No doubt about it, 2020 is a year of totally new territory for the self storage industry, and that goes for self storage lending as well. We are currently working on three loans, getting ready to close on them, and it has been a journey. CMBS We are not doing any CMBS...
I have said it in other episodes, but the fortune-tellers of today are the ones who "interrupt data." I could get the "data" to predict virtually any outcome I want. But with all this data flying around, it is hard not to predict what is coming down the pike. As...
I get tired of hearing about the “new reality” we are in due to COVID-19. I am sure many of you do too. However, in the world of self storage, as we try to figure out what works and does not work, let’s stay on the subject a little longer. What we did in 2019 to fill...
I am very grateful that I have figured out how to make money in self storage. Who I am now is someone you could take everything from, drop-off in a strange place where I know no one, and I would be OK, prosper, and soon have all I could ever want. And I don’t think it...
Before you dive into self storage ground-up development, it is always good to know other peoples' mistakes. Fortunately for you today, if you are considering developing storage, I have made a lot of mistakes and can share my experience. I could have made this article...
In today's world, if you are getting in the self storage business, or growing your self storage business, you look at a lot of "Offering Memorandums" (OM). We have to develop a strategy for quickly figuring out which ones we should focus on and which ones we should...
I am beginning to re-think how I calculate lease-up in self storage projects. When I first entered into self storage in the mid-1990s as a broker helping a REIT find self storage, they used to assume 5% of their square footage per month would lease-up (wouldn't that...
I have said before about self storage, “Make data-driven decisions.” I try to do that. But it’s getting hard. Real hard, in my opinion. In my humble opinion, there are two big issues with data today in the self storage industry. The first is how it is collected, and...
Let's talk about online marketing for a self-storage facility. Let me start by saying I am not an "expert" in online marketing for self-storage facilities. But I have never worked with an "expert" that has generated any results period, much less any cost-effective...
This week it is hard for me to talk about self-storage and ignore what is going on in the country at the moment. So, let’s talk about it. I am not sure when you see this, but at the moment we are slowly coming out of quarantine from COVID-19 (still no vaccine), and...
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