301. How Your Facility Can Make MORE Money with LOWER Occupancy w/Jonah Hall
Self Storage Income
AJ Osborne
4.9 • 591 Ratings
🗓️ 17 June 2025
⏱️ 67 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Occupancy is often regarded as one of the most crucial metrics for self storage operators—but that’s a mistake. While we’d love for our facilities to be 100% full with the highest-paying customers in the area, this is rarely the case. In fact, higher self storage occupancy rates could be slowly killing your facility, making you less money and lowering your facility’s value by tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Jonah Hall, President and CIO of Cedar Creek Capital, knows (arguably) more about self storage occupancy than anyone in the industry. He’s the reason why while occupancy rates were dropping over the past few months, our income was going UP. That’s right, fewer customers, fewer storage rentals, and more revenue. How is that even possible?
If you own a self storage facility or are planning on buying one, this is crucial information that could help you earn tens of thousands more every year. We’re talking about how to raise rents even when occupancy is low (and not lose customers), the biggest mistakes we made when taking over facilities, and the different types of “occupancy” plus which you should pay attention to most. We’ve tested these strategies across dozens of facilities, so you don’t have to.
What you’ll learn in today’s show:
- Why occupancy rates don’t matter nearly as much as you think they do
- How to increase your facility’s revenue even as occupancy rates are falling
- A self storage industry update from our own portfolio (are downward trends reversing?)
- How to “train” your customers to lower your facility’s costs
- The biggest mistake we made with rent raises at new facilities
- How to know which unit sizes will have the most demand in your area
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | It just goes to show that you can actually create opportunity in a time of decline if you're |
| 0:06.1 | strategic about everything else. A lot of people just don't quite, it doesn't click. |
| 0:10.2 | Occupancy's dropping, like, what are we doing? Like, stop everything. You know, honestly, |
| 0:14.0 | we had a few moments like that. Like, what's happening here? But then when you really stop to see |
| 0:18.3 | that you just created vacancy in units that will now be |
| 0:21.3 | very, very important to lease up at much higher rates this summer, that was the perfect time |
| 0:25.9 | to be going through that exact phenomenon. Demand can be really hard today for the fact that |
| 0:32.2 | rates have been so weird over the last two years. Occupancy can be high, why rates are still |
| 0:37.1 | going down, |
| 0:37.7 | and you're like, what? That never happened before. What are your key indicators that to you |
| 0:43.6 | says demand? What's up, guys? Occupancy plummeting month after month going into negative territory |
| 0:56.9 | is actually a good thing. Well, it can't be. So how and why? Jonah, how you doing, man? Good. |
| 1:05.1 | Happy to be back. Yeah. It's been a while. It has. Happy to have you back. Yeah. So, as you guys all |
| 1:10.3 | know from, geez, I can't even remember now when you were on like, |
| 1:14.0 | end of the year. |
| 1:32.4 | It was, it wasn't even this year. No. Last year. It was like, it was like August, September. Wow. It's been a while. Dude. Holy cow. Time flies. but as all of the you know uh j's here with Cedar Creek. He is one of the partners, and he is running up a lot of the ops. So he's president here. He's built other storage |
| 1:38.2 | companies. And he focused a lot on the development. We're talking a lot about operations and the overall automation side, |
| 1:48.2 | so that integrating with technology and the physical asset. And as everyone that listens to |
| 1:54.9 | stuff knows, we're big on that. And there's good reasons why. But there can be some confusing |
| 2:00.6 | things. And we've seen this. |
| 2:02.8 | What we're doing today is actually giving you numbers and examples, which I'm really excited about |
| 2:06.9 | because it'll illustrate it. So why don't we set it up right there, dude? Let's just talk about |
... |
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