350. He Bought a Self Storage Facility for Less Than a Rental Property ($5K Down)
Self Storage Income
AJ Osborne
4.9 • 591 Ratings
🗓️ 26 May 2026
⏱️ 42 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
People think you need millions to get started in self storage. You don’t.
You’re about to hear about someone who just bought a self storage facility for less than a single-family home. And not only that—they put just $5,000 down. Now, rather than dealing with tenants and toilets, they’re getting a 42-unit self storage business that provides immediate cash flow and offers serious value-add potential.
Today, we’re highlighting wins just like these, from “small” investors just like you. We’ll get into how smart investors are building out their capital “stacks,” structuring partnerships, and identifying the best markets to invest in.
We’re also addressing the most common pain points and questions investors have when running a self storage business. What are the best ways to leverage AI? Should you have cell towers installed on your property to increase revenue? Is it a good idea to do away with security deposits? How do you get insurance costs under control? We answer all of these and more!
What you’ll learn in today’s show:
- Recent investing wins, questions, and pain points from the SSI forums
- Leveraging AI to improve operations and increase your bottom line
- How to keep your self storage facility’s insurance costs in check
- What to know before structuring your capital “stack” or partnership
- How to increase revenue by placing cell towers on your property
- The number one mistake investors make when analyzing a self storage market
—
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
Patchwork Labs - https://www.patchworklabs.com/
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This individual has got an LOI signed. |
| 0:02.0 | It's 42 units, 6,000 square foot facility, a great amount of rentable square footage on four acres. |
| 0:09.0 | Do not think that storage has to be millions and millions of dollars. |
| 0:12.0 | Like you can find storage facilities for less than a single family home. |
| 0:15.0 | This is under $250,000. |
| 0:17.0 | $4,200 down. |
| 0:19.0 | Very low down payment to be able to get into a storage facility. Great job on getting some of this creative financing in here while still being able to have a long-term aspect of owning the asset. |
| 0:32.6 | What is going on, everybody? Today we have an amazing episode because we're taking real-time |
| 0:39.4 | information from our online educational platform, self-storage income, directly from our members, |
| 0:46.1 | the questions that they're posting in our community posts and forums and so forth. And we're |
| 0:51.5 | bringing them straight to you guys and sharing the challenges, the wins, like what they're seeing, what they're experiencing. And some of the questions that they're asking as they're going out, acquiring facilities, analyzing facilities. It's such a great episode today, ma'am. Yeah, this is a good one. We're going through things that people are working on right now, questions that they have deals that are working on. And, you know, our thought was if they have these questions, and you guys might have the same |
| 1:13.9 | questions as well, too. So really excited to dive in today. 100%, man. It's so, so important. |
| 1:19.1 | All right, this first one, we've got this individual that got an LOI signed. It's 42 units, |
| 1:25.3 | 6,000 square foot facility. So not massive, but a great amount of rentable square footage on four acres. |
| 1:32.4 | Yeah. |
| 1:33.4 | They did this situation where they're doing a small amount of money down, less than |
| 1:37.7 | $5,000 down, and they're doing like this lease to own scenario where they're coming in |
| 1:42.4 | and their payments start 90 days from the time that |
| 1:46.5 | this person's coming in after the quote unquote close let's say and it's all applied to it looks |
| 1:52.7 | like a $230,000 purchase price and then they've got two years later it's about a $200,000 balloon |
| 2:00.2 | essentially that it looks like is going on here. So |
| 2:02.4 | they've got about a couple months it looks like to get in, get tenants out, or making monthly |
... |
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