283. Self Storage Insurance 101: What You MUST Know to Protect Your Property w/ Terry Campbell
Self Storage Income
AJ Osborne
4.9 • 591 Ratings
🗓️ 11 February 2025
⏱️ 32 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Get my FREE self storage starter pack to learn how to analyze, underwrite, and operate your next storage investment: https://www.selfstorageincome.com/start-podcast
Most people don’t realize it, but self storage facility insurance can kill your deal. Fires, tornados, hurricanes, and winter storms are making it more and more costly to protect your facility, and rising prices could eat into the profit margin you worked so hard to create. How do you keep your insurance prices reasonable while still protecting your property? Are insurance premiums about to skyrocket again, or is 2025 the year they finally “level off”?
We own a lot of self storage, but we aren’t insurance specialists, so we brought one on to help YOU get the most coverage at the lowest cost.
Terry Campbell is the expert in self storage. He’s done everything from building to lending, operating, and educating on self storage investing, but now, he’s tackling a bigger beast: self storage insurance.
If you’re new to self storage investing, this is an episode you MUST listen to before buying your first property. If you’ve been investing in storage for a while, you already know how pricey premiums have gotten, and Terry’s tips can help you save some serious cash when it’s time for renewal.
What you’ll learn in today’s show:
- What’s behind the recent insurance crisis and why 2025 may finally be a “leveling off” point
- How to factor insurance price hikes into your underwriting for new and existing facilities
- Why more and more facilities are moving to “self-insuring” even at its high cost
- Expert tips to lower your insurance premiums and when to (and when NOT to) shop other carriers
- Terry’s top picks for self storage insurance carriers who can cover your facility
Johnson Insurance: https://gojohnsoninsurance.com/
Email Terry: terry@gojohnsonins.com
📌 Make self storage management easier than EVER with our podcast sponsor Tenant Inc. - https://www.tenantinc.com/
📑 Our Self-Storage Feasibility Studies will help you speed up the process in understanding markets, potential risks, and analyzing the facility itself. https://cedar.cc/feasibility-studies/
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | How do I think about this? How do I say, I'm underwriting a deal? This deal, I have a premium that is $15,000 a year, but I'm worried that it's going to double to $30,000 on a property where that's 50% of my merchant. |
| 0:12.7 | Exactly. And, you know, people are always asking, how can I lower it? How can I lower the price? These premiums, what things are they looking for that will help give you some relief on that price? |
| 0:23.5 | Some of the things you just mentioned are great examples on being able to save money. |
| 0:34.4 | Welcome everybody to self-storage income, And today we have a extremely important topic. |
| 0:41.5 | This has been a problem for the last few years. |
| 0:45.1 | And a lot of people are wondering what's going on. |
| 0:49.0 | How do we underwrite this expenses with insurance and everything that's gone on, especially what we've seen |
| 0:57.0 | through California and others. It's become one of the larger expenses and one of the more, |
| 1:03.4 | I think, unpredictable one. So with that, I have my friend Terry Campbell on here. We've worked |
| 1:10.6 | with Terry for actually a long time. He worked |
| 1:13.7 | in the banking sector and really built out Live Oaks self-storage side. And he is now doing |
| 1:20.6 | the same in the insurance world. So with that, Terry, how's it going? It's going great, man. It's |
| 1:26.0 | awesome. Good. And you just couldn't stay away from storage. And so you're back in trying to help people solve more problems. Yeah, I couldn't stay away. I, you know, tried to retire early a year. It was a year ago last week. And after about four months, I told my wife, I'm going to have to go back to work to get some rest because this retirement stuff's killing me, all these projects and things. And so I ended up coming back |
| 1:49.3 | into the industry to start a vertical, an insurance company, like you said, because I've done |
| 1:56.9 | the building side, I've done the lending side, operation side. This is one of the few things I haven't done yet specifically. And so I'm rounding out my self-storage knowledge base, I guess you |
| 2:06.6 | could say. And at a time where everybody's interested in talking about it. Yeah, it's been a |
| 2:12.0 | wild few years. I've seen a lot of people get in trouble with it, actually. The southeast has been an issue, |
| 2:19.4 | and then now we see it on the West Coast, but we've been dealing with it throughout the Midwest, |
| 2:24.6 | even too, where we saw insurance premiums just skyrocket. So, you know, first and foremost, |
| 2:31.7 | when looking at this, when we're talking about property and casualty, |
| 2:36.3 | we're particularly talking about the coverage over the actual buildings, the asset itself. |
| 2:45.2 | So, you know, what happens if it burns to the ground, what happens, tornado, hurricane, |
... |
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