291. Self Storage Seasonality: Moves to Make NOW Before “Busy Season” Hits with Jesse Harmon of Cedar Creek Capital
Self Storage Income
AJ Osborne
4.9 • 591 Ratings
🗓️ 8 April 2025
⏱️ 54 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Self storage is a seasonal business, so if you’re not capitalizing on the busy and slow seasons, you risk your entire year of revenue. Why do we raise rates in the winter, strategically encourage tenant turnover before spring, and constantly obsess over occupancy by unit size? Today, we’re bringing on Jesse Harmon, Cedar Creek’s Director of Revenue Optimization, to reveal our proven game plan for self storage seasonality. This WILL make or break your facility, so get this RIGHT!
We’re about to enter (if not already in) the “busy” season of self storage. People are moving, spring homebuying is picking up, and you BETTER have units ready to lease at your facility—at the highest price possible. Have units below market rates that need to reach street-level pricing? Jesse shares the data to look at before putting in a rent raise and how to “test” higher rents so you can keep the most high-paying customers.
Next, we’re talking about leads: how to get them at a low cost—or even for free—and which marketing services we use most to fill our pipeline with self storage renters. Plus, before paying a service six months’ rent to get a customer, calculate this CRUCIAL metric to see precisely how much you should pay per lead.
What you’ll learn in today’s show:
- Self-storage seasonality and how we optimize for busy and slow seasons
- “Testing” new rental rates and the one metric that is a sign you can raise rents higher
- Why you WANT move-outs (especially in one season) to maximize your facility’s revenue
- The metrics you should be looking at every day to guide what moves to make at your facility
- Marketing tactics we use to get more leads and customers while keeping costs low
Helpful Related Articles:
Calculating For Marketing: https://www.selfstorageincome.com/blog/market-dynamics-key-metrics-and-Insights-for-smart-investments
How To Increase Revenue: https://www.selfstorageincome.com/blog/how-to-increase-revenue-in-self-storage-investing
Why Occupancy Doesn't Matter The Way You Think it Does:
https://www.selfstorageincome.com/blog/why-occupancy-doesn-t-matter-in-self-storage
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Resources Mentioned:
📉 NowMetrics: https://nowmetrics.co/
📌 Make self storage management easier than EVER with our podcast sponsor Tenant Inc. - https://www.tenantinc.com/
🎙️ Apply to be a Guest On Self Storage Income HERE: https://form.asana.com/?k=TGU88eU0bFTFW1iHcckuTA&d=1203571084143207
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | When we're looking at our race strategies in the winter time, we're looking at those tenants that quote unquote don't belong and we're trying to get them to move out. |
| 0:10.4 | When it comes to the spring and summer, if you don't have any availability, you're dead in the water. |
| 0:16.0 | Don't just think because, you know, a competitor is selling at 50% of what you are and you're 90% full that you have to lower your price. |
| 0:23.4 | If you're at 90% full of that unit type, you've got demand. |
| 0:26.4 | And talking about that, both from like a marketing and a rate and revenue management standpoint, like what are the metrics that matter? |
| 0:33.5 | Like what should I as an operator or manager or owner? |
| 0:35.9 | What should I be looking at? |
| 0:37.0 | I have to go out. matter. Like, what should I as an operator or manager or owner? What should I be looking at? |
| 0:48.5 | Welcome everybody to the Self Storage Income Podcast. You have got an incredible episode coming your way today. You've got myself and are one and only Jesse Harmon in the house today. |
| 0:53.5 | Thanks for having me. |
| 0:54.4 | Heck yeah. How you doing, man? I'm doing good. How are you? Doing great. Awesome topic to talk about today, especially as we're right now, the recording of this episode, we're heading right into busy season. Oh, yeah, we are. We're like right there. So I'm really excited to dive in. We're going to be talking today a little bit about |
| 1:11.7 | self-storage seasonality, what it looks like. We're talking occupancies, revenues, marketing, |
| 1:17.3 | some of those different elements. And the ebbs and flows of what that looks like, things you need |
| 1:21.0 | to be looking out for and considering, give you some insights into how we manage things, what we look |
| 1:26.4 | for and what we do. |
| 1:31.4 | And Jesse Harmon is the subject matter expert in all those things for us. |
| 1:32.2 | So yeah. |
| 1:32.5 | Yeah. |
| 1:34.8 | It's going to be an awesome podcast. |
| 1:36.6 | This is super important. |
| 1:38.2 | You can't fail at this, right? No, it's huge. |
| 1:39.1 | As AJ, when he comes into meetings, like, if we're going to execute, it's this strategy right here. |
... |
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