5 Rules of Thumb to Successfully Navigate Self-Storage – Management

The final rule of thumb is your management. You need to know how you are going to manage the property before you even buy it. So how are you going to manage the property? Are you going to do it yourself or are you going to hire someone to do it for you? If you are planning on building a portfolio of self-storage facilities, you need to be the person who manages the managers not the one taking care of the day to day operations of each self-storage facility.

Your time is better spent finding the next deal than it is being spent on something that you can pay someone to manage for you. When you manage the self-storage property yourself, you lock yourself into an hourly wage or an annual salary depending on your area. Is that all that you are worth? Your time is much more valuable than that.

More than likely, you are going to pay someone to manage the self-storage property, and this will affect your Net Operating Income. You can’t determine whether something is a great opportunity or not until you know the management portion.

You need to decide if you are going to hire an individual employee to manage your self-storage property or a property management company. You need to know how much the wages are for that type of employment in that area.

There are a lot of highly talented people on the market right now. There is no reason to hire someone who doesn’t have self-storage experience. Make sure that you are putting your self-storage facilities future in the hands of someone who will help you take the property to the next level.

Having said that you are going to hire someone does not excuse you from knowing how your self-storage business should be run. You need to understand the business well enough that you can manage your managers and do audits along the way to make sure that they are working efficiently and not taking advantage of you.

Having effective management is critical to your success and that it is why it is one of the 5 keys to being successful in self-storage. Over the next few weeks, we are going to discuss each of these 5 rules of thumb in detail so that you understand their importance and you feel comfortable and confident in applying them to your business. As always, happy investing.