It's the land/location increasing in value - not the home itself, in my personal experience and opinion

Now, I believe the right legal CYA move is to have one LLC for each individual property, but personally, I don't want to keep up with the bookkeeping on that! 

What happens if the property needs money and one of you doesn't have it?  

So you need to remember that there are about 4- 6 big box lenders that fund most of the Hard Money loans and then you have thousands of brokers selling their products and lots of times someone thinks they are dealing with a lender but they are not, they are dealing with a broker who has a lending sounding name and this broker is set up with an account at a few different lenders. 

On the other hand, there appears to be a lot of money looking for deals.

Thank you, it's good to hear from personal experience.

do You need money asap?

The idea that you can build wealth without putting any money into it is a recipe for disaster and the sales pitch of gurus trying to steal your money.

I put my self storage plans on hold for a while for personal reasons but I'm back at it looking for opportunities.

To finance the deal, I'm thinking of using hard money and heloc from 1 of my properties.