316. How to Analyze a Self Storage Facility from Scratch (6 Steps)
Self Storage Income
AJ Osborne
4.9 • 591 Ratings
🗓️ 30 September 2025
⏱️ 63 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
How do you know your first or next self storage investment is worth the money?
This is how you do self storage analysis in six steps, even if you’ve never invested in storage before. With the most basic of numbers, you can analyze a self storage facility to see if it’s a worthwhile deal. And you don’t need any experience in commercial real estate or self storage underwriting models to do these calculations—you just need some time.
We’ll take you all the way from defining your “buy box” (know what you want to buy) to estimating expenses and revenue, running the numbers, and the extra “margin” we add in every single self storage deal to ensure it’ll be profitable.
Plus, what a good self storage investment looks like and how to secretly get your competitors’ rent prices so you’ll know just how much your facility can bring in.
Your first or next self storage deal is close—let’s make sure it’s a home run!
What you’ll learn in today’s show:
- How to analyze a self storage facility from scratch, even if you have no prior experience
- The secret way to know your competitors’ pricing and how occupied they are
- Why you must design your “buy box” before you analyze a single storage deal
- When to go from quick to full underwriting vs. pass on a so-so deal
- The two biggest self storage expenses that you cannot ignore (or you’ll get burned!)
🌳 Live Oak Bank: https://www.liveoak.bank/
📉 TractIQ: https://tractiq.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/
📖 Get AJ's book that teaches you everything he knows about self-storage https://a.co/d/aRSKcSq
📉 Take advantage of today’s market conditions and invest with us: https://cedar.cc/invest
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | If you can get just the revenue, that is enough to do a quick underwriting. |
| 0:05.0 | If you can take that number that they give you of, say, $10,000 a month, |
| 0:10.0 | and then you take a 35% expense ratio, that means you're spending $3,500 a month, you have $6,500 left over. |
| 0:17.0 | That's your NOI for the year, your net operating income. |
| 0:19.0 | Then what you would do is you take that by a cap rate. And so a cap rate is a measurement of value, and that can allow you to get up a purchase price. And either you're in the range and they're like sweet, like yes, those numbers do sound good to me, or you're close or you're way off. But either way, I let you know, are you guys on different planets? |
| 0:38.3 | Are you at least in close enough zip codes where it's worth the conversation? |
| 0:42.4 | People are like, man, I can't find any deals. |
| 0:45.3 | And dude, I don't know if I've ever seen someone just find a deal. |
| 0:48.5 | A deal has always been created and made in some way. |
| 1:01.6 | Welcome back, everybody, to the self-storage income podcast. |
| 1:03.5 | George, how the heck are you, man? |
| 1:04.8 | I'm doing good, man. |
| 1:06.7 | We get a good topic today, Connor. |
| 1:11.3 | So talking underwriting, as always, is an exciting topic for everybody. |
| 1:12.9 | So looking forward to diving in today. |
| 1:14.2 | Heck, yeah, me too, man. |
| 1:20.0 | We get a lot of questions just out in the natural world, out in nature, right? |
| 1:21.9 | Just having these conversations. |
| 1:26.8 | And we also get a lot of questions from folks in our community, which we're going to touch on and stuff, which I'm really excited about. |
| 1:33.3 | Because there is so many different dynamics, man, when it comes to underwriting and trying to figure out, you know, where your revenue is going to be, where expenses are going to be, |
| 1:37.5 | and how to try to plan for those things. |
| 1:40.9 | And at the end of the day, make sure that you're putting in a good competitive offer to |
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