Self storage remote management

[John Brennan]

Now that I’m sold on the idea of acquiring and remotely managing a small to moderate sized self storage facility, I’m going to be posting questions that have been sitting in my sub conscious and preventing me from getting started. The biggest fear is what I don’t know about actually managing. There are great educational resources I’ve found from Michael Wagner and Scott Myers but nothing about the real details of how toremotely manage a property. Any recommendations on where someone can learn about it?

Thanks 

[Lance Langenhoven]

Hi John,

The rents are not quite the same but have you thought of boat & rv storage? It's much easier to manage remotely. I have one & we don't have anybody on-site. We have 99 tenants and my commercial brokerage assistant handles everything part-time for that business as well. 

Tenants have access through key-pad access. If new prospects want to look at a space she simply give them a guest code over the phone. If they like the look of the space they want, they call my brokerage assistant back & she asks them to text over their driver's license. Once she has that she sends them a lease agreement via DocuSign. Once they've clicked through that and added in their credit card details they get added to the management system (SiteLink) and she calls them back with their personal gate access code. Done. 

The yard maintenance guy has his frequency set up & simply uses his own gate access code to come & go. 

The dumpster company has their own gate access code to come & go. 

There's really not much else to do. 

I don't think her & myself combined spend more than an hour a week on that business.