Question #
What challenges do buyers face when looking for off-market self-storage properties?
Answer #
It has gotten to the point that I almost don’t pay attention to listed self-storage properties anymore.
Not quite, but I notice when specific companies’ listings show up in my inbox, I delete them automatically because I know they will be so overpriced for our goals, they are not even worth looking at.
Do you do that as well?
But the reality is that trying to find off-market listings is hard as well today.
As a storage owner, I get on average 10 texts a week, lots of letters a month, and perhaps one to two calls every week or so about selling my facility.
Some inquiries even come for properties I sold years ago (not sure what lists out there show us as owners).
The reality is, for the most part, the way most of us try to connect with and buy off-market properties doesn’t work very well.
The people who are successful, I have seen, take a long time to establish relationships and trust.
This usually means face-to-face contact over months, or even years.
But what if there was a faster way?
The challenge we have as buyers is we don’t want to put an offer in without knowing the income, expenses, and occupancy rate.
Often owners don’t know this, or they don’t know it off the top of their head, and us just throwing an offer out there quickly, we tend to be low.
As an owner myself, when someone tells me they can pay more than the market or I am going to save a commission, I think… “yeah, right.”
It has gotten to the point that we, as people searching to buy off-market deals, sound like and act like used car salespeople or politicians, both of whom have extremely low ratings in the average public’s mind.
No owner is going to give me, after a call or two, their P&L, balance sheet, and operating statements.
Source: The First-Call Offer: A Different Approach to Finding Off-Market Self-Storage Deals
