How To Buy Your First Storage Facility In The Next 90 Days

Want to invest in self-storage without the hassle of finding properties, evaluating deals, negotiating with owners, and running the facility? Self-Storage Fund of America lets accredited investors earn totally passive income! Listen to Stacy pitch the fund, learn about how you can involved, and hear about the first deal under contract

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How To Buy Your First Storage Facility In The Next 90 Days

If you’re interested in learning how to invest in real estate, please check out REI USA. It’s one of the companies that I own. It’s a platform where expert coaches across the United States teach people how to invest in real estate, not only self-storage. I’m one of the coaches for REI USA. You can learn all the different types of real estate investment transactions through REI USA. StorageNerds is the coaching program. That’s where I coach, hold people’s hands and teach people how to invest in self-storage.

The doors to StorageNerds are only open three times a year. That’s it. It’s in January, May and September. We do have the doors opening on May 1st, 2022. If anybody’s interested in getting into the coaching program, go to StorageNerds.com. You can check it out. There is the StorageNerds show. For any reason that you miss any of the Monday night sessions, then you can always read this if you want or go to YouTube, Stacy Rossetti Teaches. That’s my YouTube page where we teach as well. This gets put out as a podcast and on YouTube as well.

Make sure that you join the Facebook group. It’s called Super Simple Self-Storage. If you are not a part of that group, join. You can ask any questions that you have. If you have questions about how to get started, how to look, management questions or anything like that, a lot of people are posting questions in this group. If you’re looking for deals and stuff like this, also join that group because people are posting out deals that they’re selling. It’s a very good group to be a part of.

Also, if you want to get started in self-storage but you don’t think that you can afford the coaching program, then you can always buy my course. My course is called Super Simple Self-Storage. You can go to StacyRossetti.com, click on the course, buy the course and do the course. That’s like a do-it-yourself or learn-it-yourself kind of thing. We’ve got lots of links from Aariellynn. If you need the link, you can contact Aariellynn. Our email is Questions@StacyRossetti.com. If you have any questions or anything like that, Aariellynn can always do and tell you where to find everything that we offer.

I have the Self-Storage Fund of America. It’s Self-StorageFundOfAmerica.com. If you’re one of those people that are like, “I got some money but I don’t have any time. How can I invest in self-storage?” The fund is perfect for you. It is where you need to be. Make sure that you check out Self-Storage Fund of America. Email us at Questions@StacyRossetti.com or Questions@Self-StorageFundOfAmerica.com if you are interested in that as well.

Typically, I pitch that on Monday nights. Right after this session, I talk about the fund, the deals in the fund and all this stuff. You can ask me questions then. All that is found at StacyRossetti.com. If you have any questions about anything, go to my website and look around for that. If you have any questions, you can always email us. Tim is a student. Tim owns a storage facility. Tell me about that and also set an appointment with me. I would love to hear about what’s going on.

STN 16 | First Storage Facility — First Storage Facility: You could run your numbers at eight caps.

You Can Buy Large Storage Facilities

I do all my coaching calls on Monday afternoons. All my students, whenever they need help, can do a coaching call. You can chat with me and let me know what’s going on and stuff. I always love knowing what’s happening with everybody. Angie has a 39-unit self-storage facility that she bought in July of 2021. She’s looking to purchase her second. Where did you buy that? I would love to know. If you get into the industry and start learning about how to invest in self-storage, you are going to hear that you should not be buying smaller facilities.

Typically, most storage facility owners are going to say that you have to buy a facility that’s 50,000 square feet or bigger but the truth of the matter is this. I say this all the time. Not all of us can get up there and buy a 50,000-square foot building. Our very first facility was about 125 units. We typically stick around 100 units. Our smallest is 59 units. It’s in a tiny town called Warm Springs, Georgia. I bought that thing for $100,000. It was a wife that inherited that property. Her husband died and she inherited it and ran into the ground.

She wanted to dump it. I offered $100,000. I was like, “That’s a fair price for both of us.” It took a good year to get that thing leased up because it’s a smaller town. It takes a little bit longer for these types but that thing has been rocking and rolling for years. It’s probably worth $300,000 honestly. It’s full. The truth is I don’t know what anything is worth anymore because you could run your numbers at an 8% cap. In a tertiary market, I typically was running my numbers at an 8% cap but people are buying stuff at crazy cap rates.

I had a realtor from Marcus & Millichap. He called me up and was like, “Do you want to sell your facility? I’m talking about one of them that we have in the North Georgia Mountains?” I was like, “I don’t want to sell my facility.” He’s like, “Are you sure? We’re selling facilities at a 4% cap in the area you’re in.” I was like, “Maybe I should sell this thing.” I bought it as an abandoned facility. It was at 0% cap but we’re probably running that thing at a 16% cap rate.

Could you imagine getting that thing up to 15% to 16% and selling it for 4%? That’s the thing. It’s a 76-unit facility. If I was going to list my property to sell, I’m going to list it on Crexi or with a realtor most likely because prices are so high. I saw a facility. I can’t remember if it was in Georgia or Florida because I’m typically in Georgia, Florida or Texas when I’m looking for properties. I saw a tertiary market facility listed for $20,000 a door. I was like, “What?”

Find Them, Fund Them, Run Them

What I wanted to talk about was how you get started in self-storage investing. I saw that there are a lot of newbies here and a lot of people interested. I figured that we would find them, fund them and run them. That’s what we’re going to do. I’m in an RV park, just so everybody knows. I live in an RV and we travel full-time. Everybody is getting to know me. We’re in Albuquerque New Mexico. There are probably 100 RVs here or so.

All of us can get up there and buy 50,000 square feet of storage facilities.

I want to help people to get an overall view of how the market works and how the industry is working and then hopefully give you your next steps. If you’re here and you have no idea how to get started, I’m going to help you to get out there and start looking for facilities. If you’re already looking for facilities and you found a couple but you don’t know how to get the money for them, I’m going to talk a little bit about that. If you own a couple of facilities as a couple of you do, then we will talk about managing them and maybe I’ll give some tips on what we do. My goal for this is to find them, fund them and run them.

Typically, the software is going to cost you, let’s say, $75 a month. The website also costs $75 a month per facility. We started getting all these facilities. We’re paying $150 a month. We are grandfathered into our software at the cheapest rate because when I joined storEDGE, only three people were working there. I was not one of the first ones but I was in the very beginning years of storEDGE. We got grandfathered into the lowest rate.

What we did is we went out and hired somebody. It’s our coach. His name is Guy. He’s our Marketing Coach for StorageNerds. He builds the website for you. You can eliminate that $75, $100 or whatever they charge you per month for each of the facilities. We still pay the management fee for the software to manage the facility but we don’t pay that website fee. We saved a lot of money by doing that. The website costs us maybe $1,000 to build but in the end, we have saved so much money like $1,000 a month. We saved a ridiculous amount of money every single month by building this out.

Keep that in mind when you’re looking for software. This is one of the questions that you should be asking the software companies when you talk to them, “How much is this going to cost me when I have 5 or 10 facilities? Do you cut me a cost out? Am I going to still keep adding this up per facility?” See if there’s a way around it. I’ve done a lot of demos on pretty much every software out there. They’re charging for the management software and then also for the website software.

That’s one of the things that you should be thinking about. We didn’t think about this until it was too late and we had ten facilities. Think about that if you’re the type of person that wants to own 5, 10 or 15 facilities because we’re going to own anywhere from 20 to 30 facilities. It’s like, “In the long run, what’s the best fit going to be for us?” You only want to own 1, 2 or 3. It’s not that big of a deal but that stuff adds up, especially if you’re going to be this person that I saw here that has this 39-unit facility. We have a student that did a student showcase.

For StorageNerds, we meet on the 1st and 3rd Tuesdays of every month and do it during lunchtime. During that mastermind session, we always have a student coming on and doing what we call a student showcase. In the last student showcase, we had this guy, Matt. The first facility he bought was also 39 units. He did not do the property management software and the website. He was old school and wanted to save as much money as he possibly could. He does all automatic payments through PayPal and takes the money out every single month.

Eventually, he set up a credit card company to withdraw the money. When you have these smaller facilities or these 39-unit or 59-unit facilities, you have to take into consideration that it’s going to cost you a couple of hundred dollars. It’s up to around $300 a month for the software and the website. $300 a month on a facility is a lot of money. That starts adding up. My students are paying typically for a website and the software $200 to $300 a month.

Free Content On Finding Sports Facilities

You can check us out at Ms. Lillian’s and then look at our website to see how you could do it. We had that made. We’re going to find them. I have a lot of free content out in the world on how to find storage facilities. This is not something I’m going to go into because you can always search Stacy Rossetti Teaches. It will come up with a plethora of videos on this because I’ve done a lot of videos on finding them. Since there are a lot of newbies here, I want to give you some ideas on how we find our facilities. The first 6 to 8 facilities we found by driving for storage.

#DrivingForStorage is the hashtag I created. We go on Google Maps. I don’t know if anybody else got this but I got an email from Google stating that they are getting rid of the Google My Business app. Typically, for you to get onto Google Maps, you had to go into Google My Business, fill out the profile and add your facility. I’m not going to get into it. It’s a whole process to get your facility onto Google Maps. You can still go to your desktop and do Google My Business but they’re getting rid of the app.

What they’re going to do is make Google Maps also Google My Business. When you get into Google Maps, you can log directly into your Google My Business area. It’s on the app anymore. You can edit everything through your phone. Do you know how you can go into Facebook and edit your profile right there? It’s going to be like that for Google Maps. You will be able to pull up your company. I’ll pull up Ms. Lillian’s Self Storage. On my phone, I can edit all my stuff right then and there.

Instead of having to go into the app, they’re getting rid of that. I don’t know if anybody else did but I got an email for that. I thought that was pretty interesting. Essentially, what I’m trying to say is that you as a business owner should be on Google Maps but a lot of storage facilities are not on Google Maps. You want to go onto your app and search storage facilities near you or in the areas that you’re interested in purchasing in. You can create a list of storage facilities in the areas that you want.

Take out the ones that you don’t want to buy unless you have a lot of money. Typically, you don’t want to buy the big box office ones or anything that are owned by REITs, funds or anything like that. You would take all those out and create your list. We have an acquisitions team. That’s another thing I wanted to put down. I’ve talked about this a couple of times. Essentially, internally, we have an acquisitions team. That acquisitions team is going onto Google Maps, building lists for us and then calling those owners to see if they want to sell.

You can create your own acquisitions team to go to Google Maps and build lists for you.

Our acquisitions team does this. You can create your acquisitions team to do those if you want to do that or do it yourself. Essentially, they’re going on Google Maps and then creating the list themselves. Any ones that they see that are two stars or something like this, we already know that those are ones that we should be trying to focus on. That’s another thing. Google Maps gives you so much information. You want to make sure you utilize that. Our acquisitions team is building lists by going onto Google Maps, looking on Google Earth, doing this thing and calling the owners.

Another thing that I wanted to mention is that as of May 1st, 2022, you can hire my acquisitions team if you want to find a property for you. You have to be a student of StorageNerds. If you’re interested in having somebody look for facilities for you and you tell them exactly where you want to find the facility like, “I would like to buy a facility on the outskirts, in the suburbs or the tertiary market of Nashville,” then our team would essentially go onto Google Maps, build that entire list and drive for storage virtually for you. That’s another thing. You can do this virtually or in real-life.

I like real-life drives because I live in an RV. Driving is not a big deal for me but some people are like, “I don’t have time to be out there driving and stuff.” You can drive for storage virtually by looking on Google Maps and seeing the facilities that you can find that are listed on Google Maps and also some that are not listed on Google Maps. Another thing that I do besides using Google Maps is LandGlide. There’s another app called Parceled. That’s free but LandGlide is better. It’s not free. It’s $10 a month.

We use both. For our virtual assistance, we use Parceled because it’s free and I don’t want to pay for the app. Chris, my Acquisitions Manager, will use LandGlide. You can compare both to see which one you like but with LandGlide, you get way more information than Parceled. LandGlide and Parceled are apps that are on your phone. LandGlide has a desktop version but it’s not very good. The app on the phone is awesome. I can’t live without it.

It’s Best To Talk To The Owner Directly

I use LandGlide every day because I do a lot of driving. While we’re driving, we’re looking for storage facilities and stuff. These are my top picks for finding storage. You could go to Crexi and LoopNet or go online and all this stuff but the truth is you want to talk to the owner directly because then you’ll get the best deal. You build this relationship and bond to connect, communicate and stuff like this. I’m personally not going through a broker.

If you were going to buy, let’s say, a 40, 000, 50,000 or 60,000-square foot facility and you want a super big facility, then maybe going through a broker is the best way to go. We come across the owners that have 50,000 square feet of facility they want to sell all the time, even talking to owners directly like this. The reason that we do it this way is that most of the time when you talk to them, they have not thought about selling at all.

Essentially, what we hear on the phone all the time is, “I never thought about it.” It’s like, “Would you be interested in selling?” They’re like, “I don’t know if I’m interested in selling or not.” I said, “Would you be interested in us giving you an offer? We would love to give you an offer. That’s it.” That is what we do. We’re giving offers. Our goal is a minimum of five offers a week or more. The truth is if you are not making offers, then you are never going to find a facility to buy. My question to you is this. If you want to find a facility, how many offers have you made this week? Has anybody here reading this made any offers this week?

If you want to buy a facility, then your job is to make offers. If you don’t want to make an offer, drive for storage, get on Google Maps and call or buy a list, you could buy a list of storage facilities if you want. You could buy a list and call all those people yourself. Let’s do a cold call. We’re virtually driving for storage, creating the lists ourselves internally and cold calling those lists. You could buy the list. The list is very expensive. It’s not a cheap list. I’m guessing it’s $1 a name. Typically, you need to be at a thousand names to buy the list or get it. It’s a little bit of money.

In my mind, I’m thinking, “I’m paying a virtual assistant $7 an hour.” That’s 40 hours a week, $250 or maybe $300 a week. For a list of 1,000 people, I could have a virtual assistant working for me 40 hours a week full-time. I was like, “Why would I buy one list and still have to find somebody to cold call and pay them for that?” Our virtual assistants’ job is to call 25 people or owners a day. It’s 125 calls a week or more.

We have learned this by creating this acquisitions company, starting to look at the numbers and how everything’s working out, talking to the VAs and working with them. We know that they’re calling around 25 people a day. That’s taking half of the day up. They’re not calling all day long because nobody wants to do that. The other half of the day, they’re building lists, virtually looking, calling and then also following up on all the calls.

Essentially, what’s happening for this acquisitions team that we’re building internally is that we have all these deals and calls. All the wheels are turning on and trying to manage all these different deals at the same time. It’s quite a logistical feat to be able to manage all that at once because to manage one deal is a lot of work. Think about having a lot of deals at the same time too. It’s exciting. I love building it. This is something that you can do too. It’s not difficult. It’s just a lot of management, helping everybody get set up and then teaching them how to do this stuff.

To give you some insight, I’m excited for May 1st, 2022. Anybody that joins StorageNerds and becomes a lifetime member will be able to hire our team and then utilize our team as well. They will do all this work for you or you can do it yourself. This is how you do it right here. We got lots of different ways for you to find facilities. Also, my boot camp is coming up at the end of May 2022. The doors are going to open in the first two weeks of May 2022. The weekend before Memorial Weekend is for my boot camp.

You get the best deal and relationships when you talk to the storage facility’s owner directly.

Ways To Fund Your Deals

Those two days essentially are to find and fund them. We are going to be digging super deep into this. We have twenty different ways for you to find storage facilities, all the different ways to fund them, creative deal structuring and things like that. That’s what we’re going to talk about in the boot camp. I’m giving you a high-level overview. If you are interested, only students can come to the boot camp. That’s it. We will be talking about that.

In this section right here, I want to talk quickly about all the different ways you could invest in self-storage and then fund your deals. I’ve talked a little bit about some types of deals but the one that I focus on is mismanaged properties. These are properties that the owners are not managing properly. They are out there. It is not difficult to find these. Two things are difficult about buying a mismanaged facility. Number one is they’re very hard to fund because banks don’t want to fund these.

I have a facility up in the North Georgia Mountains. It’s a commercial property. The thing too is that owners of mismanaged facilities don’t have any documentation or they are not documenting what they’re doing correctly. The owner of this particular facility that we’re looking at told me he was making $90,000 a year. We got his tax return. His tax return says it’s $54,000 a year. $54,000 a year is worth $600,000 maybe and $90,000 is worth $1 million or more.

I put it under contract for $1 million. When I put it under contract, it was an income-producing property. I talked to ten banks. I was like, “It’s an income-producing property. I can go to a bank and get a loan.” Any regional or local banks or SBA love income-producing properties. Everybody loves storage facilities and lending on storage. For banks, you could do regional, local or SBA. I talked to every local bank in the area for a ridiculous amount.

Once we started to get the tax returns in, they said, “Due to the fact that he’s only making $54,000 a year and he told you it’s $90,000 but his tax returns only show $50,000, we are only going to fund a value of $600,000 because that’s what it’s valued at. If you can prove to me that you’re making $90,000, then we will fund it.” I thought it was an income-producing property. It became a mismanaged facility. Banks want nothing to do with them.

If it was a mismanaged facility that was on the up and up and you could prove it was on the up and up, it was increasing over the last couple of years and has been getting better and it was at 50% full and then it’s at 75% full but it’s not truly full, then maybe SBA would lend because there is a gray area with SBA, which is this 50% to 75%. I’ve seen this with my students. They are open to looking at these types of deals to see if it is being managed properly. If it was not managed properly but it was showing that it was becoming better-managed, then they might be okay with lending on that.

Most likely in those scenarios, you have to put more down. For this facility, I ended up talking to hard moneylenders. The hard money lenders are essentially asset-lending companies. They look at the asset as a whole but they’re asking for very high down payments. They were asking 30% to 40%. I talked to a couple of hard moneylenders. They’re like, “You got to put 40% down.” I was like, “Are you kidding me?” That was $400,000. I was like, “I could go out for $1 million and find a real income-producing property where we only had to put 20% down and buy 2 of those. Why would I give you $400,000?”

I’m not going to put 40% down on the deal and then have the interest rates super high because of hard moneylenders and interest rates. He said, “I could do 40% down at 10% interest.” I was like, “I’m not going to do that. I don’t think it’s worth it that much.” What happens is that the interest rate makes your mortgage so much higher. You have to pay that every single month. I don’t feel like being stressed out. The thing is that the stressful part of buying a mismanaged facility is not only finding the money. When you find the money, that’s the easy part.

The second stressful thing about mismanaged facilities is that there’s a lot of work because you will buy them typically at a discounted rate. You will double, triple and quadruple the value of that property within a couple of years. That’s why I love mismanaged facilities because the value add is so high. The truth is that it’s a lot of work because a mismanaged facility doesn’t have a lot of work in terms of rehabbing or anything like that but in terms of maybe cleaning the property up a little bit if there’s trash everywhere or something like those.

Maybe some cars are leftover and you have to get rid of them or something like that. The truth is that getting the old or bad tenants out and the good tenants in and managing that property properly takes more work to handle a mismanaged facility, particularly facilities that are 50 to 200 units. They will take more work than if you did buy a $50,000 income-producing property. Keep that in mind.

We come across a lot of facilities. We have one that’s 25% full and 220 units that we’re trying to buy. He wants $1 million for 220 units. It can be worth at least $2.5 million to $3 million when we’re done. Getting it from 25% full to 90% full is going to take a lot of work to manage. We come across these properties all the time. That’s why I started the fund. Self-Storage Fund of America is to buy these $1 million to $3 million properties that are mismanaged facilities.

Income-Producing Property

Another thing with mismanaged facilities that I wanted to go over was this. It wasn’t in the last session but in the session before, I talked about this. Our acquisitions team is noticing that there’s a certain type of deal out there, which you have to keep your eyes and ears open for. It’s considered a mismanaged facility but it’s producing income. These types of facilities are facilities that are making money but haven’t raised their rates in years.

You can quadruple the value of mismanaged facilities within a couple of years.

We have one that we have under contract. It’s making $150,000 but he hasn’t raised his rates in three years. He’s at $0.73 a square foot and he should be at $1.20 a square foot. It’s an income-producing property. We could go to the bank and get a loan for that because it is making $150,000. Once we increase the rate to $1.20, it’s going to be worth well over $3 million. We are doubling the value of that property because we have that property under contract for $1.7 million. We’re going to double the value of that property pretty much by raising the rates, which is awesome.

Keep your eyes open for that. A mismanaged property could also be considered income-producing but you have to be able to raise the rates. Also, you need to learn how to raise money. In all cases and all of these types of facilities, you need to learn how to raise money. That’s it. Commercial real estate is expensive. If you don’t learn how to raise money, then you will only be able to buy 1 or 2 properties. The truth is you have to raise money.

Virtual Summit To Learn How To Raise Capital

The good thing I was going to tell you is we are doing a virtual summit on May 7th, 2022, which REI USA is hosting. If you need help raising money, please make sure that you check it out. It’s How to Raise $100,000 in 100 days Virtual Summit. It’s REI-USA.com/Raising-Capital. This is a virtual summit for REI USA members but anybody could come. If you have to join, it’s $40 to join. You can come to the summit and then all of the coaches from REI USA will be teaching how they raise money.

Yukiko is teaching. She’s going to talk about how she raised all this money to buy all these multifamily that she does. I’m going to be talking about how I raised money to buy storage facilities. There’s land, Airbnb and all kinds but essentially, it’s all these expert investors across the country talking about how they raise money. What did they do to raise money? I highly recommend it if you can come to that. It’s a one-day event from 10:00 to 5:00. That’s it. Each teacher is going to do 30-minute sessions and then it’s going to be one after another. I’m excited about it.

Mismanaged facilities are private lenders. If you have private money, which is learning to raise capital, then you can buy lots of mismanaged facilities, triple the value in the next couple of years and make a beaucoup of money. This is exactly what I do. The other way that you can invest in self-storage is you can wholesale. I want you to know there are a lot of sessions on how to wholesale self-storage. If you’re like, “I want to get into storage but I have no money at all,” learn how to wholesale self-storage. I teach this.

There are lots of sessions on YouTube and stuff on how to wholesale. I also teach this and help students in the coaching program as well. You don’t need any money to wholesale. You just need to learn how to wholesale self-storage. Also, you can do conversions. You will see more of these conversions, which is where you buy a building and then convert it with portables and stuff like this. I don’t know if anybody’s interested in doing conversions but this is getting bigger.

Essentially, with all of these retail spaces that are coming up for sale, people are buying them up and converting them into storage facilities. You have to have money to buy the building, which is typically a lot of money and then you have to be able to convert, which is also a lot of money. Essentially, conversions cost a lot of money. A lot of times, with conversions, you could do this with SBA. SBA loves new construction. New construction is another way.

It’s any type of bank loan, SBA or syndication. If you are a syndication type of person, then you can do that. Finally, the last way to get into self-storage is to lend. If you’re the type of person that has no time, you should lend it out, honestly, to somebody that’s buying a mismanaged facility. You could be the lender and get a lien on the property. I’m going to talk about this at the summit as well. I have some lenders that are like, “I want to have a lien on the property and make sure that if something happens, I get that property.”

I have some lenders that are like, “I want to partner. Let’s do this together.” I have some that are like, “Let me put some money in this fund. It’s passive. You take care of it. I do everything and make the money.” It’s something like that. That’s lending. I have three different types of lending programs. I have to get a lien on the property and do debt. It’s debt partnering or the fund. This is something that you’re going to have to think about as well. If you truly want to get into commercial real estate, you’re going to have to learn how to do all this.

Finally, run them. I talked about the software and the website. There’s a lot of property management software out there. We use storEDGE but there are all kinds like ESS. The new one that came out is Breeze. I did a demo with them too. It seems pretty good. They don’t have a website. They only do the property management software, which I thought was cool. They’re going to come and do a demo for our StorageNerds students, which will be good. For all the students that are here, you can hear them out and see what they do.

It’s a different-looking software but it’s very modern and stuff. It came out and they’re trying to push it and stuff. It fits well into especially smaller facilities but it is expensive. These are not cheap. There’s SiteLink. It is the one that has been around forever. It’s older. It’s not being funneled a lot but a lot of super big facilities are using this as well. What I’m saying is that your software is the most important part of your business because it runs your entire back office.

The truth is that most people pay for software every single month but don’t utilize everything that software has to offer. Why pay for software that has all the bells and whistles if you’re only going to be putting tenants in? The reason that we chose storEDGE and I liked storEDGE so much is because you can automate everything inside of storEDGE like your auction. Our auctions are virtual because of storEDGE. Also, storEDGE offers mailing.

The software is the most important part of your business because it runs your entire back office.

We signed up for this. I’m excited. Once it perfects this, we will go over this in the mastermind so all the students can see this. Essentially, we signed up for the Mail House. There’s no other software that does this. storEdge implemented Mail House where they will mail out any type of letter that you want. For instance, it’s your owner transfer letters. When you buy the facility and you want to send out letters to the new tenants, they will mail all these for you. They also mail rate increase letters.

We signed up. They do a lot of other stuff as well. We’re starting to use the Mail House stuff too. The reason that storEDGE comes out with all this stuff is that they question their members, “What can we do to make this software better for you?” This is all the stuff that they would come up with. It’s like, “We need to automate the auction process, the letters and our rate increases.” They have stuff like dynamic pricing. No software does dynamic pricing except for storEDGE.

I’ve asked all of them. All software will do revenue management but they will not do dynamic pricing. In all the things that you’re manually going in and doing, you want to be able to automate this and take it off your plate. You don’t have to think about it. You want to find software that does this. The software is the most important part of everything that you do. Spend some time doing demos of every single software out there and then asking them questions.

“How do you do the revenue management, dynamic pricing, auctions and the Mail House? What do you do to make everything easier? Do you ask your members regularly what they’re looking for so that you can update it?” The one thing with Breeze is that accounting is inside of Breeze. You can’t hook to QuickBooks. They have their accounting system. Why embed it? They do your accounting plus software. That’s why I said play around, talk to every single software, learn them and then choose the one that best fits what you’re looking for.

That’s a good find them, fund them and run them at least for now. I’m going to get out. There were a couple of questions. I’ll answer those. StacyRossetti.com is where everything is. Check me out and then you can check out REI USA. You can find there the course, StorageNerds and the fund. Go to the whole website, check me out and google me. You can find everything that way as well. I see some questions, “To figure out what areas are good to invest in, do you use third-party or software?”

Honestly, the truth is most areas are going to be good to invest in except for areas that have declining populations. You want to be able to look to see if there’s a declining population. How do we do this? We use Radius Plus but the truth is that Radius Plus is not perfect. They are having issues with their 2021 and 2020 data. You have to fall back to 2019. They emailed all of us out and let us know like, “At Radius Plus, we’re having some issues with all the data, the demographics and stuff like this. We’re trying to fix it but it could take a little while.”

You want to make sure that wherever you’re looking, it’s 2020 data or more. You can upgrade Radius Plus to get even higher data if you want to do that. The truth is that you don’t want to be in declining markets. You can’t look at 2019, see a declining market and then be like, “I can invest in that.” The truth is that towns and small areas are growing. People are moving everywhere. The demographics are skewed. You want to be looking at the most up-to-date data that you can find.

I’m going into Google and searching the population of Jamestown. It pulls up 2019 because Google only has 2019. It doesn’t have 2020 data. You want to make sure that you find the best data. Make sure you’re not in a declining market and it’s in a growing or stabilized market. One of our acquisitions managers is in Alabama. In Alabama, there are some small towns. They’re either stable or declining. It’s in Georgia as well because I’m sure of Arkansas, Mississippi and all around. What areas are growing that you can afford? That’s the question and what you have to find out.

Retirement Funds

“Do you help people invest in retirement funds or land retirement?” Yes. If you have money, I highly recommend that you set an appointment with me. Go to the Private Lenders tab on StacyRossetti.com. Hop on the fund, meet the session, set up an appointment and I’ll chat with you or email Questions@StacyRossetti.com. We can figure out how to do that as well. One of the investors I’ve been working with for years was my neighbor.

He started a checkbook IRA and lends from that. He has made almost $1 million from me. He bought a house. He paid and is going to start building his dream house. You could make money on your retirement account. It’s tax-free. You must be an accredited investor to invest in my fund. It is a 506(c) Reg D fund. If you have money but you are not an accredited investor, you can become verified if you want. Use VerifyInvestor.com or talk to me because if you can’t get accredited for any reason at all, we can still find another way to work together.

“Do you work with international investors?” Yes. I was talking to somebody that was in France. We have a couple of people from Canada and then also students. If you want to be a student, we have students that are international as well. One student is from Jamaica and is living in Jamaica. He bought three storage facilities in 2021 from Jamaica. You could be virtual. I didn’t put that on the thing but what I’m pointing out with the software is that you want to be virtual.

I live in an RV and travel full-time. We manage eleven storage facilities from our RV because we have utilized the software that we have and made everything virtual. I think about this all the time. My lifestyle is a choice. Anybody could do that. You could choose to become virtual if you want to, travel and do whatever you want. Choosing to manage your storage facility virtually is a choice. It’s a new concept. A lot of people have a hard time struggling with it but the truth is that it’s a virtual world. You might as well grab it by its horns and then take it for a ride.

Look at the most up-to-date data that you can find.

“Not all retirement accounts are tax-free.” You’re right. I was talking about self-directed retirement accounts, 401(k)s and stuff like this. We got it all. I hope that I helped you at least get an overall picture. I appreciate you hanging into the end. I’m here every Monday to teach. This is free. Also, the pitch is usually every Monday. “When you do virtual, how do you do clean out?” We have boots-on-the-ground people that do all of that.

Another thing that we’re implementing into our company is Microsoft Teams. Everybody is like, “How do you manage all your boots on the ground and all the people managing?” Microsoft Teams is what we’re utilizing to manage everything. That’s the software. We will eventually start teaching that as well in the mastermind. You have to give us some time to figure it all out and stuff. We will be showing everybody how we manage all that as well.

Why Not Just Hire A Management Company?

“Why not hire a management company to run the facilities, buy the property and then collect the check?” It’s because then you have to pay the management company. The truth is that there are not a lot of good management companies that will manage smaller facilities. The bigger ones or the 40,000, 50,000 to 60,000 square feet facilities, CubesSmart, public storages, extra space storage and stuff are third-party management companies. When you get these bigger facilities, then you can afford that. The truth is I hear a lot of stuff from owners. We have a coach. His name is Scott Krone.

He has come and talked to the group many times. He hired a third-party management company to manage his conversion. He bought a warehouse in Louisville, Kentucky, converted it into a storage facility by dropping portables in it and then hired a third-party management company, CubeSmart, to come in and manage it. He said that after six months or so, he had to fire them because it was getting too expensive, number one. Number two, they weren’t properly managing the thing. That’s another thing. When you get too big, it’s hard to manage stuff.

We are vertically integrated. We hire our property management company to manage our facilities. It’s a company outside of Ms. Lillian. On top of that, with the company that we use, our property management company will also be managing the fund. Hopefully and eventually, we will be able to offer property management services to our students as well. That’s the goal. We are first offering our acquisitions team. That’s the first step. The goal is eventually to offer a property management company to our students as well. We will have a turnkey solution for our students.

“What do you recommend for a site design?” That would be the layout of units. The best thing to do for a new site construction is to talk to a metal fabrication company. The metal fabrication company will design and do an outline for you for free of what they feel like they could put into your area. Talk to 1, 2 or 3 of them. We have a couple of people that come into the mastermind and talk about this that are friends of mine. Essentially, find a storage facility metal fabrication company that can lay everything out for you. There’s Trachte, Janus and all the big names.

The truth is you should look at local companies as well and compare to see how much the difference would be. “What does new construction cost per square foot?” It’s $40 a square foot. Years ago, it was $20 a square foot. It’s expensive. Make sure that your prices can compensate for the price that you’re going to pay for that. Also, it’s almost a six-month waiting time unless the company has bought a lot of steel and is holding that steel. I appreciate it. Thank you. Take care.

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