339. How to Start Investing in Self Storage Right Now
Self Storage Income
AJ Osborne
4.9 • 591 Ratings
🗓️ 10 March 2026
⏱️ 24 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This is how to start investing in self storage, right now.
In under 25 minutes, I’m going to walk you through exactly how to go from no self storage investments to your first one. Everything from building your “buy box” to finding the deals with upside potential, financing, due diligence, increasing revenue, and repeating it to build an entire portfolio.
None of the steps I’m sharing are difficult and a beginner can follow each of them, step by step, to get their first self storage facility this year. But you’ll need to be consistent. There are opportunities out there right now—I should know, I’m heavily buying in 2026. But they won’t fall into your lap.
If you’re able to spot the best self storage opportunities, present my three-offer strategy to sellers, and improve operations, you’ll have a cash-flowing, equity-building, stable asset for decades to come. I did it, too, buying small, mom-and-pop facilities for $500,000 or less.
Now, it’s your turn. You want to know how to buy a self storage facility? These are the exact steps I’d take in 2026.
What you’ll learn in today’s show:
- How to buy your first self storage facility by the end of 2026
- Building your “buy box” and knowing what type of facility you want to buy
- The value-add opportunities that will boost a facility’s value once implemented
- The formula to follow to find stable, safe, opportunistic self storage markets
- Three financing options to give every seller when making self storage offers
- Spotting the “money on the table” that will make you wealthy in self storage
—
Grab AJ’s Book, Growing Wealth in Self-Storage 2.0 - https://www.amazon.com/Growing-Wealth-Self-Storage-2-0-Post-Pandemic/dp/1735258865
Join the Self Storage Income Community! - https://www.selfstorageincome.com/learn-yt
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Here's what I do to invest in self-storage right now, to find the opportunities that will create wealth and have upside. |
| 0:08.5 | I started in very small facilities, in very rural towns, and I scaled to hundreds of millions of self-storage assets. |
| 0:17.0 | The simple methodology that you use really hasn't changed. And even what I'm doing today follows this. If I was starting over again, this is exactly what I would look for and how I would go about it today. |
| 0:43.5 | Today is very different than self-storage has been in the past. |
| 0:50.1 | The last three or four years in storage had been a struggle with occupancies and rents dropping. |
| 0:58.4 | But in 2025, we saw stabilization, meaning rent stopped dropping, occupancy stopped, and over the last four or five months, we've actually seen them start to rise. But the key is most people won't realize, |
| 1:05.1 | see the opportunity or know what to do until the market is booming again. And that's when there's no opportunity. So how do you |
| 1:12.8 | find opportunity? What do you do today to find it and get it? The things that I'm focusing on today, |
| 1:21.1 | even if we're talking a small facility, maybe $200,000 to buy and invest in. We've got to take into account both opportunity |
| 1:30.2 | and risk. The first thing that I'm looking at is value add or distressed properties. Right now, |
| 1:37.6 | I'm buying a lot of distressed properties, but we also are focusing on value add. Now, what does that mean? First of all, |
| 1:46.7 | distressed properties are almost always wrapped into owners that have to sell. This may be a |
| 1:52.5 | lease up facility, a new development, or simply someone that bought, and now the refinances coming up |
| 1:59.4 | because they bought in 2019, 2020, 2020, 2021, or 22, |
| 2:05.1 | and they got to move their loan into a perm loan. |
| 2:08.7 | They have to refinance. |
| 2:10.3 | Interest rates are higher, occupancy and rents are down, and they've got to get rid of it. |
| 2:14.8 | The opportunity of value add. Really, we're looking at the exact same |
| 2:20.9 | thing that I've always done. That is mom and pop operators that treat it as a passive real estate |
| 2:28.5 | asset. This affords lots of opportunity without a lot of risk, meaning that it's known. |
| 2:37.8 | We can see everything that's going on. |
| 2:40.3 | They're just not operating it in a way that they should, therefore leaving that money on the table. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from AJ Osborne, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of AJ Osborne and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.