buy those. This is what’s going to help you to do it on your own. If you don’t want to do it on your own and you want me as a coach, go to StorageNerds.com. That is my two cents. I’m sticking to it, and I’ll see you guys next episode. Take care.

 

Important Links

• Deal Analyzer
• StacyRosseti.com
• Super Simple Self-Storage – Facebook
• Super Simple Self Storage
• StorageNerds.com