We find ourselves in new territory in terms of running a self storage business in the age of COVID-19.
We’ve made some decisions on how to run our self storage business during this “lock-down” time due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
First of all, we do not have everything figured out, and we are making decisions daily. I will share with you where we are as I write this.
Essential Business
I have been telling you how great self storage is, and now you know. In most areas of the country, it is considered an “essential business.” I haven’t seen a state or county where it is not.
Not sure how that happened, but I am not complaining.
Like many of the self storage companies, we are promoting “touchless move-in” and touting our ability to have customers move in using our web site or kiosk we have at all our facilities.
We even have touchless keypad entry in some of our facilities where you hold your phone up and you can get in.
I am in the process of making some videos we can use on our websites that demonstrate what a “touchless move-in” looks like.
Hopefully, if you are in the business, you have been upgrading your facility with these tech features. If you have, now it is going to pay off.
Running The Facility
We decided to keep our retail counter and office closed to protect our managers. We have an exterior kiosk at every facility, and our managers can talk to and support any customer in a move-in or receive a payment through the kiosk door.
If an employee is concerned or does not want to work, they can stay home.
We designed a cleaning protocol for the kiosk, keypads, etc., that protects the employee and keeps the facility clean. Every employee knows how to follow it.
We are promoting “social distancing” at our facility for our customers. However, in reality, organic social distancing (I created that term…do you like it?) has almost always been the case in self storage. As you know, if we have four to five people in the facility at the same time, that is very busy.
In a three-acre site, the odds of two people being in their units next to each other are very slim. However, we are still promoting it.
Fees
We made the decision, effective when we made it, to turn off the late fees and lien fees.
I don’t think we have to, and I am not suggesting necessarily you do it, but we didn’t like the optics of charging fees during this time.
I would think that if someone challenged it at a later date, given all the federal, state, and local financial support given business owners, we would have to refund it. I am not clear on this, but it was a decision we made.
We are also not going to raise rents during this time.
We are not going to put any more units into auction during this time.
Again, I am not telling you this is what you should do; it was a decision we made based on the core values we created for our company. My understanding is you can continue to operate your business as normal.
We have been trying to over-communicate with our customers to (1) keep them present to us and let them know we are still operating (i.e., keep paying their bill too), support them during this crisis, and as a referral source for continued move-ins.
Here is a communication, for example, our operating team sent.
