Join us as we dive into the real-world story of Stacy Rossetti, a seasoned self-storage professional, as she navigates the renovations of her Macon facility. Learn how she meticulously calculated the costs involved, weighed the pros and cons of each step, and implemented a strategic plan to ensure that the renovations were completed on time and within budget.
Stacy’s journey is not just about making her facility more aesthetically pleasing; it’s about enhancing the customer experience and maximizing her revenue potential.
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Inside Stacy Rossetti’s Macon Facility: A Case Study On Calculating And Managing Renovations
I want to show you the executive summary. How did we find this facility? One of my virtual assistants found this by cold calling. We are virtually driving for storage, found the facility, and called the owner. That’s how we started talking to the owner. The owner is a nice guy. He is a little kooky, but we got along well. He had bought this facility. He got it owner-financed. He picked it up for cheaper than what we had it for several years ago.
Over the course of several years, he tried to fix it up, but three hours for him was too far. In the end, he didn’t do hardly anything to it. This is the address. It was called Macks Self Storage. There’s a sign right here. He put the sign up. He was proud of the sign. You can see two different colors. Here’s a brown. This is the old color. This is the color that he painted, which was the blue and the gray. It’s right next to a mobile home park. It’s right in between Macon and Warner Robins. I’ll show you that on the map.
This is Atlanta. Here’s Macon and Warner Robins. Here’s Columbus and Augusta. This is in Georgia. Macon is a big town. It’s a couple of hundred thousand people. Warner Robins is also big. We’re right on the outskirts of Macon. It’s a Macon address. It’s right in the middle. This is a highway that goes through that connects both cities. We’re on this highway. It is a busy road. Rutland is the nearest town, but we’re not in Rutland. We’re in Macon.
I’ve talked a couple of times about this deal, but I wanted to go over the renovation stuff. This is our property here. It’s two acres. There’s a lot of storage here. It has 180 doors. There’s a big warehouse here that’s a couple of thousand square feet. Somebody was renting out, and they died. He never got rid of any of this stuff. This is when we first bought the thing. What is cool is that all this property here is included.
Regrid is a free tool where you can look up property data. I’m not that good at it because I don’t do it anymore. I used to be good at using Regrid. Here’s the property. It’s two parcels. This is the parcel with the storage units on it. This parcel is also owned by us. This was included in the sale. There’s some long section here, and there’s this big acreage here. It’s a lot of acres. It’s 7 or 8 acres. He was like, “I don’t need that property. I don’t need this. You all could have it. I’m moving to Costa Rica. Take both properties. I’m going to sell this property, and I’m moving to Costa Rica.”
You can see here that we picked up both parcels for $375,000. On Regrid, you can find a lot of information about the owner and acreage. This is four acres, and this one here is two acres. It’s a total of six acres. It’s a good-sized piece of property for us to add onto. Even though this property ends here, we’ve cleared a lot of this area out here and already graded it for parking. We have cleared not all of this, but a little bit right here. The whole property was fenced when we bought it.
It’s the ugliest property in Macon. It was horrible. I’ll show you some pictures. This is what it looked like. I’ll show you some inside pictures. Dawsonville is a little town in the middle. The truth is this is in Macon. Within a five-mile radius, there are 40,000 people. In a seven-mile radius, there are 80,000 people. In a ten-mile radius, there are 188,000 people. There’s a lot of people in this area.
You could see the competition. This is one of our competitors. This storage facility was on the market for quite a long time. It was on the market for $2 million. I’m not sure what it sold for. We could look at it. This is the property. Let’s see who bought it. Macon Storage Center LLC bought it. He lives in Jacksonville. I don’t know if he sold it or not. It’s $1.5 million, but it was listed on Crexi for almost $2 million. It looks like he hasn’t sold it. Maybe he took it off. I’m not sure. You can look on Crexi and see if it’s on there or not. For a while, it was listed on Crexi.
That’s one of our competitors. Here’s another competitor. Here are two more. Here’s one that’s a big huge storage facility. This one has an office person. My husband went in, pretended he was a tenant, tried to rent some space, and got some prices. Their ten-by-tens were $85 at the time. I’m not sure what it is now, which is the national average. This one is remote, but this one had a price on the sign. It was $85 for a ten-by-ten.
It’s good to drive around and look at the competition. This is virtually driving for storage. The only competitors in the area are those people. We’re over here. There’s this one, and there are these two. That’s in the area. It’s a good location. It’s the weirdest thing. We’re already starting to get calls, but we’re not going to lease up because we’re working on the move-in process. We’re trying to get that organized and situated.
It's good to drive around to look at the competition. Click To TweetWhen you think of leasing up or getting your facility, you have your software, but the moving process, emails, text messages, and everything automated have to be all set up properly. What about this property? When we did the renovations on this, we did not put any key doors and no key locks. It’s owned by Janice. This is what our doors and latches look like. You all could check this out and see how it works. That’s how everybody signs in, but I don’t do that part. This is how it works. You have an app. You go in, and you do this.
Think about that. With this facility, this is the first time that we’ve ever used the no-key smart entry. You have to create that move-in process so that it’s seamless. You have to have emails and text messages explaining how this works. Download your app, and it will show you all this stuff. We’re in the process of doing it. We’re trying to fine-tune the move-in process so by January 1st, 2024, we can start leasing up.
All of the renovations that I’m going to tell you about got done in the last couple of months. I’ll talk about the process, but I wanted to show you guys the executive summary first so you all could see what we look at to determine whether or not it’s a good deal. We’re looking at the picture and the population and if there’s a growth rate of 4.5% in this area. What’s the population within a 3, 5, 7, or 10-mile radius? Where does it look at? Does it have a Google Business listing? What does it look like on Regrid? What’s all the property information on Regrid? We start getting into the numbers and doing the analysis.
We also look at the competition. This is all the competitors right here. We had the three competitors and their prices. The executive summary is what I give to investors, banks, or whoever is going to help me buy this facility. This is what the facility looks like. This is the blue and the brown color. These are the pictures that my husband took going over there and determining whether or not we want to buy this facility. It looks crappy.
It was fenced in, but the owner said that he gets a lot of break-ins. There was a fire. There was no lighting at all on the entire property. This is why we decided to get new doors and raise the money to do it all. This is the gate operator system. As soon as we bought the property, all that got stolen. We updated it and secured it.
This is the back area where it was cleared. We went in, regraded it, cleared it, and put gravel down. I’ll show you all the final pictures when that’s done. Would you want to put your stuff in this property? No. He owned this thing for several years, and he never fixed it up. He was trying to get people to lease this place out. Who would want to put their stuff in this place? Nobody.
The thing is, I offered this property to my students because, typically, I always offered the property to my students first. They always get first dibs. None of my students wanted to buy this property because they were scared. It was too much work. They had to raise the money for the purchase and renovations to do everything. I was like, “This is an amazing deal. Somebody needs to buy it.” Nobody wanted to buy it. I was like, “Fine, I’ll buy it.”
Deal Analyzer: Calculating Costs
That’s how it worked out. I wasn’t going to buy this thing in the first place. Here’s the main road. Remember I told you it’s on this highway, and there’s this big drive right here. This is a pointless drive, and you can go into the gate right here. This is what we bought. He said he’d gotten a couple of offers for less than $300,000, and he is not going to sell it for that. This property has 180 doors. It’s 25,000 square feet in total. The storage itself is around 22,000. That warehouse is another couple of thousand square feet. It’s almost like 25,000 square feet. This place was a dump. You need to buy it, and you need to also have the money to fix it up. You have to have time and patience.
You have to pay cash. You don’t have a mortgage on this property, which is what we ended up doing because I raised the money, or you could get an SBA loan or a mortgage, and you have to pay that mortgage. Even if you’re not making any income, which this property wasn’t making any income, you still have to pay that mortgage. You have to know that you have to borrow enough to get you through the lease until the lease is up, which is taking us a year plus another year, at least a year to eighteen months, like two full years of us trying to make money on this property.
We were running the numbers with my CPA. By the end of December 2024, if we get eight tenants a month to move in, we’ll break even. We sat, looked at the numbers, and tried to figure that out. The way it’s working for us is there are eight move-ins and four move-outs on a property. We have to spend around $2,500 a month to get that in marketing. Think about that. We’re spending $2,500. We’re getting eight move-ins and four move-outs. How long is that going to take for you to lease the property? That may be different for every location or type of facility, but for us overall, for our properties, especially in the funds that we have, that’s what it’s looking like.
I’m going to do the Deal Analyzer so you all could see the numbers and stuff. The fund is closed. I raised $5 million. I used the $5 million to buy four properties. It was a 70/30 split. All of the investors have 8% interest on their money. They’re going to split 70%, we get 30%, and they also get 8% of interest. That’s how we do. We’ve syndicated. We’ve done them differently, but that’s what we did for this one. This is what it looks like. This is the Deal Analyzer. If you come to my bootcamp, we’re going to sit and do a deal analysis for two days straight. For Saturdays, all day, we’re finding properties. The rest of the time is deal analysis, putting it under contract, and a little bit of wholesaling.
This is what the Deal Analyzer looks like. I appreciate a lot of you all who bought the Deal Analyzer over the Black Friday sale. This is what it looks like for the Macon property. He told us he was making $12,000, but in the end, he wasn’t making any money. We put $12,000 here, and we put 20,000 square feet because we did not include that big warehouse. We took out some of the fire-damaged stuff. We came up with these 186 units, and all we did was add that up on our unit mix tab.
We put the size of the units and the unit mixes. The square footage and the rental rate that he was supposedly charging versus what the market rate is. He was saying, “If somebody moves in, this is what we would charge.” This is what the market is charging now. It’s around $0.85 a square foot, which is what I told you. The competition for a ten-by-ten was around $0.85 a square foot. You filled this unit mix out. You could do the physical occupancy and economic occupancy. You could look at the numbers there. You look at the competition. This is where we put all the competition in all of the properties. What are they charging for all the same units? You can see from this unit mix tab that there are a lot of different sizes. This is not clicking the right thing here. There are a lot of different sizes right here.
These are auto-populated over to the competition chat tab. You want to compare apples to apples when you do your competitive analysis. We called them up and got the rates. You come up with the average per unit price, and you come up with the average price per square foot. These numbers here are all populated back to this number right here at the top. That’s how we get these $0.85 per square foot. That $0.85 a square foot should go here on your after-updates, which is your opportunity. Opportunity means we have 186 units, 20,000 square feet, and $0.85 is the max. We put $0.77 in to be on the safe side. We were like, “We’re going to have to be cheaper than everybody else to get leased up.” We ran our numbers at $0.77 per square foot.
Vacancy was at 92%. ? It should have been 100% with no money. We put this in to run the numbers. I came up with $250,000 for CapEx. That’s my guess. I was like, “How much is it going to cost?” In my mind, I was thinking, “How much are each of these doors going to cost?” It’s going to be new doors and new latches. Typically, a door is $500, and there are $200 of them. That’s already $100,000 right there. It was $100,000 for all the doors, the Janus doors. That’s what they quoted us.
They offered to do the no-key locks when we were doing the doors. You don’t have to go and switch all the latches out. He’s like, “You’re getting new doors. You might as well get the no-key locks to go with it.” We said, “How much are the no-key locks?” They quoted us for all 200 doors, $50,000. In total, it was $150,000 for 185 doors. It was around $600 to $650 a door to get the new doors and the no-key latches put on there. That included the no key system because you have to have the no keypad and system to check-in. It includes everything. It includes for them to come out, taking all the doors down, and put all the new doors up to get everything all set up. That was the biggest expense. I put $250,000 in for CapEx. For CapEx, we had the doors and no key locks.
The first thing that we did as soon as we bought this property was that there were a whole bunch of break-ins because the owner was saying break-ins were going on at this property. One of the main reasons that there were a lot of break-ins at this property is because there were no lights at all. What happened is we called Georgia Power up, and we said, “We need to put some lights up like this. This is getting broken into a lot. What can you all do?”
They proposed putting six different big poles with the lights on them. They put a ridiculous amount of lights up. It’s lit up like a football field at night. I feel bad for all these mobile home people living right next door. You’ll drive down that street at night. They’ll be dark. You’ll drive past your facility to be like, “There it is.” As soon as we put the lights up, the break-ins completely stopped. We were getting at least 2 or 3 break-ins a week. It took a couple of months for them to put those lights up. They broke in. They stole the keypad and all the computers. He had put brand-new stuff in before he bought it. They broke the window and walls. They got it and stole the wire and everything they could. He said that he had put all that stuff in again because he had a break-in. It wasn’t a good situation.
The main thing that we did was we put the lights up in the first couple of months. I put cheap cameras up so that we could keep an eye on the place, but the break-in stopped. The next thing that we did is we did the auction process. We bought this place. Every single one of the units was full of crap. Outside of the fire damage stuff, everyone had something like trash crap, something in them.
Renovating The Facility
One of the first things that we did was we hired a boots-on-the-ground person. He was there several days a week. He was cleaning the place up. He would try to get all the trash and put it into one unit. We had all these different units full of trash and crap everywhere. The way that we work is we put everything into a unit. We bought a dump truck because we got a lot of trash. My husband wanted to buy a dump truck. He would have the dump trailer fill it up. We would go and dump it, which is a lot cheaper. We’re doing it a little bit cheaper.
The boots-on-the-ground person did most of the work. We did not hire any outside contractors to come and do the work. Our boots-on-the-ground people, when we hire them, they’re like contractors. They can do a lot of stuff. We don’t have to do anything. They can pull doors down, take springs off, and do latches. They have a truck. They can pull around the trailer and pressure the washer. They can use every tool. They’re one of these people that can do it all. That’s who we hire for us. The reason why is because we buy crappy storage facilities. We’re telling them, “Your job is to get this thing up, running, cleaned, and going.” They’re all into it.
Will is our boots-on-the-ground person. He’s cleaning and putting little lights up, like the solar-powered lights that go on the things. He’s fixing those because they’re all hanging out. He’s doing odd and end jots cleaning. He’s cleaning a lot. That took months. There were 80 or 90 auctions because every single one of those units was full of this crap. The way that we do our auctions is we’ll put all the trash and anything that we find into the unit and not take any of the trash. We’ll take a picture of all the units and put it on the auction. We don’t get rid of anything. The first thing that we did was try to find the owners, but we couldn’t find any owners.
When we bought the place, there was somebody living at the property. There was a girl that was living there. She’d been living there for a long time. She had a unit with a couch, a bed, and curtains. She had a pet cat. She’s been living there for a while. Everybody knew her. Morris was the owner. He didn’t kick her out. Pete is also the same way. Pete was like, “If you’re going to stay here, you need to clean. You start helping and cleaning.” She helped pick up trash.
Eventually, we put her into a shelter. We found a place for her to stay outside of the facility. Pete did not kick anybody out because she had no place to go. She had no money or anything. She was a nice person. She was down on her luck. We started making her work for her keep. It took a couple of weeks after we purchased the property. We found a shelter, put her into the shelter, and got all her stuff out.
We started to clean the place up and did all the auctions. It takes months to do an auction. People are like, “You could auction stuff off.” It takes quite a while to do an auction. It takes 60 days to start your auctions. Within the first 90 days, we did our first auction, which was 75 units or more. It was all the trash compiled into empty units. We take pictures. Whoever buys whatever, they’ll come.
It takes months to do an auction. Click To TweetThe rule is when they do the auction, they take everything out. Some people will bid on units with trash in it. They’ll be like, “Yes, I’ll pay.” The minimum bid was $10. They’re like, “I’ll pay $10. Let me throw all that trash.” Especially if they’re in that business, they don’t care. They’ll look and see if there’s something in there, and they’ll clean it out. They have their dump trailer and take it. Half of them were sold for $10 or more. We didn’t make a lot of money, but they at least sold. The people came and cleaned the property out.
We had the leftover stuff. That’s where we dropped the dump trailer off with Will. His job is to get all the stuff out. If there’s something that he can’t do, like it’s too big, we’ll call a junkyard company to come. In the end, for all the stuff that Will could not get on his own, we had a junkyard company come, and they had two guys. They throw it in and take it off. That will be 1 or 2 trucks full of stuff instead of 50 trucks full.
That’s how we did that. That doesn’t cost a lot of money because we’re paying Will on a weekly basis to do all that. That’s boots-on-the-ground stuff. During all that, we’re trying to get quotes for everything. To get a quote from a contractor, and if anybody knows anything about getting quotes from a contractor, contractors, it sucks. For anybody here who is a contractor, I’m sorry, but you all take forever for quotes, or you never give quotes. You say something, but you never want to write it out or anything like that.
The first thing that we got quoted was the gravel. We had a horrible time trying to find gravel. Macon is like an industrial town. If you know Macon, Georgia, it’s industrial. There are a lot of our rental properties and contractors there. You would think that you’d be able to get people to come. It’s not putting the gravel down, but it’s spreading it. We can find the gravel easily and get that dumped, but we can’t ever find the people who have the spreaders. If you want to have a business, get a spreader and start spreading some gravel because there aren’t a lot of them out there in the world. We struggle with that.
If you want to have a business, get a spreader and start spreading some gravel because there aren’t a lot of them out there in the world. Click To TweetIn the meantime, we have another Will that we have in Blairsville. He is our landscape person, but he has a landscaping company/grading company. We could get the gravel there, but we could not get the spreaders, but Will had the spreaders. We paid Will to come down to Macon from Blairsville to Macon. He was like, “I’ll do it.” He had all his people come down. It took a week for them to grade everything and lay all the gravel down. In the back of the property is where we put a whole bunch of gravel down so that we could start doing parking spaces, at least half an acre of gravel, if not an acre of gravel in the back.
The gravel finally got done. We closed on this. We closed on this time in 2022. We started to do everything after the holiday holidays. It’s January, February, and March 2023. We did the gravel maybe in the late summer. It took us that long to be like, “Will you come down and do it? We’ll pay extra for you to do it.” We got all the gravel down, and the place looked amazing. It looked good to get the gravel done. We started looking for doors and getting quotes on doors during this time. To get quotes on doors took forever. After a couple of months of getting quotes on doors, we decided to do the no-key. We decided to do it. We said, “Let’s get the best and make this facility a good facility so that we could have those features.”
There are different levels of storage. You’ve got your $50, $100 and $150. You have certain features for your facility that people tend to want or not want. A lot of features are easy access and security. That’s what people want. There are a lot of options out there in the storage world for this. There’s nothing like this in the area. Macon is one of those areas where I don’t know if it’s run down, but there’s a little rough over there. If we can say, “We’ve got a lot of security there, cameras, and no-key,” maybe that’ll help. We’ll see. I don’t know, but we decided to do that anyway.
What we could do is go into the Google Business listing for Macon. We got the Google Business listing from the owner. You could see the gravel. When you look at the older pictures, all the grass was growing, and it was trashy. Now, all it is is gravel. We graded all that grass away, and it’s only gravel now. This is the older pictures. You could see all that was gone and taken away. We laid fresh gravel down. This picture we have to take out.
We uploaded this picture. This is one of our teammates. In Google Business listings, you can take this picture down if you upload it yourself. If you have pictures on here that are not yours, you can’t take those down. This is Eugene Jr. I don’t even know who this person is and why they put this in. Maybe they were on a scout out seeing. They burglarize this place.
They posted this up. You cannot take this picture down. What you have to do is bury these pictures by putting good pictures. We haven’t done professional pictures yet because we’re finalizing everything, but we will have brand new pictures on the Google Business listing. This is our in-house graphic designer. He created some pictures like this. There are marketing pictures here. We’ll stick those in there. This is the little sign that we have right here that’s up. Morris had the blue sign that he had made. Pete came in and put all this in.
We’re in the process of optimizing our Google business page, but you can see the difference in the color. We decided to go with the Mission Self-Storage colors. We did the black with the red because that’s our logo. I was like, “Let’s do the black with the red.” What happened was Janice was like, “These are our colors.” Janice showed us the colors of their doors. I was like, “We’re going to do a red.” I saw this color, and I was like, “Okay. We need to pick a color to go with it. That is what we need to do.” That’s how we came up with a red. We picked these two colors.
I want to talk about the painting. After we did the gravel and the gravel looked good, the next thing was power washing and painting. After that, Janice was going to come. My husband has this massive, huge power washer that holds 500 gallons. He built this thing from the ground up all by himself. He uses it to go around to our sixteenth facilities. Once we get a facility, he powerwashes it and paints it. We do this. We’re about to paint two more of our facilities, which are older looking.
We have an in-house power, like a power washing system, because we got quotes to get a power wash. It’s like $5,000 plus $10,000 to get the thing power-washed. It’s expensive. You have to have something where you have that water there because there’s no water typically at stores and facilities. You have to pay for that.
He had two more boots on the ground, people coming from Atlanta and South Georgia to spend the day at Macon painting. He booked out one entire week. What he did was take the power washer up there, went over to Home Depot, and picked up a day labor person. The day labor person power washed almost the entire property. Pete started it and showed him how to get into a couple of buildings. After that, this guy came over, and he power-washed the whole thing. We paid him $20 an hour. It took one day to power wash all the buildings.
Our power washing took some meat and muscles to build the thing and to put it together. It’s $200. This guy did not speak any English that we picked up from Home Depot. This guy was amazing. I was like, “You have to bring him on our team.” He couldn’t speak any English. What they did was use Google Translate to talk to each other, but the guy was the sweetest guy. He didn’t have a car. Pete picked him up and took him to the Macon facility. They power washed. He asked the guy, “Would you be interested in working the rest of the week with us and helping us to finish the job?” The guy was like, “Yes.”
The whole thing was power-washed within a day. After this, the two boots-on-the-ground people, Pete was one of the people who painted, and Chris was one on our team. He’s one of the people who painted. We got quotes to paint this facility, and it was $30,000. Our budget was $250,000. He was like, “We can do it ourselves.”
Typically, we paid $20 an hour, but he paid $25 or $30 for the week per hour. he gave him a little bonus. He also paid for the hotel and all the food for the entire week. That was for Denise. We have a female boots-on-the-ground person who handles four of our facilities. She didn’t paint. She was the person who made sure that the paint was always full on the sprayer. She ran around and got everything ready so that they could quickly do their job.
Pete and Denise worked together. Pete sprayed and painted. It didn’t matter about the doors because the doors were all going to come off. They were spraying and doing the best they could. Chris was the one painting. The guy that we picked up at Home Depot was the guy who was filling everything up and making sure everything was good. Pete went to Home Depot, and he bought the best sprayers on the market that he could find, which were a couple of hundred dollars each. He paid the boots-on-the-ground people to stay there for the entire week.
They took one day to paint almost every single one of those buildings, like 200 doors. For 20,000 square feet, it took one day to paint black. On the second day, they did the second coat. It took two days to paint the entire thing. In the last couple of days that they were there, Denise, Chris, and Juan, the guy that was with us, the job was to take the springs off of the doors that were there, any springs that looked good, take them off and take any latches that looked good off of the doors.
When Janice came to put the doors up, they could take the doors down and pile them up. We could look through and see if we wanted to keep any of the doors, or we could scrap the doors because they’re not going to get rid of them. We decided to keep those and use them for stuff. They scrapped some of them, and they left some. Pete was like, “Stack them up in here, and we could use a couple, or I’ll take some of them and do something with it.”
They spent two days taking these springs off because that’s 200 doors. That’s a lot of springs. We are always looking for springs. We have thousands of doors. Pete was like, “Take those springs off. I want to use them.” They sat and took every single one of those springs off. Denise and Chris were doing that because they already knew how to do that because there were boots on the ground people. Juan, the other guy, was the touch-up person. He painted all of the things yellow. He went around, touching up and finalizing it. He painted anything that was sticking up out of the ground. He did touch-ups on paint and did a whole bunch of other stuff.
What Pete did while he was there was he put the new camera system in. He did not hire somebody to put the new camera system on. Pete put it in himself. What he did is he put the camera system on these tall poles so that nobody could steal those because we’re having such an issue with theft. He created these poles. It’s solar-powered cameras. They’re from Rio Link. There’s all kinds of cameras, but they’re good and crystal clear on your phone. You could see everything. Even at night, you can see stuff clearly, which is important to think about when you’re getting cameras.
They were done. He came home that Friday afternoon. The next week was Thanksgiving. The week after Thanksgiving, Janice came and spent the entire week there, taking the doors down and putting the doors up. They also put the no-key keypad system that you use and made sure that everything worked well. That was like the first week of December 2023. We’re done with all the renovations.
We had a whole bunch of signs made. He went and put the sign-up. He has a pre-leasing sign that he put up. For that facility on the renovation side, we’re done. For all that, we spent around $225,000. It’s $30,000 for the gravel, $5,000 to paint and everything included, and $150,000 for the doors. Cameras and odds in it where we’re about $220,000. This is what the numbers look like. I bought this property for $350,000. We ended up doing $375,000. It’s a 23% cash-on-cash return at $375,000. I did $250,000 for CapEx plus expenses. We’re going to take it from $12,000 to $175,000 a year at $0.77 a square foot. It was worth a negative $250,000. I paid $375,000. I’m at a negative three cap rate.
Every facility that I buy has a negative 3 or 2 cap rate because these are typical properties for me. Once we lease it up by the end of 2023, we will be at a $2 million valuation. This is the storage. This does not include the warehouse and RV parking. This includes the storage facility. That comes out to a 23% cap rate. We’re taking it from a negative three to a 23% cap rate. Our cash-on-cash for this property is 23%.
That’s the Macon property. We’re in a lease-up mode, and I’ll do another blog on the lease-up stuff and how we’re doing and trying to figure all that out. We’ve done a lot of lease-ups before. I’ll get into all the marketing and what we do over 2024. I wanted to give you all an idea of what we’ve done with this property from the time we purchased it until now. It took us a while to get to this point. What do you all think? Any questions or thoughts on this property? Would you do something like this? Is this too big of a property for you? I’d love to get your thoughts on this.
I’m excited. I think the colors look great. The red and the black look good together. I love the color mix. The property itself looks beautiful. We’ll get some professional pictures done. We’re working on the Google Business listing. We started the Google Ads. We’ll do a lot of promos and start trying to lease up. The goal is two to eight new tenants a month, with a loss of four tenants. It’s a plus-four. One year to break even is what it’s going to take us, which is around 72% or 70%. After that, we will be in profit mode. It’s going to take us a while to lease this thing up and get it to 70%. That’s the goal.
That is it for now. I hope I inspired you guys to get out there and look for some storage facilities. Go to StacyRossetti.com. Everything about me and all my courses is there. When you go to the webinar, it asks you to opt into a text message. Opt into the text message because, in 2024, I’ll be doing text message-only sales in my facilities. That’d be great for my products and courses. I’ll see you guys next episode. Take care.
