Mastering Self-Storage Revenue Management: Pricing Strategy, Demand Trends & 52-Month Stay Secrets

In this episode of "No Vacancy," we dive into the intricate world of revenue management with Roland Minaya, Director of Revenue Management at Access Self Storage. Discover the art of balancing occupancy and revenue, as Roland shares insights on optimizing pricing strategies, managing stakeholder expectations, and maintaining customer loyalty.  This is jam packed with revenue nuggets!

We also dive into the extremely interesting topic of MLB's All-Star game and our take on how to improve it as well as a slight detour into our very first jobs, spoiler: one of us literally dug graves!?!?

Transcript

Speaker 4 (00:01)
We spoke about this yesterday. Did anybody else watch the All-Star game? Any... I did not. Any All-Star stuff?

Speaker 1 (00:04)
I did not.

Speaker 3 (00:09)
No, baseball.

Speaker 4 (00:12)
I was saying to Brian, it would be cool if they did like a skill competition like they do in the NFL. Like you have outfielders and you set up like a target where they have to throw to third. show the arm strength off. it's kind of where my thinking stopped, but I think there's a lot of, right? Cause they did it with the NFL and I think it was, it was great.

Speaker 1 (00:17)
Go ahead.

Speaker 2 (00:26)
you

Speaker 3 (00:34)
They brought it back. I mean it was gone from the NFL's Pro Bowl week for a

Speaker 1 (00:39)
That's true. It's the best part. I still watch the NBA. I like the NBA All-Star game. So I like the three-point contest and now that they've included the WNBA with the with all that but ⁓ yeah I like the NBA. Yeah they do some of the skills contest together. Yeah like a team type situation. I think you're going in the right direction though because it's just the home run derby and

Speaker 4 (00:40)
Did used to watch like the...

Do they do it together?

Nobody watches the All-Star. Who's watching the All-Star?

Speaker 1 (01:10)
No, not me.

Andrew Rockoff AI (01:14)
You're listening to No Vacancy.

Speaker 4 (01:18)
Roland Manaya, how are you, man? Good. Thank you for joining us.

Speaker 2 (01:20)
How are you? Thanks

for having me. This is awesome.

Speaker 4 (01:24)
Director of revenue management for access self storage. How long you been with access?

Speaker 2 (01:28)
Been with Axis

Speaker 4 (01:35)
Where were you before access professionally?

Speaker 2 (01:38)
Before Access, I was in the hotel industry, also revenue management in

New York City.

COVID came and kind of wiped that industry out for a bit. It was a big pause. So that's kind of how I transitioned here to self storage.

Came over to Access back in 2021, about that, and I've been here ever since. It's been pretty great.

Speaker 4 (01:57)
doing similar things

Speaker 2 (01:58)
Absolutely.

Revenue management in hotels, very fast-paced, high

but the principles are all the same.

So it's all about driving the dollar to the bank.

Speaker 4 (02:06)
How did you get into that originally? This line of work.

Speaker 2 (02:09)
It was by chance,

my background really started in accounting,

then moved over into operations just to get a little bit of exposure of front line and see how that all worked.

And somebody said, hey, you have a knack for numbers and pushing business, why don't you give this a shot? I looked into it, said, why not? And here we are.

Speaker 4 (02:28)
Nice, where are you from originally?

Speaker 2 (02:29)
Originally I'm a true New Yorker. Manhattan, upper Manhattan, Inwood Heights, 207 and Sherman all the way up there, Inwood Hill Park. P.S. No P.S. I went to private school.

Speaker 4 (02:31)
Okay, what burl?

Yes.

okay. All the way through.

Speaker 2 (02:43)
All

the way through Good Shepherd, went to Mount St. Michael's in the Bronx. In high school and in the middle of high school, we jumped over to Woodbridge, New Jersey.

Speaker 3 (02:53)
Nice.

Speaker 4 (02:55)
private school and would

Speaker 2 (02:56)
Woodbridge?

No. It's two years of high school. We're Woodbridge High. Much different environment. Thank you, sir. Right around the corner, right? Yeah. I love coming down here.

Speaker 3 (03:02)
Well, welcome home.

Andrew Rockoff (03:07)
No Vacancy is the self-storage podcast that pulls back the roll-up door on the industry's most outrageous stories, toughest challenges, and unexpected laughs. Hosted by the team at Access Self Storage, each episode brings together real operators, sharp marketers, and off-the-wall personalities to talk about what really goes on behind the gate code. From crazy tenant tales to hard-won lessons in customer service, it's real, unfiltered, and a little irreverent, just like life in storage.

Speaker 3 (03:39)
That was the wrong button. God damn it.

Speaker 2 (03:42)
you

Speaker 4 (03:43)
You can't tell me that was the wrong button if I'm dancing like this,

Speaker 1 (03:48)
How could it be wrong if it feels so right?

Speaker 4 (03:52)
How's your summer?

Speaker 2 (03:53)
Summer's good, flying by, Keeping my five-year-old entertained. That's all it is. It's a full-time job. It's three jobs in one. She is. She goes every day, comes home. I pick her up, what, about 5 o'clock? And she still has the energy of I don't know what and wants to keep running until all the way to 10. It's insane. It's craziness.

Speaker 4 (03:55)
What have you guys been up to? ⁓

Speaker 1 (03:57)
Thanks

Speaker 4 (04:02)
Is she in summer camp? is.

Speaker 1 (04:12)
No.

you could bottle that up and sell it. Oh my god. We would not need to be here.

Speaker 2 (04:19)
not be here at all.

Speaker 4 (04:20)
You got a summertime bedtime for that kid?

Speaker 2 (04:22)
We still keep it to the school year till about 8 o'clock, 8.30, just to give us some peace of mind. I shall go to 10, 12 o'clock.

Speaker 1 (04:29)
Yeah, like if not. My

son keeps playing that. He just turned eight. He keeps playing that game. He's like, but dad, it's summer. I don't have to have bedtime. And I'm like, yeah, but I need you to have a bedtime.

Speaker 3 (04:39)
Dude.

What time is he going to bed?

Speaker 1 (04:42)
We

try to start the process around 8.30. By the time he actually goes down, it's closer to 9.30. Most of the time he's a needy child.

Speaker 2 (04:49)
What

time is he getting up the next day? Busy in camp or anything?

Speaker 1 (04:53)
He did a

couple weeks of camp, but now he's home and just, yeah, he's waking up. I don't know, it's not, it's been better lately. He's sleeping in a little, so seven, eight, somewhere in there, which is great. The kid goes hard, like you said about your daughter, goes all day until he drops and then the good news is he will knock out for a solid 10, 11 hour night's sleep somehow.

Speaker 3 (05:20)
That's

awesome. What's that like?

Speaker 4 (05:23)
I have no idea what that's like. I mean, I have one that was up last night until one o'clock in the morning screaming at his computer.

We allowed that to happen. What was he playing? Elden? Elden Ring? I don't know, some new computer game. And he was just screaming at himself and really beating himself up until, you know, easily Seth Meyers was over. So we're once again, parents of the year, just letting the feral children run the house.

But the good thing about him staying up that late, he doesn't roll out of bed until like 10 30 or 11 o'clock in the morning. Cool. Yeah. Thank you.

Speaker 1 (05:59)
Yeah, that's the age I remember. What is it? He's like a preteen, right?

Speaker 4 (06:04)
Yeah, I think so.

He's been the preteen for like 12 years now.

Speaker 3 (06:07)
Laughter

Speaker 1 (06:09)
That is like a peak, you know, just stay up until 2 a.m. playing video games and sleep till noon age

Speaker 2 (06:15)
My five-year-old tries to pull that ⁓ it's Friday night. I can stay up till whenever right ⁓

Speaker 3 (06:21)
Scott of InSha.

Speaker 1 (06:24)
So we talked a little about your background in revenue management, how you started there, we talked about

you arriving at Access.

But for people that may be listening from outside the industry or maybe sort of new to self-storage

who

haven't really embraced good processes yet around revenue management. How would you explain revenue management and self-storage kind of in a few simple terms?

Speaker 2 (06:50)
Revenue management in any industry, it's all about selling the right product to the right customer at the right time at a price that they're willing to pay. And on your end, from the business angle, you're trying to maximize that price, right? So

in self storage, it's about high rate, low discount if possible. In other industries, it's

selling a product today versus tomorrow because of seasonality, whatever the case might be. So it's about pushing the dollar and getting as high of a rate as

Speaker 1 (07:18)
How would you say revenue management and storage differs from your experience in the hotel industry or what you see as a consumer, like for airlines or anywhere else where kind of pricing models like this are pretty prevalent?

Speaker 2 (07:33)
So revenue management in the self-storage space doesn't operate at the same cadence as some other industries, hotel, airlines. There, you're cranking every day, and every day that goes by and you haven't sold a unit or a seat or a hotel room, it's lost revenue.

It's really our target is at the end of the month. What are we pulling in for the month? We can't, while there is some sort of seasonality, there's so many other factors that affect that. It affects the inflow of move-ins and even

In the hotel space, you can pretty much...

tell time by what's happening in the market.

You're always working in the hotel space, you're working a year out. Here in Self Storage we're working today. We're trying to grab what we can today.

Speaker 1 (08:17)
for me, not knowing much about this beyond my experience in storage, I would imagine that the

existing customer factor is pretty different, right?

selling the units that are empty is probably very similar to, semi-similar to hotel rooms, right? You're looking, it's kind of transactional. There's like that first buy thing.

So how different is it having to consider the existing customers?

Speaker 2 (08:40)
Well, that's a great point.

You've got to keep the existing customers in mind because at the end of the day, when you put a rate out there and you're trying to attract new customers, you don't want to undermine the rate that's already

You want to keep the existing customers happy. You want to make sure that you're exhibiting to them that they have value and what they're paying is

And when you cut the rate too low, then you've got upset

tenants and you've got issues in operations.

Speaker 4 (09:06)
Is it challenging to manage up to owners and stockholders where they one day may want to see a certain occupancy and one day may want to see a certain dollar per square foot? Do their opinions change much and how do you deal with that?

Speaker 2 (09:25)
Everyone

their ideal in mind.

At the end of the day, it's our job, anyone in revenue management, it's their job to take the data, the information, and communicate that to the stakeholders and the owners and help them understand, listen, this is the path that we're on. This is what we're seeing out in the market. While I may or may not be able to wave my wand and make magic happen, these are the realities. Hopefully we can hit your targets. However, in cases where that's not the case, here are the reasons why.

we're not able to hit those price points or those occupancy numbers for whatever the case might be.

Speaker 1 (10:00)
the market's constantly evolving, right?

we can try to give that good five year, two year, or even one year projection at budget planning time every year, but we have no idea what can happen in February.

Speaker 2 (10:15)
Great point.

Right? Even three months down the road, you don't know what's happening in terms of

competition. You don't know what's happening in terms of the housing market. You don't know what's happening in terms of

anything around the area and the city that you may be in or whatever the case might be, right? There's a lot of external factors that play in.

Speaker 3 (10:30)
And with all these different

areas of revenue management that you constantly look at, seasonality or ECRIs and ⁓ vacant units, what tools do you use that kind of help

or assist with kind of working out the perfect prices for each of the unit types?

Speaker 2 (10:51)
Because we manage 33 facilities, it's all about efficiency of information and being able to get your hands around it

while it's happening and not being too late to the party.

Right now, so we use Self Storage Manager as our POS, and we've obviously exported a lot of reports and Excel data from there, but we're also connected via API to Veritech. So Veritech grabs all of the information out of SSM, pulls it over from a revenue management perspective, and just makes it a lot quicker

and much more efficient for us to see and keep our finger on the pulse, see what's happening, understand, okay, five by tens are doing this this week, five by tens are doing that last

It also pulls market data, provides market suggestions. Again, when you're using a system for pricing, their suggestions, their guides, you should not be using them as a black and white and all be all.

But because every facility is

And it's about really mastering the skill of data. So again, ⁓

using your POS, Excel, and any third-party system such as Veritech.

Andrew Rockoff (11:52)
Time for a short pause, but don't go far.

And now back to the show.

Speaker 4 (12:09)
What else does Veritek

as far as services and features that you take advantage of?

Speaker 2 (12:14)
It allows us to.

Set up outputs the way the individual would like to see them. Whoever is responsible for everything to management. Let's call it

and really see things at a quick click so I can

data for a particular site I can see vacancy. I can see occupancy. I can see the last rate the last occupied rate I can see how long it's been since the last unit moved in how long it's been since the last units moved out Obviously again based on what we've set up

For CompSet, it gives us pricing recommendations, again, just

So it gives us enough information to make quicker decisions versus having to formulate that ourselves every single time.

Speaker 4 (12:55)
That's a pretty effective tool for that many locations that must

help you on a daily basis immensely.

Speaker 1 (13:01)
Absolutely.

Speaker 2 (13:02)
Veritech is also the platform for dynamic pricing in terms of good, better, best.

within the system itself, you'll assign unit types as, you give them all a ranking. And based on the ranking, it gives you

the

variable pricing in order to push revenue.

Speaker 4 (13:20)
what makes one unit number one versus number 50.

Speaker 2 (13:25)
location, convenience, climate control, not climate control, first floor, second floor, inside, outside, drive up, not drive up. So any of those components are a benefit of someone will see value in one of those components at some point.

Speaker 1 (13:39)
It's good way to combat sort of the human nature of the self-storage manager, the frontline employee of just renting the one that's closest to the office first, right? Absolutely. Obviously, you're a rent-up facility, you're running strong promotions, probably have very customer-friendly rates, trying to build that occupancy up. Yeah, I think it's a great way to make sure that you're not filling those most desirable rooms at that lowest price.

Speaker 2 (14:03)
to sell. Right.

You said it perfectly.

an upcharge for X, and Z.

We are all willing to pay for convenience and that's kind of the the market that we're in today with with everything right? We'll pay to be able to charge a credit card versus going to the ATM and pulling cash. So someone will absolutely pay an extra five bucks a month to have to walk not walk down one less hallway in order to get to their stuff or even to drive up right? We all know that that's just an industry standard. If I've got a business, it's much easier for me to pull my truck to the to

to the roll-up door than it is for me to walk down a hallway or two. So we're trying to find our way through

Speaker 1 (14:43)
Time is money and it creates an efficiency in many ways for people. Absolutely.

Speaker 2 (14:48)
And there are some tenants that just aren't price sensitive at all. It doesn't matter. Give me the best, walk in, walk out, I'm done.

Speaker 1 (14:56)
Is it?

Speaker 3 (14:57)
Is that usually by market that you see that? Like

the people who aren't as price sensitive, just kind of whatever they want, they'll get it. Like some of our more affluent areas, do you see more of that there than you do

Speaker 2 (15:09)
That's, I'm gonna say that's probably hard to judge only because if you're putting dynamic pricing in play within these individual stores, within different markets, the price is still variable. Sure. Right. So

they're gonna take what they wanna take and once that unit is filled, the system automatically pushes the next unit up to the line. Sure. And there might be a variable price there.

Speaker 4 (15:34)
With existing customer rate increases or ECRIs, you've been to a number of these conferences, these self-storage conferences, every conference we hear from, we'll call them mom and pop owners or smaller owners, they always seem very resistant to existing customer rate increases because, well, it's my third cousin's brother-in-law's pastor who has that unit and I don't want to lose them. What would you say to an owner who is

shy or not aggressive at all or just wants to leave their rates as it is to try to convince them bump it up and they'll stay.

Speaker 2 (16:13)
I would first ask, is the entirety of the 300 units all the pastors at your brother's church? The answer is no, that's an exception. You can skip one. ECR is important in terms of pushing rate. As the market changes and things get more expensive, your street rate continues to go up.

And the tenant

align with that.

At Access, we have our own strategy.

owner facility needs to develop

what the appropriate strategy is for their location.

But we find that it works. It's a necessity. You've got to keep up with costs. Taxes are going up. Labor is going up. Electricity utilities are going up. How do we manage that if we're not increasing one street rate but also increasing the existing tenants, right? At Access, our churn on average is about 38 % a year. So if we're only going by street rate, we're probably going to wind up leaving a lot on the table.

Speaker 4 (17:08)
Yeah, that's a good point.

Speaker 1 (17:09)
My impression of revenue management with my background primarily being in

operations is

it's a constant balancing act between occupancy and revenue, right? And I feel like as managers, those are kind of the

top tier metrics that we're constantly looking at.

Do you have any secret sauce that you could share to try to help somebody who maybe is a new operator or doesn't have

a robust revenue management platform built out yet as

kind of just some top of mind,

high level thinking about how to do that successfully, how to balance revenue and occupancy?

Speaker 2 (17:49)
It's a question. think the old school way of thinking was it's all about occupancy. Fill it to the gills, 99.9 % and you're golden, you're good. However, managing that way, you're probably leaving a lot on the table, right? From my own practice and the way I operate, again, and this comes from my training in hotels, it's all about the dollar, it's all about revenue, keyword in revenue management.

It doesn't matter for me personally, it doesn't matter what the occupancy is. If I'm consistently growing the rent roll, consistently growing top line, that's where I want to be. So it's about managing your inventory, making sure you're attracting the right customer, the right customer profile, the

right tenant at the right time at the right rate.

Don't give away three, four months discount if you don't have to,

create some sort of consistent formula for yourself where you're sitting down whether it be once a week, once every other week, at a minimum once a month for the smaller

and look at your performance, look at your move-ins, look at your move-outs, look at the rates, look at what's happening to the rent and roll when these individuals move in and out, look at what you're discounting as a percentage of your total revenue, and look at your marketing strategy. That's really important. If you're not doing that consistently,

on a schedule, it becomes very, very difficult to wrap your hands around the data and really understand what's happening and understand what the seasonality of the data is telling you or the cadence,

What's happening mid-month might be much different, obviously, than what's happening at the beginning and end of the month. What's happening in March might be very different than what's happening in June. So you've got to sit down, devote the time, look at the information and...

try to find correlation between what's happening today and what happened last week. That's the key.

Speaker 3 (19:38)
You mentioned marketing in there and ⁓ you you and I ⁓

Speaker 1 (19:44)
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (19:44)
look

out here he comes.

Speaker 3 (19:46)
Well,

how do you you how do you manage like that relationship because essentially and you and I have spoken about this is that like, you know, marketing kind of helps bring the

to where we need them to be. And then at the end of the day, pricing is really kind of what closes them out or could be a contributing a big contributing factor to closing them out. So how do you

manage that

especially

a pain in the ass on the other end?

Speaker 1 (20:11)
What?

Speaker 2 (20:12)
Let's say.

it really depends on if you're a solo team or you've got a great partnership with a director of marketing such as yourself.

Working with someone that's responsible for marketing is imperative, right?

The responsibility of the person that handles your marketing, it's their job.

to get eyes on your facility, whatever that means, whether it's through promos, through social media,

having people land on the website, having individuals land on the appropriate page. It is revenue management's job to make the rate and or discount or combination of both attractive enough to close a deal.

The other component of marketing, well, in our organization, because marketing is responsible for the website, is making sure that we minimize the hurdles to closing the deal.

Minimize the number of pages they have to go through, minimize the amount of irrelevant information they may have to enter. We just need them to close the deal. So yes, we have to have

a very strong, tight relationship. It's one hand washes the other.

The two cannot operate in

Speaker 3 (21:12)
Yeah,

I agree. I think over the past,

six months, eight months, a year since we've been kind of working more and more together, I think it's been pretty awesome that we can kind of play off each other and be able to make sure that the right promotions are working for the right campaigns that we're running. And it all kind of

Speaker 2 (21:35)
Absolutely, it's been great and that's not to say you know the again the data is important,

Just like revenue management and marketing as well We need to look at you know, how many how many individuals are landing on the page? How many eyes are we getting on a social media post? Is it working? Is it not? It's not you're not always gonna hit it out of the park But you've got to understand where the data lies in order to know can I tweak this? Can I tweak that? How can we make it better or this really work? Let's continue to replicate it

Andrew Rockoff (22:03)
We'll be right back.

And we're

Andrew Rockoff (22:22)
So what's the typical night at the, what's the Thursday night look like at the Benaiah household? What do you guys do? It's pretty routine. You know, it's nothing exciting. Any shows that you'd recommend right now that you're watching? Yeah, right now I'm into white lotus. Uh, the wife and I have been watching them,

as we get to find a time

I'm on season three, think episode two. I hear it's terrific. I haven't seen an episode. It's pretty good, yeah. Really well done. We mentioned Kronkman there on episode three. They're using their music for episode three. I mean, I'm sorry, season three. Drama, comedy, both? Drama. Okay. Right, drama, I guess, or? Yeah, like a... Yeah, I would say a drama.

Nice. Who cooks dinner at home?

On me you wife's not cooking. Yeah, giving it up for Lenten. That's her thing It's dropping down the list. No, it's cool, though I worked in a restaurant business as a kid and kind of became a foodie So I kind of became attached to the process of cooking and you know, what was your first legit working paper job as a kid? Working paper job. Yeah like not paper. I worked at my

I worked at a family members dry cleaner. Then I delivered flowers. Then I worked at a gym as a towel guy. I guess some maintenance supporter, whatever you want to up towels, take out the garbage, fill up the soda machine, that kind of thing. Yeah. Actually the club at Woodbridge, Brian. nice. Nice. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Back in the day, right on rolling, walking around with towels. All right, Joe, go snap. Rat tail. Yeah.

I worked at Boston Market and I will say that the food is good and ⁓ clean. The place is clean. It's not like that chair in the corner of the hotel.

Yeah, Boston Market was my first job. The problem with that place was every night you would leave smelling of the chicken and you would have, was like ⁓ playing hockey. Like you would have to leave all your crap outside in the garage and for a week. Yeah. To air it out. What was your first job as a kid? ⁓ umpiring. I did that for like spring summer. Okay. Yeah. How often did you get chewed out?

It wasn't too bad. I got wasn't like it is now. got chewed out more for girls softball than I did for Little League. But yeah, it was fun. I always just like being around sports. Yeah. What about you, Brian? If if paperboy doesn't count, I think probably like camp counselor at a job where he did that for a while, like summer camp for younger kids.

plenty of restaurant stuff too. did, I worked at like a fine dining room of a well-to-do retirement community actually. residents who lived there and they had like, learned a lot and a lot of good food too. ⁓ Delivered pizzas after that. And then dug graves and cut grass. Worked at a cemetery for a couple of years. Sticking on that one.

It's less exciting than it sounds. It's probably equally as terrifying. does not sound exciting. is the last thing that I thought. ⁓ wow, look at Brian and his exciting grave digging. Standing up. pretty rough. Yeah, standing up at the bottom of a hole when you're in there the first time, that's pretty wild. I suspect every shift is the graveyard shift. ⁓ When you're working. it. There it is.

What a waste. So do they pay per hole? Are we still talking about

Yeah, we are. No, yeah, it was hourly. I think I made 10 bucks an hour back then. More cutting grass than digging graves, but yeah, both of those things.

you know,

Andrew Rockoff AI (26:19)
Time for a short break.

Andrew Rockoff AI (26:30)
And we're back.

Speaker 1 (26:31)
I think that's

interesting. The idea of essentially making sure that you're not over discounting, right? Giving away more than you need to. mean, we see it would probably be a kind of a surface level thought for easy to kind of consider like, oh, the competitor down the street is offering a dollar for two months. So I should be doing that too. But you're saying you can kind of monitor that discount per unit in and see, hey, if everything else is looking good, I can grow the rent.

here as well by not I don't have to not over discount

Speaker 2 (27:04)
Don't feel forced to do what everyone else does. Don't feel forced to do what you've always done. Try different things. Test, test. Even if it's for a week, two weeks, a month, two months, nothing's forever, pull back your discounts or apply additional discounts, whatever it is that you feel is appropriate. Days since last moving is a big one for me. If a unit type has gone stale at a particular facility, I might do a very limited promotion or pricing reduction

in order to see does the market exist for that unit type or it's just not there. If it's not there, then I'm not gonna spend too much time chasing this particular unit type. I'm gonna move on to all the other ones that are producing for me.

Speaker 1 (27:48)
That makes a lot of sense. Have you seen that happen where I imagine like store managers, especially myself in the past included, right? Like, like, man, just drop that rate and I can sell it. And I imagine that doesn't know that's not always the case. Like you said, there may not be demand no matter how low you go. Absolutely.

Speaker 2 (28:04)
I

have seen that you can drop a very small unit to $12 a month with 50 % off and nothing. Right.

Speaker 1 (28:11)
So if somebody just doesn't need it at that time, maybe you have a competitor who has just a ton of those and it's...

Speaker 2 (28:17)
That might also be a signal for the facility to start consolidating. How do we change or update our unit mix if necessary?

Speaker 4 (28:25)
Yeah, that's a great point. is. That's a great point.

Speaker 1 (28:28)
I think it's something

that probably gets overlooked because

it's kind of a heavy lift at times, right? To consider taking down a wall, putting up a wall, you know, you're like, all right, it was built this way, we're going to sell them. But if after a certain time period you see like, hey, I always have 20 vacant 10 by 10s at this property, there's nothing we can do. But I have no 10 by 20s available. ⁓

Speaker 2 (28:51)
That's it.

Speaker 4 (28:51)
Well, in

that case, it's a lot easier to take down the wall than put one up. I promise you that. So take that wall down and build that 10 by 20.

So you mentioned

occupancy percentage,

is not the main driver. ⁓ Podcast is called No Vacancy. In your opinion, what's the perfect

occupancy percentage?

Speaker 2 (29:10)
We're seeing that somewhere in the 90, 91, maybe 92 range works really well. That allows you to put pressure on pricing for a particular unit, especially if it's sold out,

or very close to sold out. You've only got one or two. Because at that point, you're assuming that one, it's a combined effort from both ends. For your existing tenants, your increases are probably gonna go up a little bit.

you're going to go from whatever your let's just use a loose number five, six percent. You might be able to start pushing seven, eight percent increase or more, whatever you determine is right for your strategy. And on the street rate side, you'll be able to increase your rate as well. So you're going to attack it from both ends at 92 percent. You also have one, hopefully one or two units available of each unit type where you can move people around. You can wheel and deal. You're offering

options to the ops staff in order to be able to do what they do best, which is so.

Speaker 4 (30:11)
Yeah, yeah, it's very important. You're absolutely right. People love options.

Accesses policy has been one rental increase after a full year of rent, right? So they do not, the customer would not receive a rental increase until a full year after they signed the agreement.

How does that work? Is that a good policy? And how do you manage that if that unit type is a very high occupancy?

Speaker 2 (30:46)
Our strategy historically has been rent increases every 12 months. That's the choice we've made. industry overall has chosen, well, puts out that.

Speaker 4 (30:53)
Yeah, let's talk about that.

Speaker 2 (31:00)
What seems to be normal is twice, a year or

seven and 11 months or something to that effect.

If that works for them and you're able to retain customers at the same time, then that's fine. Access self storage

cares about its tenants and its customers and the community. We place ourselves in a place where we want to be top of mind. We want to be the ones that are also sensitive to a

tenants situation condition and the fact that everything is more expensive these days. So we play more of the balancing act between optimizing a business or running a business really well with great revenues but still keeping our customers in mind.

Speaker 4 (31:41)
And

That strategy works well, works very well over time because of customer loyalty and the customer experience.

Speaker 2 (31:49)
It's all about customer loyalty. With as much competition as we have today, the Retour and every other block, especially where we are, right? We're in the New York City metro area.

We've got lot of compression in this in this area. We've got long time customers and there's a reason that they continue to stick with us and rent with us. And we've got customers that have been paying X Y Z rent which at times

higher

than what the market is

calling for today. Again because of the

the amount of supply that's in the market. So because we're not

hitting them with two rent increases every year. That's why they

They know they've got a good deal. They know we're taking care of them, and that's what matters.

Speaker 1 (32:28)
Does anybody remember what the most recent number is as to what our rough average length of stay is? And how that might compare to kind of what we hear from the reeds.

Speaker 3 (32:40)
I've had a number but I'm gonna roll and looks like he's got something.

Speaker 2 (32:44)
So right now, as of July 15th, our average LOS, length of stay, is about 50 months. That does take into account all of the 50.

Speaker 3 (32:57)
That 155050.

Speaker 1 (33:01)
Wow, that's...

Speaker 2 (33:02)
And that's averaging

down because of the rent up facilities, right?

Speaker 1 (33:06)
So that's

inclusive of brand new facilities. Yes. Hey, but that's a great number. mean, that's incredible. 50. So more than four months. Is our average length of stay. Incredible.

Speaker 3 (33:08)
I was way off.

Speaker 4 (33:19)
It's time for a

commercial!

Andrew Rockoff (33:21)
Access Self Storage is a family-owned company that's been helping people since 1976. Founded by Foy and Ken Cooley, Access built the first self-storage facility in the greater New York, New Jersey metro area.

Founder Foy Cooley, a recognized industry leader, has served as president of both national and state self-storage associations and is an inductee in the Self Storage Hall of Fame.

Andrew Rockoff (33:44)
And now back to the show.

Speaker 3 (33:46)
so in terms

like the wreaths and our competitors

jacking up prices every I don't know four months five months

We have been, from a marketing standpoint, we keep an eye on reviews. So we also keep an eye on reviews of our competitors. And we're seeing a lot more than we have before of tenants complaining about these rent increases that are happening because you have people coming in at a very discounted rate, sometimes 40,

It is not being made clear that on their website that's like a special or one of our concessions to move in. And then they're seeing these rate increases and it's...

I hate using the term bait and switch, but it comes out kind of looking like that. Whereas I think with what you were saying before, where we have this one year rate guarantee, it really shows that, you know, we're not looking to take advantage of the tenants. We're looking to

help them when they need it, where they need it, and still be somewhat affordable, especially in today's world where, like you said, everything is so expensive.

Speaker 4 (34:55)
You're doing much more than that. mean for a 50 month relationship, you're really cultivating a back and forth and experience like what other kind of business has a four year, two month relationship with someone? Where you see them every month and they pay you every single month. Yeah. There you go.

Speaker 1 (35:15)
Netflix.

Speaker 2 (35:19)
but

they don't see me.

Speaker 1 (35:21)
Yes, my good It's funny. I've actually I've said it a few times in the past, but I kind of think of self storage in the the advent of Everything feeling like a subscription service you can I get razors mailed to my house on a subscription basis each month, right? Like Self storage is kind of the the og subscription service, you know We're always on month-to-month rentals and I think

customers are just really comfortable with that pricing model. However

I think that it makes a lot of sense to be, like Andrew alluded to, be transparent, be upfront from the beginning, let customers know when they're coming in what to expect.

I think that probably contributes greatly to a long-term relationship is, ⁓ you know, them knowing from day one, this is what your promotional rate is. This first month, these first two months will be built at this. Month three and forward will be built at this. And after 12 months or around 12 months, you can expect an increase to the tune of about this percent.

Some customers don't care. Some customers will never ask that. But ⁓ I think for the select group of customers who

are trying to plan ahead and be aware and know what to expect. Just transparency

does a lot to have them feel comfortable with us being an honest provider of the service that they need.

Speaker 2 (36:40)
To your point, right, no one likes surprises, right? The busier we get, the further we get in our careers, the further we get in life, parents that take care of whatever the case might be, we wanna be able to plan. We don't want surprises. We don't want all of a sudden ⁓ figure out that, my gosh, my rent is going up three X and I can't afford that and now I have to go and move a 10 by 20 out of the unit on a weekend where I just don't have the time. There's a lot of value in being able to project health.

running smoothly. No surprises and that's what customers want. Now the customers that do go to the REITs at 30 whatever the number is at a very low rate,

they're either they're price sensitive or they're just there short term but then you've got to ask yourself are the short-term customers the ones that your particular property needs or wants?

You can't market to everyone,

got to determine what your strategy is. What is the customer profile that you're going after and go with that.

Speaker 3 (37:42)
I think

when people are looking for storage, don't think anybody intends to be there for four and a half years. I think it's like, yeah, I'll be here for six months, something like that. then one way or another kind of turned into that longer tenant.

Speaker 1 (37:50)
Two months.

think it's a good

opportunity to kind of earn it as the business, okay, if a customer comes in with the expectation of 90 days, but in that 90 days, you can win them over by showing that we're here to build a relationship as opposed to being a transactional quick fix for a short-term problem. ⁓ I think customers are maybe more inclined to stick with us.

Andrew Rockoff (38:21)
We'll be right back.

And we're back.

Andrew Rockoff (38:34)
Roland.

You're our first guest on the podcast. Thank you for doing that. really appreciate it. it. This is a pretty cool setup here. Great. Awesome. It's been fun. ⁓ Obviously appreciate your patience with us working out our kinks.

But

we want to give a try

a quick lightning round. So some rapid fire questions, quick answer, top of mind, ⁓ whatever you think. All right. Ready? We should play some background music.

All right, ready? Data guy.

Favorite Excel function. Index match. Okay. It's like VLOOKUP on steroids. You can do searches based on multiple criteria. Yada yada yada. Yes, I'm an Excel geek. Thank you very much. Love it.

I've learned a lot. Where'd you get your Excel knowledge? Honestly, it was working in hotels. So I initially started, I worked in accounting, so I had really high level understanding of Excel,

Then I took an analyst job as I started in revenue management and

in high volume environments, data is everything and you need to react immediately. You don't have the time to be clicking and keying and so you've got to be able to figure out how it all works and make it move fast. say it again. What was it called? Clicking and keying? No, no, no. The function. Index match. Index match. I'm going to Google that because it's index match. Sounds intimidating. Can I throw a question in here? What's one tip you have for anybody staying in a hotel? Oh, great question.

You've once told me don't use the coffee maker. Don't sleep in the bed. ⁓ He's told me that sleep in the tub, sleep in the tub. Chris, I don't want to destroy an industry. don't use the coffee machine and probably rip the comforter off the bed. All right. Great. I'll leave it at that.

One thing you wish more operators understood about self-storage pricing. It's not set it and forget it. You must review constantly. You've got to develop a process.

Consistency beats complexity every time and because you've someone feels that a unit is worth X doesn't mean that the market feels the same. So you've really got to meet the market where it is and then manage it from there. Fact over feelings. Okay, off topic coffee, tea or energy drinks during pricing reviews.

Energy drink. Shout out a brand so we can get a sponsor. Celsius orange. Let's go.

I like the orange Celsius. I don't necessarily like the blue raspberry lemonade. I don't like all that other nonsense. The orange is the way to go. Celsius. I don't know if I've had one of these before. Does it really give you a... does. Yeah. it's a nice... it's a little drip. It drips on you. It's a nice build up to the energy level you want to get to without a weird crash and stuff, I feel like, What do you got in that cup right there? Coffee, because I had my Celsius on the way here in the car.

All right, so you're I got ⁓ a little bit ⁓ smaller of a caffeine regimen than you do. My regimen is usually like iced coffee in the morning because ⁓

warm. There's a whole lot of country here, so it's got to be iced coffee and then like an energy drink, whether it be Celsius or Monster at one o'clock and then on the ride home just to take the edge off little little fountain diet Coke just to get you just to get me in the right mindset for home. What's yours? got you ⁓ coffee in the morning. Probably half a cup. Celsius only what I need to grind. If I've got nothing going on, I try to say off of it.

calories and whatnot, not even calories, but the stuff. definitely coffee, one cup of coffee a day and I keep it, go from there. Ice water definitely helps. So if we see you with a Celsius at work, is that a good day for Roland or is it a stay the hell away from Roland? no, I'm focused on something. Try to get it when you need to grind. Let's turn up the heat. This is great.

background music while working. Yes or no?

Most of the time, yes. No vocals. No vocals. So what's the instrumental you're going with? It could be anything. It's smooth jazz. It could be jazz. could be black coffee. could be classical. It could be whatever I feel in the moment. Nice. I'm all over the place. That's a good idea, though. Jazz fusion. I like the... Thai funk. Excuse me? That's a thing. Thai funk. What is that?

Ties in Thailand? Ties in Thailand, old school 70 sounds. Krungbin, if you've ever heard of them. They're awesome. Big fan of Krungbin. Love them. K-H-R-U-N-G-B-A. Don't try to spell it. OK. No, I said that. They're from Texas, I believe. Yes, Texas. Great. Yeah. Big fan. Awesome. First concert. You don't want to hear this. Yes, we do. We'll share. Initiation, right? Circa 1996.

Boyz II Men, Atlantic City. Hey, hey. That's the second time in two episodes that Boyz II Men has made an appearance, think. Yeah. Ex-girlfriend.

Got tickets through Dad and whatever we were there. So it was cool. That's great. I just saw boys to men last summer. No way. Only the three of them. Yeah. It was incredible. They were at a festival. They only had about 45 minutes to an hour. It was the best part of the festival. Yeah. They played everybody under the table. They're doing that thing. And I mean, they were playing at two o'clock in the afternoon. But they kicked ass. Yeah, they're good. They're awesome. Brings you back.

Does anybody feel like they're turning into their parents? Yeah. Yeah. Like I'm really, am that insurance commercial. that's right. The all is it progressive state progressive. Okay. Maybe like I feel when I'm having conversations, liberty mutual. No, that's Lima email. Yeah. Liberty, Bibbity. That's the Bibbity. ⁓ not a sponsor also, but we would take them to, ⁓

Feel like when I'm talking to my wife or my children that I'm just my father and I love my father but also Maybe not yeah. Yeah, like

You guys are also dealing with this either turning into your mom or your dad or you just hearing Yeah, you say the things that they would say you hear anything. Let me tell you what I would do. Yeah Yeah, yeah any any type of ⁓ tips or tricks to get away from that or now? How are we all processing that just accept it? Yeah, I Comes with age I guess I guess

Better than the alternative. That's true.

Getting old is weird. It is weird. Like probably once a week, it's like a real cold hard slap from reality. And you're like, why does that hurt? Oh, it just does now. Snap, crackle, pop. Once a week, getting out of bed every morning. I do remember as a child, I would hear someone break their ankle.

And you would say, well, how did you do that? What kind of horrible accident? And they would say, I stepped off the curb. And I would think, wait, that's not how the body works. know, 10-year-old kid. And now that I'm in my mid-40s, I think to myself, I'm going to trip on the sidewalk and die. Sneeze and break a toe. Yeah, I know. I know now how my hip is going to break. And it's going to be just getting out of the car.

had an injury recently, like I pinched a nerve or something in a shoulder. You are falling apart. I was closing the window. I was just closing the window. And I was like, ⁓ what just happened? God. You blink too fast. Yeah, you blink too The sneeze, throw, slip a disc. It's crazy. Yeah, fun

thank you again, Roland, for joining us today. It's been a great conversation. think tons of great information for people who are

looking to learn and or who have experience and might want to look at things through a different

Do you have any final thoughts, any advice for operators trying to be a bit more intentional with their strategy?

Absolutely.

Strategies don't happen by accident. Have one.

Make sure you have clean data, recurring price reviews. You've got to collaborate across departments. ⁓ Operations marketing needs to know what revenue management's intention is in order to make sure that everyone is aligned.

Get into a rhythm. Again, you've gotta look at the data, you've gotta look at what your stores are doing once a week, once every other week, at a minimum once a month for some of those stores which may not move as quickly. But you've gotta do something. You can't look at this stuff sporadically. You've gotta identify trends. And you've gotta stay on top of it. It's part of growing a business. if anyone has any questions or wants to reach out, please hit me up. I'm on LinkedIn. You can email us directly through the website. I'm always here. Glad to talk.

Thanks for having me. Thanks Matt. Thanks Roland. Really appreciate it.

Speaker 2 (48:05)
Thanks

for listening to No Vacancy. If you liked what you heard, our episodes are available wherever you stream your podcasts.