258. Building a Self Storage Portfolio Fast After Leaving a Time-Sucking Business w/Courtney Galyan
Self Storage Income
AJ Osborne
4.9 • 591 Ratings
🗓️ 20 August 2024
⏱️ 50 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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Courtney Galyan has worn many hats. He’s been a real estate broker, worked in development, and even owned a pizza franchise. All of those made good money, but the problem was his time was being slowly sucked away. He wanted the “passive” income real estate provided along with the freedom NOT to have to be on-site, running the show every single day. The self storage business, although overlooked by most investors, was Courtney’s lifeline.
After driving around a popular lake town and looking for facilities, Courtney and his business partner quickly realized how high the demand for storage was and how poorly most of the facilities were run. Through a commercial broker friend, they secured their first self storage deal, and it was exactly what they were looking for.
Now, less than a decade later, Courtney has over 750,000 square feet of self storage—a massive amount for any investor to tackle. With eleven facilities across the South and the Midwest, Courtney has had to bob and weave through hot markets (2018-2022) and slowdowns (post-pandemic). He’s made some mistakes and learned some crucial lessons along the way he’s sharing today that any investor, even brand new ones, can take to heart to scale their facilities faster and get ready for this next market cycle.
What you’ll learn in today’s show:
- Why Courtney ditched his successful pizza franchise to invest in real estate (and specifically, self storage)
- The tiny, untapped tertiary markets that have massive pent-up demand for self storage
- Calculating the risk-to-reward for your business and why self storage makes so much financial sense
- Why Courtney believes there’s even more demand for storage facilities coming
- Self storage’s return to normal and why it’s EASIER to make decisions on investments now
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | After about four or five years, plus the number of hours I was working, I kind of sat down with myself and I said, do I really want to be in the restaurant business? |
| 0:07.5 | I didn't want to trade time for dollars. I wanted my money to work for me passively as much as possible. I knew that I wanted to have flexibility to travel. |
| 0:14.4 | If you can apply the real estate components, right, you know, great location, good signage, good good street visibility strong traffic counts out position |
| 0:22.3 | your competition main on main corners as much as you can if you can target those and then you can |
| 0:27.9 | apply the utilization and the demand scenarios to it i think you know you have a recipe for success |
| 0:33.5 | at the end of the day and if you can do it it right, buy your price right, and you can build it |
| 0:38.8 | appropriately, you're going to see a benefit in two or three years because there's not |
| 0:42.0 | enough supply coming on the market. |
| 0:49.8 | Welcome everybody to self-storage income. And today we have a guest with us who's actually in the office. |
| 0:58.7 | Courtney, how's it going, man? Doing well. Thanks for having me. I appreciate AJ. This is great. |
| 1:02.4 | Well, I'm excited for everybody to get to know you and get to understand a little more of your background. |
| 1:08.3 | So right now, let's kind of get this base level. |
| 1:15.7 | Where are you from? What are you currently doing, working on in your background? So then we can discuss everything from storage to the other commercial assets and your insight there. Yeah. So |
| 1:20.4 | from Indianapolis, Indiana, born and raised, grew up there. I've been in real estate since I got |
| 1:26.7 | out of college. Been doing storage for about |
| 1:28.3 | four or five years now. It's been a great asset class for us. But kind of had a diverse background |
| 1:32.2 | getting to this point. Grew up in a family owned a large sporting goods company. So kind of had |
| 1:38.9 | that natural entrepreneurial spirit, the natural retail gravitation, you know, for that type of sector. |
| 1:44.0 | And when I got out of college, |
| 1:45.9 | my dad sold his business and retired. And so it was good to see him do that. And so I, my, |
| 1:51.6 | my trajectory at that time was I just kind of landed in real estate. It wasn't necessarily my |
| 1:56.2 | main priority at the time wasn't exactly sure what I was going to get into, but landed a couple |
... |
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