Finding Storage Facilities To Purchase

Finding storage facilities to purchase is often the first step to building your investment portfolio of storage facilities. So how do you go about finding the best facility to buy? Stacy Rossetti dives deep into the subject as she gives us a masterclass in generating leads and finding places to buy. Stacy looks at using Google Maps and Business listings to identify and distinguish possible leads and using skip tracing to find deals. Tune in and learn more about investing in storage facilities.

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Finding Storage Facilities To Purchase

I am in a different location now. That is why everything is a little bit different. Typically, I’m in my RV doing my show regularly but I am now at my mother-in-law’s house. I have been hanging out here all day. I appreciate you hanging in. You guys introduce yourself to me if I don’t know who you are. We have a whole bunch of new Storage Nerds students. A quick reminder, you can go to StorageNerds.com if you want to get into the coaching program. Get on a call and chat with me.

We launched the show in 2021. You can go onto iTunes, Spotify or whatever to find us. It takes a couple of weeks for this session to be released. You won’t have it the very next day but you will have something coming out, so you will be able to read. I do these sessions every Monday night. All my students come and hang out. Any guests can come and read as well.

Since I have had so many students joining, what we are going to do is we are going to go over how to find storage the way that I find it. I’m going to show you what I do. In that way, you know what your first steps are. Is there anybody here that this is the first time that they have ever been here to read? I would like to know that. Is there anybody here that owns a storage facility? That would be good too as well.

I see Yukiko is here. Yukiko teaches for REI USA, which is another company that we own. She teaches small multifamily. You can always check out REI USA as well. It’s REI-USA.com and then you can learn all the different ways to invest in real estate. I want to get started in self-storage investing. “What do I do now? What’s the next step?” It’s one of the things that I hear. It’s like, “I am interested in this but I don’t know what to do.” I’m going to tell you how to find them.

A quick reminder that my two-day Bootcamp is on January 22 and 23, 2022. I’m going to take you through all four stages of investing in self-storage. Stage one is finding them, funding them, and dealing analysis. That’s what it is. Stage two is onboarding. It’s like, “I’ve got something under contract. Now, what do I do?” It’s all the things that you have to do before you close on the facility. There’s a lot of stuff that you have to do. We are going to get into that.

Stage three is, “Now I bought this facility. What do I do?” It’s all the things that you have to do to get your facility up and running. That’s the management part, getting the management all set up. Finally, stage four is like, “I feel a little bit better. It has been a couple of months since I have owned this facility. I’m going to get out and start looking for another facility. On top of that, I’m going to work on automating this facility and systematizing it so that it is true passive income.” Those are the four stages.

I teach finding, funding, and deal analysis. That’s what I’m good at. My husband teaches onboarding and management. Guy is one of our coaches for StorageNerds. He comes on every couple of months. He teaches how to market for tenants and truly become like an online business because when you buy a storage facility, you become an online business. You have to be able to market yourself online.

STN 7 | Finding Storage Facilities — Finding Storage Facilities: When you buy a storage facility, you become an online business.

That’s the way that the world is turning now, especially for storage facilities. Anybody that thinks that you can just put a sign in the front of your storage facility nowadays, it’s not going to make it. You are going to be one of those facilities that I buy in the next couple of years. We don’t want that. Let’s learn how to truly market ourselves online and become a storage facility brand. Those are the four stages. That’s what we are going to do on January 22 and 23, 2022. If you are interested in coming to that Bootcamp, please go to StorageNerds.com and apply to become a student because only students are allowed to come to the Bootcamp.

Finding A Storage Facility To Acquire

I want to talk about all the different ways that we can find storage facilities and how I personally do it myself, how Chris does it. He’s my acquisitions person. We now have three facilities under contract that we are pitching to lenders to get funding for. On top of that, we have a 4th one that we are about to get in under contract.

How is Chris finding all these facilities? I’m going to show you how we do that now. I want to have a question from everybody out there. If you were interested in renting a storage unit in your area, where would you go to rent the storage unit? “Where would you go,” is the question. “What is the fastest-growing search engine in the country now?” is another question. Where would you go to find your facilities now?

Leverage The Power Of Google Maps

We are going to go online but where online would you go? Specifically, what would you do? Would you just drive around until you found a storage facility? No, nobody is going to drive around and randomly find a storage facility. Nobody goes to the Yellow Pages anymore. One of my students did buy a facility where the only place that he did his advertising was in the Yellow Pages. He had never changed that in the last several years that he owned the facility.

Where do they go to find storage? We all know, everybody was posting this out. Google Maps and somewhere that has good reviews online. The fastest engine is Google. I just use my general search engine and see what pops up. I would google nearby facilities and choose based on the price and location. I don’t think I have looked at Yellow Pages in several years.

Everybody nowadays goes to Google Maps. I’m not an iPhone person. Is there Google Maps on iPhone or do they have their own mapping thing? I’m not aware of how that works. Google Maps is on iPhone as well as on Android phones. What you would do is you get your phone and go to Google Maps or you could do exactly what some of the people said. Type, “Storage near me,” in the search engine or you go to Google Maps and type, “Storage near me.” That’s how everybody’s finding their storage facilities nowadays.

As the owner, your job is to be on Google Maps because when you go to the Google search engine or you go to Google Maps, it leads you to the same place, which is Google Business listings. As a storage facility owner, once you close on your deal, your job is to get on Google Business listings. The truth of the matter is that getting on Google Business listings is not easy at all.

As a storage facility owner, your job, once you close on your deal, is to get on Google business listings.

Has anybody ever got put their business on Google Business listings? Let me know how it worked or whatever. When you get into bigger facilities that are big businesses, maybe 2, 3, 4, 5, not even 200, 300, 400, 500 units, that might be a little bit different but I’m talking about these smaller facilities. We are buying a facility now and it’s 217 units. I’m going to pitch it and the owner still has no mailbox. He has no bell box at all. He doesn’t even use a website or anything like this. It’s a whole lot of nothing. You want to be getting onto Google Business listings. When you get onto Google Business listings, now we can go to Google Maps and we can search for storage facilities.

I always tell everybody, when you go to Google Maps and you look for storage, most of the time, when you are searching storage near me, you will find storage facilities that are on Google Maps. They went through the whole process to get onto it. The truth is that there are probably a lot of storage facilities that are not on Google Maps.

I talked to Jennifer, she’s one of our students. We went through nine storage facilities that she found while driving for storage within her radius of her small town in Tennessee. She found 9 storage facilities and only 1 of them popped up with a website. The other eight don’t even have a website. We want to find those facilities. Honestly, those are the ones that you are going to get the best bang for your buck.

What we are going to do is we are going to get into Google Maps. Before we do that, I wanted to read the comments, “Did I miss how to buy part of this? This seems to be about once you close on a facility.” I’m going into, how are you going to find storage facilities to purchase them? The truth is that how you find them is going to be on Google Maps. Storage facility owners need to get on Google Maps but a lot of storage facility owners are not on Google Maps.

The reason why is to get onto Google Maps, you have to set up a Google Business listing. You have to go through the entire process of filling out your whole profile. You have to get a postcard in the mail, and then you have to take that code that you get on the postcard. You have to come back, put the code in, and then they allow you to finish filling out your profile and become visible on Google Maps.

What I’m saying is that one way that we find a facility to purchase is by going on Google Maps and seeing what facilities are out there. I use Google Maps as a starting point. This is everybody’s homework. Your homework is you want to get onto Google Maps and search storage near me. Start looking to see what facilities are there near you.

If you are in a primary market, what that means is that you might have some over-saturation. There might be a lot of storage facilities there. On top of that, you might have the big ones, like CubeSmart, U-Haul, extra states-based storage. The primary market is going to be a downtown city or a city. For instance, we are looking to purchase a facility in Augusta, Georgia.

Augusta is 200,000 in population. The population is very important when it comes to storage. We are looking at a storage facility that is in the South Georgia area and within a 3-mile radius of that facility. There were ten other facilities. There are a lot of bigger facilities, not a lot of mom-and-pops but mostly bigger ones. You have to keep that in mind in primary markets.

Identifying Facilities

I always like to look at satellite imagery because I feel like you can see what the world looks like when you do it this way. It’s a little bit harder to tell what all these buildings are and stuff. When you start looking in Google Maps, you are familiarizing yourself with how Google Maps works. You train your brain to look at this. When I drive, I always use satellite imagery to drive. I don’t ever use this type of whatever this one is called. I don’t use this because I have trained my brain so much to have this up, plus I want to see what all these buildings look like because I love looking at commercial buildings.

This is our facility right here. When you scroll in, you can see what this facility looks like. This is what a storage facility looks like most of the time. If you are in a primary market, you might get a square building three levels high. The typical storage facilities that we want to buy are long skinny buildings. Long skinny buildings are chicken coops and storage facilities. That’s what I have learned in the Southeast. Tell me if there’s anything else that’s like a long skinny building. It’s either in Georgia or Florida. It’s like chicken coops and storage.

Now we are in Augusta, Georgia, and once you zoom out, here’s the downtown area. When you look at Augusta, we are right outside of the primary market. It’s right in the South Augusta area. I would consider the 520 to the 20 would probably inside it would be the primary market now. Every city has a different size primary market.

We have another facility in Valdosta, Georgia, which is a population of around 75,000 people. They have a downtown area as well too but their downtown area is very small. The one thing I love about Valdosta, which is a town of 75,000, is that I don’t see a lot of primary market facilities there. I did see Federal storage there. It is more of a secondary market type of facility.

Once you start to get to know your area and who the players are, you are going to start to recognize the same types of facilities over and over. You will know all the reach and the big ones but there’s a handful of secondary players. That 10 Federal Storage own 20 or 30 storage facilities, they’ve got funds and all this stuff but they focus on those smaller facilities, not too small but smaller facilities. Whereas like CubeSmart and U-Haul go out and build these huge big-box facilities and stuff now a lot of times.

That’s why I like playing around with bowing on to Google Maps and going in here, clicking this nearby, and saying storage near me. You can see too for ours, which is 2218 Rosier Road, there is nothing here. We will do storage near me and we will look it up. We will see what happens. You can put your address in and you will see. These are all the facilities. There are ten facilities within this area. It’s a 3-mile radius.

When you talk to property owners, it’s 80% timing and 20% connection.

What you are going to want to do is get to know who’s out there. You could do that by looking at the storage zone. There’s a Public Storage, CubeSmart, Economy Self Storage, it’s a dumpy old storage facility and public storage is here. When you start looking, don’t just look here at the map. Let me look and see what this one looks like. You can click on it and start looking to see what facility is this. They’ve got some boxes there. It’s all red. It’s fenced in and the back it’s a cream color.

Time To Get In Touch

These are all stock pictures. They’ve got some boxes and stuff. Here’s a keypad. Here’s what it looks like. It’s all fenced in. Look at this nice fence and stuff. Start using Google Maps to educate yourself on what type of facilities are near you. Here’s the Economy Self Storage. When you start looking at Google Maps, what you are going to notice is that they should have the address, the website, and the phone number. This has a website but it’s EMove.com. It doesn’t even work. It’s some random thing that I’m not going to click because I don’t want to have spam. You want to click on the link to make sure it works.

There’s something way back here. It looks like it’s a long skinny building and maybe this property belongs to it. It might have this commercial property with all this storage here. This is an older one. This is a great one to look at to see if you want to call the owner and if he wants to sell. For me personally, I would say, “This is something that I don’t need. This could be a good first facility.”

You can use Google Earth to get to know the area. He’s got some U-Hauls here. This is Allstate Insurance, he rents this out, and then it comes with these buildings. I use a website called LandGlide. You have to pay $10 a month to use this but this is a website where you can come in and see all the public data of an address. Let’s say this address is 3661 Peach Orchard Road in Augusta, Georgia.

Sometimes the roads don’t come up but you should play with it. You have to play with the words and stuff. This is not coming up at all so we won’t use that. This is what it looks like on LandGlide. AA Storage is the one that we have under contract now. You want to get into LandGlide as you are looking around to see what the property looks like as well, too.

Most of the time, it comes up and everyone’s fault doesn’t come up but also on the property, it shows you the county link. You can click on that and it will take you to the public site. It will give you all the information about the facility. You can tell where the cells were. You can see when the buildings were being built and what they are valued at, what they are paying taxes on. What it’s assessed as is $36,000. You can click on the assessments and stuff. They also have pictures and a map of it.

There’s a lot of information even on the public side. Some counties have more information than others. It depends on what your county does. Some of them have a lot of information and some of them don’t have any information at all or whatever. If you don’t see this, maybe they are not connecting or they don’t give out as much information but play around with LandGlide.

I have this on my phone. It’s an app that opened up as a desktop. That’s why a lot of the properties don’t come up on the desktop yet. They are still trying to fine-tune that because that happened in the last several months. On the app, if you put any addresses, it will come up. It works awesome on the app. When I’m driving for storage and I say, “I’m going to go check out that storage facility,” when I’m checking the storage facility out, I’m checking all the competition in the area as well, too.

For some reason, these are all bigger names. This would be considered a primary market but then you have Economy Self Storage where maybe the owner was like, “No, I’m never going to sell.” You have mine, which is the AA Augusta Storage facility. This one is also a little bit hidden. When you get in and start looking, you can see the Economy is on this main road and ours is off the road but it’s not super main.

That’s how you look on Google Maps. Get to know Google Maps satellite imagery, get in search storage near me and see if there are any random facilities. If you are in a primary market, you may be confined to some smaller facilities that maybe the owners are like, “No, I don’t want to sell.” It’s all about timing. When you talk to owners, it’s 80% timing and 20% connection. That’s how it works. They want to know and trust you when you are talking to them. I’m telling you, communication is the key.

Let’s do Ms. Lillian’s Self-Storage and let’s go to Valdosta. We have our phone numbers and the address. We have as much information as we possibly can fill out. You can do a storage near me. You can get in there and check to see. This is a town of 75,000 people. This is not Augusta. It has 200,000 people. There are 10 Federal Storage here. There’s also another one that’s not super big but I have seen a couple of them called King Storage but a lot of mom-and-pop one owner.

When I’m looking at a town of 75,000 people, which is a big city, it’s bigger than all your suburbs that you are living in your area, I started looking around and I could see Zacadoos Self Storage was here. This is way outside too and you could say, “What does this look like?” It looks like they must have converted it something or what the heck they do on this storage facility. Maybe they built it but they built it out in the middle of nowhere. It only has two pictures. This is a weird-looking storage facility.

The Zacadoos Self Storage and right here, let’s open that up and take a look at the website. It got a website here and customer support. You can come in and you can pay online. The Storable is the software that manages this. When you see Storable, they own three different types of software. They have SiteLink, storEDGE and ESS. We use storEDGE on the back end. All the websites, when you are using 1 of these 3, all look exactly the same. That’s why I could tell that it was a Storable website.

You want to click in and check it out. It got the website, phone numbers, and thirteen five-star reviews. That is good. This would not be one that I would contact. I would get in there and start to look for some that are 3 or 4 stars. This has 30 five-star reviews. They know what they are doing and got the website going on. I would just get in and start looking at all the ones that pop up like A&M Self-Storage. I would be getting in there and making sure that everything is filled out correctly.

When you start finding facilities, you want to put everything onto a spreadsheet and start keeping track of that.

10 Federal, we know, is going to be filled out. Valdosta Mini Storage, let’s check it out. They’ve got 37 reviews. We’ve got the Mid South Super Storage. This one has no website and this is a good one. It does have a phone number, though. It’s all gated and they will asphalt. It’s in a big shopping area. Maybe it’s behind this. It’s in a big area.

Here’s this big Valdosta Mini Storage, and then right next to this, you’ve got Mid South Super Storage, which looks tiny. That’s the only thing right there. It probably has 20 or 30 units. I would check in LandGlide or whatever software that you are using to look up the property line and see maybe he owns this cleaner or this whole property. He was like, “I will put a little storage in the back.” That’s how I’m looking in towns. It’s storage near me and clicking on Davis Creations Storage. This one has a website. This is a big one. It’s a nice size facility. It got some commercial warehouse or something.

All of these people that are on Google Maps all went through the entire process of going onto Google My Business listings or whatever it’s called. They put all their information, getting the code, going back, putting the information in, going back, and filling all this out, which could take quite a while. I’m saying probably a minimum a month, if not a couple of months.

That’s why a lot of storage facilities are not on Google Maps. What I’m saying is that when I go to Valdosta and I am looking at all the storage facilities in Valdosta here, most likely there are some storage facilities that are not on Google Maps. The one that we bought was actually Metro Mini Storage and it was in the wrong location. We drove over and I said, “It’s three stars. I’m going to go check it out.” I ended up being right here is where it was.

I clicked on this, took a look at it and this is what it was. The person that owned it had a manager and she was horrible. She was bad but she’s probably the one that figured out how to do this. She’s the manager and she lived right around the corner. She must have lived right up the street up here somewhere and she probably used this as her address. She got that thing sent to her mailbox because when we bought that facility, there was no mailbox there. We put the mailbox up and we’ve got the card. Somebody hits the mailbox and knocks it down. We never put it back up.

We don’t get any mail. We send all of our mail to our mailing address. There’s never ever any other mail that comes to our facilities, except for this card. When we buy the facility, we buy the mailbox immediately. That’s part of the onboarding process. We will talk about that in the Bootcamp. We have eleven facilities and there has never been a mailbox at any one of the facilities that we have ever bought. We put the mailbox up and it’s just there. It never gets any mail ever again.

I would personally say that the greater Augusta area is going to be a primary market. Now you have a 200,000 population. This is all primary and then you even saw outside of Augusta all in here was all primary market. I didn’t look up in this area. You can scroll up in this area and then just search nearby. I see a U-Haul neighborhood but that’s probably a truck rental. There are Post Storage, Tiger Eye Storage, and U-Haul neighborhood.

I’m guessing that the North Augusta area is not as popular as the South Augusta because in the South Augusta area are all primary markets down here. When you see all the big ones and you know that it is still considered the primary market, you may start getting into the secondary market. A lot of them are looking in the secondary market now because the market is so hot and stuff but the truth of the matter is most likely, it’s still the primary market.

Let’s zoom in and see if we can figure out when the primary market ends and the secondary market. You have primary, secondary, and tertiary markets. You can still see CubeSmart, Public Storage, Gate 5 Self Storage. When you click on it, it’s a beautiful storage facility. That’s big and stuff and that’s going to be the primary market.

You start searching again and you would search over here. SecurCare is still here. It’s coming on down. Fast Track is down here and then Augusta Climate Controlled RV Storage is down here but it’s getting less. You know you are getting into the secondary market, maybe even the tertiary market. There are a lot of people that live in this area over here but down here, there are not a lot of storage facilities on Google Maps. What I would do is I would be driving in this area.

They saw a need out here for a couple of different storage facilities. Are there any other storage facilities that are in this area? It looks like there are hardly any storage facilities that are popping up over here. When you start looking on Google Maps, you will see the storage is fading a little bit. You are like, “There should be more storage in that area.” I’m going to go take a look and see if there are facilities that are out there that are not on Google Maps. What I do is I use Google Maps to search and see if the Google business listings are filled out properly. That’s step one.

Step two is now I have this idea of where primary to secondary market ends and begins. I’m going to get out there and I’m going to be looking tertiary to the secondary market. I’m driving around what I call market research. This is like, “I’m going to get out there and I’m going to look and see, where does the secondary market end and where does the tertiary market begin?” Most of the time, those are the areas that are being gentrified, built out, there’s new construction, and things like that going on.

The question is, “Is there only one storage facility from here to here or maybe all in here?” My guess is that there are some others hiding up in this area but you have to find them. The way that I will do that is either drive for storage or look on Google Maps satellite view. You can do this virtually as well, sit there and look around.

I don’t know if this is being built out of this area. This looks like new subdivisions are coming out here. Here’s this low storage. Is this something or is this an apartment? I would look out and be like, “Is there a storage in this area?” Is there a storage that’s being built because eventually, all these subdivisions and all of this land are going to be built out? Maybe this is where I should build something if there’s not enough storage in this area or there’s already stuff that has been out here. We can call the owners and we can talk to them. They are just not on Google Maps. That’s what I call the hidden market.

When you start making your list of all the people you’re finding now, you have to figure out what your follow-up will be.

We have eleven storage facilities and I would say 1 or 2 have been on Google Maps. The other ones were never on Google Maps. I did exactly what I’m doing here now, which is using satellite imagery to find storage. It’s a little time-consuming. When you find a storage facility that’s not on Google Maps and you can get those owners to sell it, you get the best bang for your buck. You can most likely triple the value of those facilities a lot of times.

Tracking Your Leads

When you start finding facilities, you want to put everything onto a spreadsheet and start keeping track of that. I’m just getting into our coaching software and I’m going to show you the population spreadsheet that I have. The students get access to this stuff. This is all for students but at least I can show everybody to get an idea of how it works.

This is us keeping track of all the storage facilities that we find. You can see that we are doing name, property address, phone number, owner-manager. When we are driving, we have links to Google photos. We have the email, contact address and web address. We will list all these down and keep track of who we are contacting. All the information, phone numbers. If she’s skipped traces, it gets all the information. Why they have so many phone numbers here is because she skiptracing that information and trying to get ahold of the owners.

We keep track of all that right on this spreadsheet. As you are going through Google Maps and finding facilities, you want to be putting all those down, so you can keep track of them. We’ve got a list of thousands of people that we found by doing this. We have been to a lot of different states and stuff. You don’t want to get all confused about who we have been contacting and what are we even doing now. She has this color code system. That’s how we are doing it with her. She had green, reds, yellows and stuff. You could do it any way that you want. I used to put a note section and keep everything in the notes.

When you get this list, one of the things that you have to keep in mind is all of the different ways that you can contact owners. Calling up and trying to see if an owner is there, is one way. If you look at the sign, you can call the storage facility and you could call them to see if they are there. Storage facility owners are the most unmotivated least likely people to answer phones, especially if you are full. If they are full, they are like, “Whatever. I don’t need any help.” They will answer the phone and they are like, “I’ve got one available. Somebody is leaving in a couple of weeks.” That’s how it works. They will answer the phone only when they have to answer the phone.

Skip Trace Your Way To Information

If you start making your list up and you have all the lists of all of the people that you are finding, now you have to figure out what your follow-up is going to be. Your follow-up is getting the address, phone number, owner’s information, email address of the owner and the facility, owner’s address, and phone number. You want to get all of this information. You do that by what’s called skiptracing. Looking up the phone number and calling the facility’s phone number is not going to cut it for most of the people that you talk to.

You want to skiptrace the information and it usually costs about $1 per skiptrace, maybe $2. If you are driving for storage or looking online, and you put a list together of 30 people, the first thing that you want to do is call and see if the owner answers. If the owner answers, you don’t have to skiptrace but if the owner doesn’t answer, you have to skiptrace.

Skiptracing means that you go onto a site like American Tracers or BeenVerified. If anybody has ever skipped trace anything before, put the site that you use. I used to use American Tracers but they are not working out very well anymore. You can try BeenVerified. I personally use IDI but there are many skiptracing companies.

Each skip tracing company is not created equally. If you find one that’s like, “It’s $0.35 to skip trace,” that skip trace is going to suck. You find one that costs $2, $5 or something like that, it’s going to be a little bit better. BeenVerified is free and a lot of people say it works. I have never used it. You might want to give that a go, and then call everybody but if it doesn’t work, you are going to do some research to figure out which skiptracing companies truly look and give you real data and information.

All they are doing is pulling from county records and things like that and sometimes that stuff was not updated. You are going to create this beautiful list of all these storage facilities that you are going to find. What you are going to do is you are going to call them, see if they answered the phone and if they want to sell. If the owner answers the phone, awesome. If a manager answers the phone, not awesome because 99% of the time, the manager is like, “No, they don’t want to sell.”

We tell our manager, Bonnie, if anybody ever wants to let me know because I want to talk to them and see what they are going to pay. Maybe they could pay triple the price or something but most managers don’t do that because they don’t want to lose their job. If you get ahold of a manager, what you do is you want to pretend that you are like a customer. You could say, “I’m interested in your facility. I’m looking for a five-unit now. I would like to know what sizes you have and how much they are.”

If you start doing that, you can add that to your sheet. You know that if something happens and you do get ahold of the owner, you will know that they have 20 10x10s and 30 10x20s or whatever. You can start talking to the manager and they will give you a lot of information. You don’t want to not talk to managers and say, “Sorry, I’ve got the wrong number.” You want to talk to them.

If you don’t get ahold of them, you are going to go and skiptrace that information. You are going to put it into the sheet, just like Emily put all those phone numbers, addresses, emails and stuff. Anytime Chris, our acquisitions person, can go to that sheet, call anybody up and check to see if anybody wants to sell. We had an office manager that did all the skiptracing for us and kept everything. Chris is the one that’s calling, searching and doing this stuff.

You are going to have the facility’s phone number, address and website if they have one. Now you can send a letter to the facility saying that you want to buy their facility. You can call them and leave a voicemail if they don’t answer or talk to them, or you can text message them and see if it works. That might be their personal phone number that they are using. A lot of storage facility owners always use their own cell phones. You might want to text them, too. Also, you are going to get their email when you skiptrace them. You can get the email of the facility or even their personal email sometimes, too. You just email everybody.

There are so many skip tracing companies, but skip tracing companies are not created equally.

Sometimes when you skiptrace, you also get family members. You will see that these are the family members. You can email or text them as well and say, “I’m trying to get ahold of this owner. Do you know anything about it?” You also get the owner’s information like in the last several years, these are the phone numbers, email addresses, and addresses that they used.

Sometimes you get a bazillion addresses and sometimes you get one. If they are moving around a lot, you are going to get a lot of addresses but a lot of times you just get 1 or 2. The rule for us is if you get 1 or 2 addresses, maybe the tops 3, send a letter, call, text, and email all of them. If you get 100, try a couple of them and keep track of those. If those don’t work, try the next back or something like that because you don’t want to be sending out ten letters to addresses and getting them all back and stuff.

We would try, test a couple of them and then see if those letters came back. She was keeping track of all that. If letters did come back, she would come back and check her sheet. She would even skiptrace that sometimes. We have done a lot of skiptracing over the last couple of years and we found a lot of storage facility owners. That way is what we did.

I have been over how you can use Google Maps to find a storage, how you can look at a satellite imagery to find storage. On top of that, how you can find the hidden market? You can try to get out there and try to find storage facilities that are not on Google Maps. When you find all these facilities, keep them in good order. Put them on a sheet, so you can keep track of them and follow up with them.

This is not one and done. The reason why is because there’s only a handful of storage facilities in the world. There are not a lot of storage facilities. I’m guessing maybe 25,000 to 30,000 mom-and-pop owners and all the rest of them are big box companies and stuff, too. If there were only 25,000 to 30,000 mom-and-pop owners, that means that there’s only a handful of 500 to 700 in each state. You could put a list together of 500 names easy peasy lemon squeezy.

If you try it in one time, they are like, “I will call them. I’m not going to work.” That’s why you have to keep a sheet. You have to follow up and keep following up. The rule is that you follow up with every single owner until you get ahold of them. You need to be getting ahold of them every couple of months. That is how good your follow up system should be. We’ve just got one of the contracts that I pitched and the owner several years ago did not want to sell. We have been contacting them and we finally contacted them again. He said, “I’m ready to sell now.” It took a long time for us to follow up and to get that facility owner to sell to us.

Those are my tips for, “I want to find storage facilities to buy, how do I do that?” That is a handful of tips. In the Bootcamp, I will give you 10 to 15 different ways to find storage facilities. Those, for me, are my favorites. I like to talk about those. Throughout the last couple of years that I have been doing this, when I do that, I find the best deals versus going online and looking for facilities, going on Crexi, LoopNet or something like that.

Crexi and LoopNet are at the bottom like 14 and 15. I want to give you some other ways to do it in the Bootcamp. Hopefully, you can join my two-day Bootcamp. Go to StorageNerds.com. Also, another thing before I forget, if you do read the blog posts, if you could go on there and review my show, that would be awesome because the more reviews that I get, the better rankings I get on my show. I appreciate everybody hopping on. I look forward to seeing all my students in the mastermind. Hopefully, I will see more of you in the Bootcamp. I am here to help you on your journey and I look forward to talking to you soon. Take care.

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