Self Storage- Bad Customers

[Henry Clark]

Follow up to a contact I had.  Asking hasn't it gotten worse and customers are more disrespectful.

From when we started 6 years ago with 35 units at one location, to now 7 operating locations and in 5 towns with 800 units; things haven't gotten worse; we changed. Yes we run into the people your talking about, but we have about the same number of issues when we were at 100 units as we are now at 800 units. When we go to do auctions we always start with about 25 accounts and by the time its auction time, we are usually around 5 units. Whether we were at 100 or 800 units. We changed our operations.

After I got burned and finally got tired of calls and excuses we took the following actions as I grew in my understanding:

a. Lock sooner. Used to wait till 3 weeks to lock. Now we lock out in 1 week. That way more "good" stuff is there and you have more leverage.
b. Moved more and more to Autopay. This takes out the lag time for Check is in the mail. Our new locations, we only do Autopay. Most of our bad customers in the past came through Cash payment. We now lock in 3 days for accounts on Autopay.
c. Auction faster. Used to let people get 2 to 3 months out. Now, start at 5 weeks.
d. Escalation. If customer is continuously late or a problem. Move to Autopay. If they won't or can't, then evict. If they won't move out, then we increase their rent significantly, and when they don't pay, move to auction.
e. We cut the lock sooner, to see if anything is in there. If the people are not responding.
f. We are always responsible. In questionable items, we always take the customers point. Whether, I forgot to tell you, I moved out and you charged me a month. We refund. My boyfriend was supposed to take over my lease and send in a new contract. As long as cleaned out, we will refund. Just not worth the internet hassle. "You got me" lets move on.

The key point above is to cycle through the bad customers. I say when your starting up a new location, you have to go through 3 customers to get to a good customer. As the good customers "stick" and you cycle through the bad customers, your overall customer base gets easier to deal with.

I avoided the question of has society gotten worse.  Which I'm sure every generation says the new generation is worse.  We probably hit the reset button whenever we hit a Great Depression or a World War, and then start to digress.  But, for our business we just weed out the bad customers as fast as possible.