237. How to Improve Operations - This is how we compete w/ storage REITs!
Self Storage Income
AJ Osborne
4.9 • 591 Ratings
🗓️ 26 March 2024
⏱️ 28 minutes
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Summary
Big REITs can raise and lower prices whenever it suits them - but is this actually the best way to treat your customers? We don't think so.
Instead, we focus on operations - how can we improve, so the customer gets a better product??
Our operations team has been visiting our facilities to look at what we can do to improve the value we provide to customers. Are we missing a piece of equipment that would make cleaning easier? Are we making sure we respond to customers' concerns in a timely manner? Then, how do we pass this feedback along from customers to employees to managers?
These are all critical areas of day-to-day business that hugely impact our customers' experience. This is how we compete with the big REITs. They have the means to slash prices that many operators cannot afford. But what you CAN do is to IMPROVE the value you provide for the money.
If $90 can get you a bigger unit for the same cost as a smaller one, making this known to your customers when they're looking to purchase can be a huge win and help you stand out from the REITs that move you in at $50 then jack up the prices in a few months. As a customer, which company would you think more positively about?
We talked about the Pros & Cons of buying out of state in a recent YouTube video, but in this episode, we dive deeper into the ins and outs - the caveats, the behind-the-scenes - of how we manage our facilities despite them being hundreds of miles away.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | out of state investing there's a few things that matter first of all if you're managing it |
| 0:03.5 | yourself that's different than if you have third party management even if you have third party |
| 0:06.6 | management you need to be on the ground you have back end operations but you still have the physical |
| 0:11.3 | operations of the site there's no such thing as a manless storage facility by the way that's |
| 0:15.2 | just doesn't exist debunked because there is fundamental things that you have to do you have to |
| 0:20.7 | lock checks you have to clean out units you have to get them ready to sell. You have gates. You have physical things. People breaking into units all the time. You have maintenance. These are buildings. These are landscaping stuff. The question is then how do you do the physical asset part of it? And so you have to contract that out and then what does that look like? |
| 0:38.6 | There's no setting it and forgetting it. |
| 0:39.9 | No, there's no set in and forgetting it. |
| 0:45.3 | Welcome everybody to self-storage income. |
| 0:49.6 | And today we have a topic that is one of our most uh i think not just questions but a lot of people |
| 0:59.3 | are trying to understand their comfort level and the actual application of investing in storage |
| 1:07.6 | facilities at a state and how not not how that works, but there's like |
| 1:14.1 | this perceived risk aspect, which part of it's true, right? But part of it's also not true at all. |
| 1:24.1 | And I think this is one of the major hurdles for people is I want to invest close |
| 1:30.3 | to me, but maybe there's not a lot of good deals. And I've taken kind of the middle ground, |
| 1:37.3 | especially when starting out where I'd rather get a good deal and feel comfortable that |
| 1:42.3 | the deal was good enough to where it could be a little farther away. |
| 1:46.0 | But with that same token, when we started, I didn't invest like super far away, right? |
| 1:52.3 | I was still in the northwest, but none of it was years. |
| 1:57.5 | None of our stuff was close per se, right? It was nine hours away. And now out west, |
| 2:06.0 | that's that's in the same state, but, you know, it's, but it was not in the realm of we could |
| 2:14.0 | just get there in a day, right? So driving nine, 10 hours, then, or you could take a |
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