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Self Storage Income

305. Self Storage Secrets from 20+ Years of Ownership (100+ Facilities!) w/Kenny Pratt

Self Storage Income

AJ Osborne

Entrepreneurship, Education, Investing, Business, How To

4.9591 Ratings

🗓️ 15 July 2025

⏱️ 62 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Want to increase revenue at your self storage facility? Want tenants who will stay the longest and pay the highest rents? Today’s guest owns over 20 self storage facilities and has managed more than 100. He’s so good at what he does that we’ve even brought him on to help with our bigger facilities. In this episode, he shares his playbook for attracting the best self storage customers—and raising rents on tenants least likely to leave. 

Kenny Pratt has over two decades of experience in commercial real estate. He was the Director of Operations at LifeStorage, responsible for maximizing income growth. He knows the secrets of the REITs and proved it by starting from scratch with Crescendo Properties and Crescendo Self Storage Management. Now, he owns 25 self storage facilities and runs all of them successfully, even with REITs nearby.

What’s the optimal self storage customer? How do you get tenants to stay for longer? What are the “pain points” you can solve immediately to increase occupancy and revenue? And why should you never let your facility manager be the one making the sales? Kenny shares two decades of self storage secrets to put you on the financial freedom fast track with your portfolio! 

 

What you’ll learn in today’s show:

 

  • Secrets that BIG facilities use to know who to raise rates on 
  • The “rate lock” strategy that keeps customers renting for longer 
  • The optimal self storage customer that will pay more and stay for years 
  • A common “pain point” you can solve to get even more rentals at your facility 
  • Creative financing is back! How Kenny is picking up self storage facilities in today’s market 
  • Why you should NOT have your facility manager be in charge of sales 

Crescendo Self Storage Management - https://propertymanagement.storage/ 

Kenny’s LinkedInhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/kennypratt/ 

Reset: How to Change What's Not Working - https://www.amazon.com/Reset-How-Change-Whats-Working/dp/1668062097 

Want to increase revenue at your self storage facility? - https://www.selfstorageincome.com/blog/how-to-increase-revenue-in-self-storage-investing 

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Go rent a unit from extra space, for example.

0:03.0

Even if you don't finish the rental process completely,

0:05.0

you'll notice that they will ask you some questions

0:07.0

about whether you're a student,

0:09.0

how long do you plan to stay, some other things

0:11.0

that they can then feed into their system.

0:13.0

Where are the middle-aged families that have some disposable income

0:17.0

and have some need for storage over a longer period of time?

0:20.0

They're going to make a lifestyle choice rather than solve a problem for three months,

0:23.8

like a student choice, right?

0:25.7

And definitely where we're moving towards is to understand better

0:28.3

in segmenting our customer base and not applying the same rate-increased strategies to everyone.

0:34.2

We're applying different rate-incre increase regimes or strategies to different segments,

0:39.5

right? Because some segments are much more likely to stay. Some segments are more likely to go. And

0:43.7

there's some clues about price sensitivity that you can glean based on kind of the way you operate

0:48.6

your business. Welcome everybody to self-storage income. And Connor and I today have a guest who I met years ago.

1:03.4

And I'm really excited to bring him in to talk about, well, a lot of things, but I'm really excited to talk about management

1:12.3

because I know his company. I've seen what they did. They actually put a proposal in

1:18.6

for a facility that we had partners on and another state that we weren't running and we were

1:24.4

very, very impressed with him and his company. So I've been really excited about this podcast for a long time. Yeah, no, thanks a bunch for putting it together, AJ, because I'm really excited to dive in. You've introduced me to a lot of your friends, but this is what I've missed, unfortunately. So I'm really excited to jump in. And, you know, all things, operations, things are always changing. What we're doing is always

1:45.3

changing the strategies for the competition. All the things are always happening. Right. So I always

1:50.7

love jumping in and just hearing, you know, what are other people seeing? Yeah, it's always hard

...

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