Have you ever wondered how a self-storage facility can become a cash cow? This episode dives deep into a real-life case study: the Warm Springs facility, currently up for grabs. We’ll dissect its potential, analyze market trends, and uncover the secrets to maximizing profitability in the self-storage industry. Don’t miss out. Tune in and unlock the secrets to self-storage success!
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Warm Springs Facility For Sale: A Case Study On Maximizing Profitability
How many people here own a storage facility? Put into the chat if you own one or not. I would love to know. Tell me if you’re a newbie, you’re learning, or it’s your first time here. I’d love to know where you hear about me. Where did you find out about me? I live in Florida. We own sixteen facilities. We’re partnering 10 or 15. I’m all across the country, but we’re in the Southeast. Our facilities are in Florida, Georgia, and Tennessee. I partner with my students. Their facilities are all across the country. They’re all all over the place.
Another thing is that I’ve done every type of deal that you could imagine. I’ve been investing in real estate since 2011. We’ve done 250 transactions. I’ve done every type of transaction. I’ve done commercial, multifamily, and rehabbing rentals, but we got into storage in 2016. We did several years of other stuff. As soon as we got into storage, I was like, “I’m not doing anything else.”
The one thing I love about storage is that you can almost sit at your desk and manage everything. My husband has a lot of storage facilities. He’s going to the facilities a lot. He’s doing a lot. The reason he goes to the facilities a lot is because we’re doing a lot of CapEx stuff. If you’re new and you haven’t been here before, I go over all the different ways you can invest in self-storage. There are eight different ways.
The two main ones that most people think about when you think of storage are either buying a facility that’s producing income as is right now or buying a facility that’s not producing income. I call that a mismanaged facility. We rehabbed a lot of homes from 2011 to 2017. We did 100. When you rehab homes, you get used to crap. I used to teach rehabbing. I remember I used to say, “The nastier the home, the more money you’re going to make.”
It’s the same concept in storage, except we call those mismanaged because, in the storage business, you are making money based on how well you manage that property. You can clean it out. You can make that property sparkling and curb a pill and gate. The thing I don’t understand is when people go way overboard in their storage facilities. In my storage facility, I charge the same price that the person who has a beautiful storage facility charges, and we still get tenants.
I do not quite understand the concept that the more beautiful your storage facility is, the more money you make. I have Class D’s, C’s, and B’s. I don’t have any class A’s. In our Leesburg, Florida facility, our competition is CubeSmart, which is a nice facility. We have the same promos. We have the exact same facility as CubeSmart. It’s this beautiful building. I do not quite understand the whole concept of the more money that you put into a commercial property like a storage facility, the better.
Warm Springs Facility
We have sixteen facilities. Our goal is to sell them all. We’re slowly starting to do that. I pitched my Warm Springs facility. We’re working on getting offers now for that. I’m going to go over the Warm Springs facility now. It’s one of the first facilities that I bought. This is a good little tiny facility that you can learn on.
I know everybody wants to get into the industry. Sometimes, you have a lot of money. Sometimes, you don’t have a lot of money. I didn’t have a lot of money when I got into storage. What I did was convince my lenders, who are rehabbing with me, to roll that money over into storage. That’s what I do with this Warm Springs facility.
A lot of people are in other niches in the investing world. They want to get into storage. You may already have lenders in your back pocket. You can convince them to invest with you in a storage facility instead of doing rehabbing. The only difference between the rehabbing investments and the storage investments is the timeframe.
When you’re rehabbing, you’re paying somebody back within a year. You gotta get everything done within a year. Unless it’s a new build, it’s a little bit longer. When you’re doing storage, it’s a buy-and-hold. Most investors will lend to you for 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, or 12 years. My investors who invest or lend with me do not want their money back.
In this Warm Springs facility, I got the money that I got back from the lender who lent it to me. I met with him, and I told him, “I’m going to start selling my facilities off.” He has a couple of facilities that he’s lent me. He was like, “I don’t want that money back. Do not give me that money back. Keep using it for something else.” I have to figure out what to do with this money. I’m like, “What do I do?”
That’s another reason why people like me don’t sell. When you’re talking to owners, I teach, “Go directly to the owner and ask if they want an offer.” A lot of owners think the same way I do. They don’t want to sell because they don’t know what to do with the money they’re going to make. It’s stressful to find something after that because you either have to pay taxes or pay a 1031 exchange. A lot of people don’t want to go through that. You have to keep that in mind when you’re talking to owners.
We’re in that same process. We are going to sell our sixteen facilities one by one. Tell me what you think about this. We have ten facilities that are $1 million or less. These are tiny facilities all over Florida and Georgia. The ones that we started moving up to now are $1 million to $2 million. We’re in $2 million to $3 million now.
There’s a big handful of our facilities right next to each other because I used to live in Peachtree City. All I did was drive for storage. I talked to almost every owner of every facility. I introduced myself and said, look, “I’m trying to get into this field.” I’m asking all the owners if you’re interested in selling. That’s how I picked up many facilities around the Peachtree City area. If you go to Google Maps and type in Miss Lillian’s Self Storage, I used to live in Peachtree City. These facilities are me driving for storage. That’s all it is. There should be more than that. There are these four facilities, and there are Warm Springs.
I was talking to a realtor about selling my facilities. I’m shopping around and talking to a couple of realtors. My thought process is like, “Should I sell these four facilities as a package? Is it better to sell these as a package?” I call these little mini portfolios. I’m like, “Is it better to sell them one by one?” I don’t know. That’s why I’m talking to a realtor because my thought process is like, “Let me pitch out my Warm Springs deal. Let’s see if somebody will give me a fair offer.”
It happens. I have a list of all of you guys reading this. My question is, should I keep pitching out my deals one by one and see if anybody picks them up, or should I sell this as a package? Do you make more money with the package, or do you make more money selling them one-offs? If anybody can answer that, that would be a great answer for me. I’ve talked to a couple of realtors, and they say, “Send me the numbers, and I’ll make a decision.”
These facilities outside of this Fayetteville location are bigger. It’s got 60 units. It’s got another 40 to 50 parking spaces. I’ll go through each of my facilities. It’s bigger than the other ones. This is Fairburn. Fairburn has 60 units. It has a commercial space. We bought a facility that also has a mechanic shop, which is random. We own a mechanic shop, and he rents it out. It’s an extra income.
This one in Nonan also has 60 units plus fifteen parking spaces. This one is on two acres. You can add a lot more space to that if you want to. The Franklin one is 60 units, and that’s it. You can’t add any more. There’s no space to do anything. It’s the same size. It’s 60, 60, 60 plus some commercial space and parking spaces. Another thing that’s cool is this facility right here. This is what it looks like. You can see this is where all the parking is all around here. There are a lot of parking spaces.
In this facility, we park big rigs. This is more of an industrial parking space. There are tow trucks, box trucks, and dump trucks. The owner previously had been doing that. He had a couple of tenants that had companies that were dump truck or tow truck companies. They would come and park it here. We kept it that way, which is okay because they pay a little bit higher rate.
The only thing about doing that is that we did have to come in and repave or re-gravel this whole thing. There’s brand new gravel. You have to do that maybe once every ten years. He had never done it. The owner had never done it. It was a mess. You’d have to do that which didn’t cost that much money. It’s $20,000.
The Fairburn Facility
Here’s the Fairburn facility. You can see that this one has 60 units. This is the mechanic shop. You can see he has some cars. He parks his car in his back. With this fence, we covered it with a black screen cover. The tenants can’t see it. He’s been there for several years. He’ll continue to stay there with this mechanic business. This one is at the Newnan location. This one is the two buildings and here’s some parking. The land is large. It’s at least 2 to 3 acres. There’s a lot of the land. You could build out over here if you wanted to. This is the boat and RV parking.
We have this one, and this is the one I told you about. It’s 60 units. You drive up this, and it’s this little space. This is one of our best facilities. This one is always full. The reason is that there are not a lot of storage facilities around. There are two other storage facilities in this area, but within a ten-mile radius, there’s nothing else.
A lot of people always say, “Don’t ever buy these little tiny facilities.” My idea when I was buying these facilities was I lived in Peachtree City. I was driving around and talking to any owner that would want to talk to me. I would be like, “Would you be interested in getting an offer?” They’d be like, “Yeah, give me an offer.”
The Franklin one, when I drove past it, I called it. The good thing is that the phone number is on the sign. I called the one in Franklin. The owner answered the phone. I was like, “I’m interested in your storage facility.” He was like, “Do you want a unit?” I said, “No, I don’t want a unit. I want to buy your storage facility.” He’s like, “Where are you?” I said, “I drove past your facility. I called the number right off the sign.” He was like, “Come back around. Let’s talk.”
I drove back and pulled up. There is a tiny office there. He would sit in this office all day long. He’s managing and cleaning the storage facility. It’s only 60 units. I was thinking, “What the hell are you doing all day long?” His name was Talmage. He’s an older guy. He was like, “I’ve been thinking about selling. I want to sell.” I was like, “I’m interested in buying.” He was like, “I’ve got a couple in the area. I’d love to pick another one up. I want it for $189,000.” I was like, “I could do that.” I didn’t know anything about it. I was like, “You have to give me some numbers. You have to show me your numbers.”
We sat at his desk and opened up this drawer. He pulled out this yellow notepad and started writing down his numbers. He said, “10 by 10s, I’ve got seven of those, and I charge $60. With 5 by 10s, I’ve got fourteen.” He wrote them down. Everything was in his head. I looked at the thing, and I was like, “I could pick this one.
This is one of the best facilities that we have. He’s a nice guy. I asked one of my lenders. I was like, “Can I get a couple of hundred grand from you to go buy this facility?” He was like, “Yeah, I’ll give you a couple of hundred grand.” That’s how it worked out and how I built this little mini portfolio. I drove for storage, went around, and asked the owners.
These are good locations because you can think about the times of the storage industry. These are all right in the Atlanta area. When I started in 2015, 2016, and 2017, I got into this business, and nobody was thinking about storage. I had the opportunity to buy these facilities closer to Atlanta. These types of facilities are hard to come by outside in the burbs of big cities anymore. That’s how the market has been saturated. People are trying to buy storage facilities left and right. It’s hard to pick up a mismanaged facility outside a major metropolitan area. It’s not normal.
I have not seen this in a long time. I happened to get into the industry at that time when everybody was coming out of the bubble and trying to get back on their feet. That’s when multifamily was becoming popular. Rehabbing was popular because there were a lot of crappy houses out there, and foreclosures and multifamily started to come and get back on their feet. Nobody was thinking about storage, and I happened to be in that industry.
With these tertiary market facilities, there’s nothing wrong with buying these. We see this all the time. When you’re reading me, there’s nothing wrong with buying a smaller facility. You have to be further out. You’re going to have to be in a country. There’s nothing wrong with that. You want to build some portfolios. It’s harder to sell one tiny property for 40, 50, or 60 units versus 100 to 200 to 300 units. It’s harder to make money on these smaller facilities.
If you are the type of person who can only come up with $50,000 or $100,000, which doesn’t buy you that much, you want to be in these tertiary markets. If you can come up with $500,000, you don’t have to buy these types of facilities. That’s how I started out. We’re to the point where these facilities here are all stabilized. They’re anywhere from 75% to 95% full. Any type of repairs or anything like that has all been done. Whenever we decide to sell these properties, whether it’s one-off, one by one, or as a portfolio, there will be very minimal work that needs to be done on these. As an investor, the type of investor that I am in the storage world, I buy severely mismanaged facilities. I stabilize and sell them.
To buy a mismanaged facility and to stabilize the facility is not easy. It’s a lot of work. We’ve owned these properties for several years. It’s taken quite a lot of time. It’s quite a long time to fix them up, make them look good, and lay the gravel down. In Fairburn, we painted. In Franklin and Fayetteville, we put gravel down and cleaned them up. Fayetteville was by far our worst. The owner uses it as a dumping ground.
It takes a long time to make money on these things. You can’t buy a property, hold it for a couple of months, and sell it. It’s not like a residential. You want to plan on holding these properties for 3 to 5 years, if not longer. You don’t have to hold storage for a long time. You can if you want to. If you’re the type of person who is like, “I want to buy and hold. I want cashflow.”
You don't have to hold storage for a long time. Click To TweetYou can hold onto the property for as long as you want. The truth is that the amount of money that you’re going to make in five years versus ten years versus fifteen years is not even that much more money. You’re going to make the most money in the first several years of owning the property. Once you sell it, you’ll make some money.
That’s my personal opinion. You guys tell me what you guys think. You can yell at me and tell me I’m wrong. My idea is I was going to go over the warm springs deal. You guys could see how I found, funded, and ran it. Give me your opinion on the other four. Should I do it as a portfolio and sell it to somebody who wants all four of them? Should I do them one-off and sell them one by one?
Let me see some comments here. Mustafa says, “With selling a package, you provide the buyer pricing power on rates in the area, depending on the market. You also provide economies of scale if they wish to designate a property manager to look after all the facilities. I see that as additional value. You could also negotiate on the broker fee for selling a portfolio versus singles. You can always lead with the portfolio and decide if you want to spin off one of its own. It’s my opinion. Other factors are looking at this.”
This is a good point, Mustafa, for bringing this up. For these properties that you see here, Franklin, Newnan, Fairburn, and Fayetteville, we have one boots-on-the-ground person who manages all four of those. His job is to go to each one of the facilities once a week. One of the facilities sometimes takes twice a week. We have a full-time person who is managing all of those facilities for us. We have another facility in Carrollton that we’re not going to sell. He manages that one. He lives in this area. He gets up and moseys on over to the storage facility. He picks up trash and overlocks units. He does a lot of stuff.
Let me show you what he did. His name is Chris. He’s an amazing boot-on-the-ground person. He sent pictures of what he did. Little tiny things like this make me happy. This is at our Newnan location. This is what the sign looked at beforehand. I was like, “We need to clean that sign. It’s looking rough.” Chris went out there, cleaned it up, wiped it off, and repainted the sign. It looks good now, which may not seem like a big deal, but that’s the stuff that our boots-on-the-ground person does.
Our ballards, people knock those things over. He’s painting and fixing them up. He’s wiping down the doors like we do. We’ll power wash the facilities once a year, but he’ll wipe down the doors. He gets into the units and cleans up all the trash. He does the latches and cleans the outside area up if there are any branches. He does so much stuff.
If you hire boots on a boots-on-the-ground person, they can change the springs, the doors, and the latches out. Your doors sometimes break. We’ll send him springs. He’ll get in and change all the latches and everything out. He does it all by himself. That’s not something that we have to go and do because Pete used to have to do that all the time. We have six boots on the ground. When he is training somebody, he’ll train somebody how to do that, and they’ll do it themselves. That’s kind of the stuff that he does. I love that sign. It looks good. It was old and dirty. It’s a brand-new sign.
This is from Eric. He’s like, “From what I’ve learned, it depends on who the buyer is. If interested in the private party with the possibility of seller finance, it is easy to sell individually. If you have REITs on your crosshair, selling as a package are more interested in them, especially since your facilities have been stabilized. REITs love them because they involve a larger sum of money, which is generally more economical for them to borrow. Why not use the bull strategies office of the package with the possibility of selling individually?” This is something that we would do.
My idea was like, “Let me pitch them out and see if I can find a buyer. If I can’t find a buyer, I’ll hand it over to the realtor, and hopefully, they’ll find a buyer.” We would sell them either individually or as a package. I wanted to test that theory out with the Warm Springs facility, which I wanted to show you guys. This is the one that we decided this is our first facility to sell. Selling a facility is scary and sad. It’s it’s not sad. It’s bittersweet. We worked hard to stabilize this thing.
Selling a facility is scary and bittersweet. Click To TweetI explained this in my pitch when we bought this facility. This is the one that we decided to sell first. The reason that we decided to sell this one first is because it’s in the middle of nowhere for us. Chris has a hard time getting there. The person who was managing it got a hernia and hasn’t been able to go there in a couple of months. Pete had to drive over there. It was in the middle of nowhere. Let’s see if anybody wants to buy this one. Another thing is we’re going to roll this money over into a piece of property because our next goal is to build a storage facility near us where we live.
I have not been to the storage facility in forever. Warm Springs is a little storage facility in a tiny town of 500 or 600 people. It’s not a big town, but it has the only storage facility in the town. If you have one storage facility in a town, it’s going to run good. There are buildings and another building. There are three buildings. This area is a big piece of land. There’s enough space to build another building right here. We do parking there. We never went in and added another building, but that’s a possibility. The border goes back here. You could clear all this. You could add another building here if you want to. That’s what it looks like.
I also wanted to show everybody how we keep all of our properties organized. Every single one of our properties has a folder. This is our Warm Springs, Georgia, Florida, and Georgia full folder. We always keep these up to date. One of our in-house assistants keeps this up to date for us on all the facilities that we have in case we want to sell them.
We have Regrid information. For people who don’t know Regrid, it is a site that you can go to nationwide. You can go to the map and look up parcel data. You could see the property, the owners, the address, and the value of what we’re paying on our taxes. It’s like the property report cards. It’s free for you to look up. I highly recommend that you always look at something like Regrid. If you have another suggestion, you could put it into the chat. We used to use LandGlide, and we switched over to Regrid because it’s free.
Radius Plus
Another thing is we always pull the data from Radius Plus. Radius Plus is only for storage facilities. You can pull all the data for a specific storage facility on Radius Plus. I’m not going to pull this up because every time that you get into this, it costs a credit and money to do that. Every time you use Radius Plus, you have to pay for it. It’s not a monthly fee. I want to pay, and they give you one hour of time and it costs $25.
Radius Plus will give you information on your competition and whether or not they have a loan. This is my competition. B&E Self Storage is in Manchester. They have a loan. They’re paying 4.5% interest on their facility. When you think of radius in the storage world, you’re thinking of 1, 3, 5, 10 mile radiuses. What’s the competition? What’s the amount of population? How much total storage is in this radius? That thought process comes from people who don’t want to travel that far to go to a storage facility. They want something around the corridor. They want their stuff to stay close to them for the most part.
That’s where this radius came from. You could see our competition. There are not a lot of storage facilities within a ten-mile radius. You’ve got these four and one over here. That’s what you can look at. Within a ten-mile radius, how much storage facility is in the area? You’ve got 24,000 square feet of climate control and 38,000 square feet of nonclimate control. It also gives you a demographic. I see the population within a ten-mile radius. It is 15,000. You could see population growth, households, and average income.
This is our occupancy report. Here are photos of the facility. It’s our promo, but we need to get somebody in. We do 50% off the first three months. We’ve got the executive summary. We put everything together. The size of the units is here. We’ve got the bird’s eye view of where it’s located. We’ve got street views and demographics. There are 2,700 people. The population is growing. When I bought it, there were not that many people.
Here’s the Regrid stuff and the competition pictures. Johnny’s Self Storage is 8.8 miles away in Woodbury. Competitor 5.6 is the White House, 3.8 miles away is B&E, 7.5 miles away is Shiloh Storage, and 1.9 is Dormin stores. It’s a tiny facility. That’s our executive summary. We put all the stuff that we’re looking at into one executive summary. The reason why is that I was getting tired of opening up every single folder. I was like, “Put everything into one summary for me so I could look at that.” That was the whole purpose.
We’ve got the demographics, the competitor, the 3 to 5-mile radius, and the pitch replay. We have the management reports. This is everything that you need to decide if it’s a good deal. This is all the information that you need. When you’re looking at deals, this is what you should be looking for. This is the list of the things you should be putting in. We happen to put it into a folder and make it nice and neat. When I shared this folder with anybody who is interested in buying it, they could easily find everything.
StorEDGE
What I wanted to get into was the StorEDGE. We use StorEDGE to manage all of our facilities. You can see what it looks like from the facility map. The storage facility is 5,000 square feet. It’s big. This whole area is where you could put another building if you want or you could do parking. We’re doing the parking, and that’s it. We never did anything else with it. That’s a good opportunity for somebody who wants to add another unit.
I’ve already priced it out. To add a building like this, it’s going to cost you $20,000 to $25,000. It doesn’t cost that much money to put another building out. When you look at this, you see the blue people are up to date and paid. The green R is available units, and the red is late people. You can see this person is past due. This one is available. This is a 10 by 10. We offer it for $75. Even in a tertiary market, the pricing is quite normal. Seventy-five dollars for a 10 by 10 is high. This person is a 10 by 20. He’s paying $115. We could go all the way up to $138 on this if we wanted to.
You can see now that our 10 by 20 are $115 to $138, and 10 by 14 is $98 or $117, depending on our phone people giving discounts or whatever. You have to remember with pricing that we have a whole bunch of different prices. If you go to Miss Lillian’s Self Storage and go to our website, you can see this is our web prices.
If you do not use anybody on our team to book a unit with us, you will have a better rate than if you call in. The reason is that we didn’t have to do any work at all. It’s completely automated the whole thing. If you have to call in and you need to get surprised, talk, convince, and negotiate, that price is going to be higher. That’s how it is for us. Our rent roll is inside the folder.
Dynamic Pricing
There are prices that are all over the price, and they’re all over. We don’t have one price for a unit. We use dynamic pricing. Dynamic pricing means that we have a whole bunch of different prices. We’ve got the standard rate, the management rate, the website rate, the promo rate, the SpareFoot rate, and Google Ads rates.
The way that storage works is you can go into storage and create dynamic pricing. `SpareFoot is at a higher price than most of the others. They charge a lot of money. What we do is we’ll give SpareFoot only so many units because they charge quite a bit of money to do that. We’ll give them only many units to be able to sell.
If we give them five 10 by 10s to sell, every single one of those units is going to be a different price because we base it on whether or not there’s availability. If we only have 1, 4, or 3 left, the price will be different based on that. Overall, you can set up dynamic pricing in your facility. If you’re 80% full, your price for a 10 by 10 is this, and 85% it’s like this. you can go up. That one unit that IS left over should be way more expensive than all the others.
When you look at how much money we make, let’s say we make $100,000 per month, you can look at inside storage. You can look at how much money based on your rates that you should be making on a monthly basis and how much money you are making. Most of the time, when you look at that for us, we’re making more money than what they’re saying that we could be making based on our pricing. The reason is dynamic pricing. We make quite a bit of money off of dynamic pricing.
Once you own a storage facility, and if you are not using dynamic pricing, you are shooting yourself in the foot. You should be utilizing that technique to make as much money as you possibly can. It’s all based on your occupancy and the size of the units. You can get even more deeper into it. At our Blairsville facility, we struggle to sell 10 by 30s. We have eight 10 by 30s. We have 4 or 5 fields. For the last couple that we have left, we’re struggling to fill those. We try lowering the price and doing promos. We only do that for that one unit size. All the other ones, we have no issues with selling. We don’t have any issues with converting 10 by tens, 5 by 10s, 10 by 15s, or 10 by 20s.
Once you own a storage facility and are not using dynamic pricing, you shoot yourself in the foot. Utilize that technique to make as much money as you can. Click To TweetIn StorEDGE, you can say, “For my 10 by 10s, am I going to drop the price by 30%?” I’m going to set dynamic pricing based on how much I sell if the price will be increased.” There’s hardly any software out there that can do that. I use StorEDGE. The reason I use StorEDGE is because of that feature. We can make upwards of $10,000 or $15,000 a month by using dynamic pricing. If you’re not using dynamic pricing, you’re an owner, and you’re reading this, please utilize that. Get in there and learn how to do it. It takes a little while to figure it all out.
We go over this quite often in our facility owner mastermind. In Storage Nerds, we have two different masterminds. One for everybody and one for owners. For the owners, we get into storage and show them how to utilize it. We show all of our students how to utilize that. It’s complicated, but I highly recommend that you figure it out, get in there, and do it.
I wanted to show you the management summary. This is something that all the software can produce. I pulled this as of December 31st, 2023. You can pull it as of whatever day. This one is as of March 7th, 2024. It shows you, for the facility, what you’re making for the month and year. Come into StorEDGE, click manage summary, and click whatever day you want. This is the 20th. I could generate this report. Every week, we meet for at least an hour and go over numbers. This management summary report is super important for us as owners.
You could see, as of March 20th, we’re at $2,600. When I pull up the report, as of March 7th, we’re only at $1,900. Remember that money is always coming in. We made upwards of $700, $800, or $900 in the last couple of weeks that we did that. The reason why is that March 7th, 2024, is still in the first ten days of the period of people’s pay.
Some people pay for the first week, the second week, or the third week. By the third week, we’re going into the auction process. People are getting notified like, “You’re late. We’re about to put you in the auction process.” As of day 25, you’re going into the auction process. We don’t accept partial payments as of the 25th of every single month. As of the 25th, the numbers will start changing. We will make more money after that because we’ll be able to get fees. We make a lot of money off of fees. These are late fees, overlock fees, and auction process fees. You’ll see even more of that money go up.
I wanted to show you the management summary. You could see that we had five move-ins as of March 20th, 2024, and seventeen for the whole year. We’re at 73%. We did auctions in February 2024. We auctioned a good handful of units. We’re trying to get back up to getting these filled. You can also see that we made $8,500 in 2024. You can see how much money we have made. We made $484 in fees, which doesn’t seem like a lot, but it adds up. We made $777 on insurance. We made an extra $300 for an auction.
You can see our move-ins for the month to date. We had two move-ins. A year to date, we have had six move-ins. We had one move-out and, for the year, four move-outs. We have net rentals plus 1 or 2. We try to shoot every month for plus 4 minus 1. You can see rental revenue and the fees. You can see we only made $2,133 in rental revenue, but that includes the insurance and fees, like 60 late fees and administrative fees. It comes out to $226. You want to make sure that you put all these fees in your contract. We put a lot of fees. We make so much money off of these fees.
The Occupancy Game
That’s the management summary. It is something that we download from StorEDGE easily. We’ll hop on a meeting and go over all our numbers. We’ll check the prices and the occupancy. What you do, as an owner, is play the occupancy game. It’s like, “Is my price right for what the occupancy is? Do I need to lower it? Can I increase it? One of our facilities in Florida is 93% full. I’m like, “We got to stop any promos that we have.”
We offer no more promos at all. On top of that, in the next couple of weeks that we meet, we’ll be looking at things like, “Can we increase any of the people’s unit prices?” Once you get to assert price, you start doing that. It’s the occupancy game. If you raise the rent and you see people moving out, you say, “Was that too much? Do I need to not raise the rent for the next batch?” You never want to raise rent all at once. You want to do it in batches. That’s the key to playing the game.
That is the Warm Springs location. We are in the process of selling this location. If anybody wants to make an offer, you’re more than welcome to make an offer on this. I’ll share the folder with you. You can take a look at it and put an offer. We have already received two offers. We want to sell this property. I will let you all know. If you’re interested, put an offer. If you want to get started in the industry, this would be a great one.
This is a property where there’s not going to be anything that you need to do outside of managing it. There’s not any CapEx that you need to get done. If you wanted to add that one building, you could do that. You have to spend $25,000. You could add that and get it leased up. If you run the numbers on the 46 units that we have, what I did is add 60 units. I put one building and added a couple of units. If you can spend $25,000 and add the building, you’ll be able to make $150,000 plus on the property. You’ll increase the property value substantially, which is how new construction works. That’s the opportunity there. Let me know what your thoughts are on this deal.
Hopefully, I inspired you to get out there and put some offers in. Look at deals and put offers in. That’s all you have to do to get started. I wanted to remind you that you can go to the Stacy Rosetti website, StacyRossetti.com, to take the course. Come to the online course under Stacy Rossetti and purchase it. This is a step-by-step guide on how to get started in self-storage investing.
Make sure that you look at purchasing the Deal Analyzer. It is where you can run the numbers and look at it. Green is yes, and red is no. Don’t put an offer. That’s us running the Deal Analysis on this Warm Springs facility. This is what my Deal Analyzer looks like. It will tell you if it is green or red. Is it good or not good for the offer that you have? You can go through it, put your input in, and make an offer. This is available to you.
Richard says, “You’re in a seller’s market. I would sell individually because of the buying power out there.” That’s a good point. The thing is that now, in the industry, there are not a lot of small facilities for sale. There are a lot of bigger ones, but a lot of people can’t afford bigger. That was another reason why I would sell them individually. People can buy something. We’re putting a whole portfolio together. It’s harder for somebody to buy it. I want to get people in the industry.
In today's storage industry, there are fewer smaller facilities for sale than the bigger ones. Click To TweetEric is asking, “Is the management report auto-generated?” Yes. It’s all in StorEDGE. As an owner, which metrics do you look at for a quick snapshot of the facility? Everything in the management summary is perfect. It is what I went over. That’s what you’d be looking at. You can play the pricing game. That’s what you’re going to be playing.
An investor might play the game for management. It depends on what the market is in demand for and the timing. Yeah. We talked about that. How do I register? Email me. My email is Questions@StacyRossetti.com. You can always get ahold of me. Email me, and I’ll answer any questions that I can. I try to do that. I appreciate you guys hanging on and reading this. I will see you guys at the next session. Take care.
