Self-Storage Investments with the One and Only Kris Bennett

Foreign. Hello. Ginny Bowling here with Pivot to Prosperity, brought to you by Pivotal Real Estate Investments, where we help our investors build wealth and income through commercial real estate that also improves communities. And today we have Chris Bennett, very special guest here and I thank you very much for coming on.

Chris, thanks she appreciate it.

I'm going to read your bio and then you can tell me what it doesn't say.

Okay.

Chris brings 14 years of real estate experience to passiveinvesting.com spanning self storage and residential investment and brokerage, his previous firm. In his previous firm, his responsibilities included raising capital, securing deals and leading due diligence. He's advised third party groups on portfolio acquisitions totaling over 50 million in value. He is a trusted voice in the self storage space with his podcast, the Storage Investor Show. Chris has presented on the topic of technology and self storage at the North Carolina Self Storage Association's annual conference. He's also been a guest speaker and executive MBA in undergraduate classes at UNC's Kennan. Is that how you say Kennan?

Yeah. Kenan Flagler. Yeah. Kenan Flagler Business School.

Right. That's great. That's really important to get into the schools. Chris is a graduate of UNC Chapel Hill and Kenan Flagler Business School where he served as a fund manager at the school's private equity real estate fund. That must have been really. Do you still serve there?

Yeah, I go back at least once or twice a year. I was just there a couple months ago. We do a case study on one of the properties that we purchased, one of the self storage facilities that we purchased because we purchased it from another grad. So it's kind of funny. He and I both live in Charlotte. He had it for sale, I bought it from him and coincidentally it came through LinkedIn, believe it or not. So that's how I discovered he was selling it. And so we connected. And so we go back. I go back at least every year. I've been back a number of times. And then they actually just opened up an executive MBA program here in Charlotte. So I went and spoke at that as well. So it's a lot of fun staying connected with the school.

Well, that's great. That's great. And so tell us how you ended up getting into self storage then.

By accident. Believe it or not. I don't think most people go to school or whatever when they look at real estate. They think single family homes. And it's a natural progression to go to multi family and kind of stick, kind of stay in those two lanes. But then so that's kind of what I did after school. I worked for a company up in Raleigh, North Carolina. I live in Charlotte. We were doing multi family acquisitions. To make a long story short, tough to find deals that made numbers work and, you know, figure that whole thing out. So the guys I worked for, they had a couple of small self storage facilities. And we had a meeting with some brokers one day to help raise capital for us and we told them about Self Storage. One of the partners told about Self, told them about what we're doing in Self Storage. They really liked it and said, hey, if you have any opportunity, let us know. We'd love to invest. And so we had a conversation after that and said, why don't we do something in storage? Because nobody cares about what we're doing in multifamily. There's too many buyers. It's just. It's so hard and competitive. And so we pivoted to Self Storage and started a fund. And that's how I learned about it. So it was all by accident, really. It didn't really set out to do it because multifamily is like, cool, you know, and whatever office was cool back then, at least as of the time of this recording. Office isn't quite as cool right now, but it was back then, you know, so it really fell into my lap by accident. Even before that, I did residential 2007 and eight, nine doing foreclosure work. And as you and I talked about prior to the recording, you had PTSD from the savings loan crisis. I had PTSD from the foreclosure stuff I was doing. I was literally doing evictions with the sheriff's deputy showing up to houses. I was single, no kids, no wife. At the time, I didn't fully understand even what was happening. I just knew the bank was taking over the home and we're going to relist it for sale. I literally just was doing a job and looking back, it was that. That was my first real taste of real estate and I actually hated it after a little while. So I went to school to actually do something not real estate related. I wanted nothing to do with real estate. And it was ironic that the only job I could find my first summer there was actually at a real estate private equity firm there in Chapel Hills. So kind of everything kind of comes full circle sometimes.

Now, private equity makes it a little special, though, because that's a little more. It's kind of mysterious, it's fancy.

It's fancy to say it that way, right? We do syndications raise a fund. But if you say, oh, I'm in private equity, that sounds very sophisticated and in fancy pants. But really all it is, you're raising money, you're putting all a bunch of people's money in a bucket and going to use that money to go out and buy a property and obviously give the investors distributions and all that stuff. That, that's the, that's the, that's the redneck way of saying it.

So I like to say it's a joint venture on steroids.

Yeah, there you go. Basically. Yeah, basically.

Yeah, yeah. A lot of paperwork, right?

Yes. A lot of questions too. When things don't go well, you have a lot of like we have right now with interest rates and all that and floating rate loans that are being, you know, close to the 10% rate and all that stuff, it's really tough. So when you stop distributions and investors are really upset about that, you got to answer 57 questions, usually the same question from 57 different investors about, you know, what's going on and all that kind of stuff. So that's been, that's been fun. But yeah, we could talk about that.

Yeah, I guess we should talk about the market some. So you walked right into that. But that would be, that would be from your perspective. And let me preface that you sit with a large private equity. Would you say boutique? Not.

Well, yeah, yeah. I forgot how many employees there are. I'm siloed. So I don't do anything with. I don't have any responsibility at the company head decision making level if you think of it that way. So I oversee our storage team. Myself and a co partner, John, we oversee the storage arm of passive investing. So as far as personnel, hiring, firing, you know, whatever overall strategy, etc. We don't have anything to do with that. We offer input but we don't have anything to do with the overall direction of everything. But yeah, I would say probably more boutique compared to some other larger syndicating private equity type multifamily groups out there because there's some very large ones out there.

And so are you building new and doing value add or what? What's your market?

Yeah, no, we're doing mostly value add stuff. So if we find a storage deal, we haven't done any ground up like pure ground up development where you just have land, you get that entitled and then build through the we. So yeah, we do no ground up development, we're just doing value add. So we'll look for a facility that needs to be improved and the improvements in storage, just so the audience kind of understands. So storage is the stuff that you drive by where you see the roll up doors, like extra space, public storage, et cetera. I' There's a number of audience folks who've actually utilized self storage or maybe when they're moving from one home to another or apartment to home or whatever. But that's what it is. It's just a garage. If you think of it that way. 10x10 is the most common size. So 10ft by 10ft, so 100 square feet of space. You can almost like tape that out on your floor and see what that looks like. That might rent for like 100 bucks a month or something like that, which isn't a lot, you know, as far as just $100 at least not a lot in today's dollars. But if you take that times 400 units and you're close to 100% occupied, you know, it's pretty good cash flow. There isn't much to do there. If you think of multifamily, you think of a value add play. In multifamily you're going to go in and replace carpets, replace appliances, paint, of course, maybe redo the layouts of some of the units. You might add a playground, a basketball court, a volleyball court. You would do a big heavy lift value add. Whereas in storage a value add might be, hey, we, we implanted a. We implemented a computer system to actually rent units online. We got a website so that customers can rent from us online again when we are going to do a value added the facility, it's like painting the facility, repaving or resealing the drive aisles, adding security cameras or more cameras, improving the process, the rental process. So really value add in storage, I think of it as everything that in essence makes just. It makes the rental process a little easier and is more of a. Has more upside or I guess more utility for the owner than it really does the. The tenant. Other than being able to pay their bills online because there's no finishes that you're like going to look at and touch and put your groceries down on, right. Multifamily countertops and what it looks like and all that. When you come in, you feel good. Storage literally ever. I've visited so many facilities. The secret shop and tour. You roll the door up, you look at the floor and you say, yep, it's storage. Like there's nothing to look at. Right. You roll the door back down and you walk back to the office. That's it. Yeah, like that's it. Just make sure there's some chicken wire up there so people can't crawl from one to the other and steal stuff. But which does happen as well. But yeah, in storage, the value add is mostly benefiting the owner as far as utility is concerned. So that's what we try to do is find facilities like that. Maybe there's an expansion. So we are doing some expansions where you find some. Maybe it's on four acres and there's only 20,000 square feet. Some call it plus or minus two to 300 units or so. Well, you can almost double the size of the facility or at least 1 1/2 times it. Right. And so you can add more units if there's enough demand in the market then that would be like another way of doing a value add where you build a couple more buildings and call it a day. So yeah, so those are the kind of the two options. We are doing some expansions right now at two locations. We've completed another two expansions at two other locations, but we weren't doing any pure ground up development. So that was a long answer to your short question. But that's what we're focused on right now.

That's, that's great. And so is there any one particular brand that you're finding that you're buying a lot of?

No, it doesn't, it doesn't work as much that way. Just so the audience understands, it's hard, really hard to create a brand in self storage. So there's like call it, the statistics vary, but there's 50 to 60,000 facilities in the U.S. and I heard a stat somewhere that's more than like the Starbucks and whatever else is combined. It's more square footage than all of those places combined in the U.S. so there's a massive amount of self storage. The main players. If you think, and you're driving now, maybe you'll notice it now when you're driving you see a public storage, an extra space, a cube, smart live storage. And there's a few other brands out there, but those are the big, big four. And so you see those. But people, when they drive around, they look for storage, they don't really like care as much about the brand name. Whereas if you're going to a restaurant or maybe buying clothes or whatever else, the brand might mean something to some people. In some cases, if you use storage in the past and you went to public storage, you had a good experience, you might look for another public storage in your area to use them again. Right. But in reality it doesn't really work that way. So we'll look for anything. It can be called, you know, Jim's pack and stack. It doesn't matter because again, the 10x10 is still the same. It's still a metal roll up door. It might be a different color, but the square footage you get is the same. It's, it's, it's a commodity in that sense and it's really hard to build a brand. So we'll just look for any facility that fits that criteria. As far as being in the right markets. That, that is important. Your market's important. The size of the facility. Because we won't really do anything under 4 million, $5 million. Because it's not really worth the time or the effort to go for that because it costs the same amount of time. It takes the same amount of time and effort to close 100 units as it does 500 units. So we aim for the larger facilities if we can. We do own one. The first one we did is a smaller one that we expanded, but we do. And then there's one other smaller one we did that we expanded. But besides that we try to aim for larger facilities.

Gotcha. And so when you're looking at that, you're looking at saturation levels in the market probably.

Yeah, yeah, right, yeah, that's important. I think sometimes we focus. We'll look at both supply and demand. It's really easy to get the supply numbers. There's data for that. You can kind of do a back of the envelope calculation if you'd like to, which won't be quite as accurate of course, but there is data you can purchase that we use. We use a company called Yardi Matrix. There's a few others out there. Radius plus. That's really easy. Low barrier to entry. And then there's another one, store track. But we use Yardi Matrix. That has pretty good data. So we can see the supply. And usually they say like in the U.S. roughly there are, there is six square feet per person. So every man, woman and child. In the US there's about 6 square feet of supply, enough for every person to utilize that much space. That's an interesting statistic, but it doesn't tell me about the demand. And the demand could be different in each market and the supply could be different, could be lower, could be higher. So you have to kind of look at both and it's hard to gauge demand. So we have to do that kind of the old fashioned way. We make phone calls. You stop by the facilities, the competitive competitors nearby. And you secret shop them or just tell them, hey, I'm doing some data market research. And you ask certain questions to see could kind of get a gauge or a feel of how busy they are, how much there's demand, how much demand is at their facility. And you put that data together, you kind of give you a bigger picture on what you're looking at in the market. So just because a, a market says let's just use that average statistic of 6 square feet per person. If I'm looking at a particular deal in a market and it says there's a 10 square feet per person and that's within like a three to five mile radius, let's say there's 10 square feet per person. Somebody might say, oh my gosh, this is oversupplied. No, not necessarily. You can start calling and checking and finding out and seeing what's going on in that market at the comps. And you come to find out that they're all full and there's a lot of people moving into that market. There's more apartments being developed, et cetera. So there's more demand for storage in that market. The rates are all fairly high. So you can see, okay, it doesn't matter if there's 6, if there's 10 here, sure it's above the 6 for the national average. But the demand is showing me that obviously rates are high enough to sustain that supply of self storage and that you're going to be comfortable buying in that market, helps you be comfortable buying in that market. So that's generally how we look at it. You can have markets where the square feet per person is lower than 6, but there isn't quite the demand there that you'd want to, that you'd want to see. So you have to kind of take it on a case by case basis.

So do you look at commercial users in that 3 whatever mile radius to see that are heavy users?

Yeah. Well, so it's interesting, the national stats say that roughly 25% of storage utilization is by commercial. So businesses, maybe hospitals, lawyers, sometimes they need to store paperwork. Pharmaceutical companies, their reps need to have places to store their product. I've seen medical office device companies utilize space, printing companies like there's all kinds of different companies out there. But we did a study on our entire portfolio. I forgot the exact number if there was like 6,000 tenants. And we map them all so you can go on Google Maps and you can put in addresses and it will map everything. So it's very, it's cheap, easy, to do. I actually made a webinar video about doing this very thing. So if people are curious about that, you can check that out. But anyway, so we mapped all of our facilities and all the tenants and the businesses, the apartments and the homes. And what we discovered is that only one location had roughly 10% of business utilization. And all the other locations had about, call it anywhere from 2 to 5% of the tenants were actual businesses. And that includes like legit commercial businesses and then businesses maybe under an LLC that's run out of someone's home or whatever. So actual business users was way less than 10%. So that led us to believe. Okay. And then also in the industry, it's common to use a three mile radius. You can think of storage use as kind of like the grocery store. Usually you use the facility that's close to where you live or where you work, or, excuse me, you go to the store near where you live or where you work. That's very common. It's kind of the same with storage. You want to go to the one that's convenient to where you're going to be, you know, when you need to get your stuff. So they'll look at the three mile. But what we discovered is that roughly call it 80% plus or minus of our tenants were coming from within definitely three miles, but also out to five miles. And so for us, when we look at a facility, the three is important, the one mile is important. That's all. We look at everything. You put it all together for a big picture. But I want to see the five mile, you know, around a facility, in the competition, within a five mile, not just the three mile. Because I know that those people outside of that, in that four to five mile radius, they're going to have other options to go to that people within the three mile may not have or may not choose to go to. So the 5 mile is much more important. And then you'll get some users that are random. Like we had some guy in France using one of our locations, People in California, we're in North Carolina, South Carolina, Colorado, in Indianapolis. And it's like some guy in California, somebody in Alaska, somebody in Hawaii, like you think, okay, I guess they travel here. They might have family nearby, maybe they're moving. I don't know what the story is, but for whatever reason, you know, they're renting from us. So yeah, that's, that's how we look at it.

That's great. And then as far as your locations are, are you more suburban then I would, I Would have thought that. Yeah, it would have been tighter if it was urban, so.

No, mostly suburban. Yeah. So if you think of it, we're in some pretty dense areas, but it's going to be like Charlotte, for example, we're in Gastonia and then Mooresville, which is just north of Charlotte, and Mint Hill, which if you look on the map, Mint Hill, you can't distinguish that from Charlotte whatsoever. But it's like in the southeast kind of corridor of Charlotte from downtown. So it's pretty densely populated there as well. So we're not like in Main and Main. If you're at Main and Main, you might see a little bit of a different, you know, three to five mile usage there. But generally speaking, if you're going further out than that in a suburban market, secondary market, whatever your, I, I can almost guarantee your users are going to be coming from within a 80% will come from within that 5 mile. Unless of course, there's like a natural barrier. There's maybe a forest nearby or river or whatever. Obviously nobody's coming from there, but yeah, that's, that's how we look at it.

Very interesting. All right. And so do you have people storing things that are dangerous, even though you probably don't?

No, we have rules. Yeah, we have rules against that. We don't want food stored because it's obviously rodents. We don't want chemicals, etc, gasoline, you know, that kind of stuff. You can't control what everybody puts in there. But we have in our lease paperwork you have like your, what you can and can't put in there. Just like when you go and you fly. The TSA says none of these things. Same idea. So we say none of these things. And then we do require tenant insurance so they don't have to buy it from us if they do. It's nice. It's great. Helps us. We do have a split with the tenant insurance company, so we do get a little bit of revenue. It's a couple bucks, $9, $10, something like that. So it's not going to move the needle very much. But it helps. However, they can use their homeowner's insurance if they send us a copy. I forgot the name of the page, but they send us a copy of the homeowner's insurance and as long as they have that coverage on there, then they can utilize that. So it is actually very important. I always see emails. Actually I'm looking into email over here. I'm not looking at it now, but I get an email from these news things like storage News publications. And I always see one in there where a fire destroyed 60 something units or something happened at another facility and you know, it went up in smokes or something got flooded and people's stuff got ruined. So it happens. And so it's actually important to have some sort of insurance to protect your. Your stuff.

So. Yeah, I'm sure you get all kinds of interesting things, especially if you have to auction off.

Yeah, yeah, it's different. Yeah, it's different. So you don't have to. Yeah, that shows fake, by the way. I mean, you know, when you're selling stuff, it's. We're in the ebay. We, we got accustomed to ebay years ago. Right. So you. That's how it is. The auctions work that way where if somebody hasn't paid, it's different than multifamily. So if someone hasn't paid in multifamily, you evict them. You go through the court process. And then sometimes, you know, in certain municipalities you can't evict people. We saw that during the pandemic. And you're kind of stuck with having to make the payments. Hopefully that doesn't happen like that again. But everybody gets the point that it's sometimes tough to evict people, depending on the city, state, et cetera. In storage, it's just stuff. It's not people. So every state has its different, like lien laws is what we operate under. So usually you have like rent's due on the first, late, by the sixth, you have a little late fee there, and then by the 15th, you might have. You get overlocked on the 6th, which means that the hasp, the little latch has two places. One for your lock, the customer lock, and one for the manager, the owner's lock. So if you get overlocked, you can't get in until you make your payment. Then they take that lock off and now you can get into your unit and then if you don't pay, continue from there, you don't pay. Then you go through the auction process and roll the door up. We cut the lock off, roll the door up, take pictures and video, put that online, and literally you can go to storage auctions.com, lockerfox. There's a bunch of them out there that do auctions for storage owners. And you just bid on stuff just like ebay. You're literally bidding on units. And that's how it works. And so you have a couple days to go pick up the stuff. And if you don't, then you. I Think you forfeit. Whatever. I can't remember exactly how it works, but the point is that people do that a lot. And you can try to resell some of that stuff, but that's how the auctions work. And so it's not quite an emotional. Like I said before, I was doing the foreclosure work in 2008, nine and all that. And that's a little. I remember seeing kids toys on the floor and just, you know, even then I felt bad, but I didn't know fully understand what was happening, and I would hate to do that kind of work today. So it's just stuff. Most of the time, people just have junk. I remember there's one unit that we have we can't require. I mean, we require that people put a lock on their door. We can't make them put a lock on the unit. So this one never has a lock on it. So I would, you know, I'm just going to see what's in here. I rolled the door up, and it was just a washer and a dryer. It's just sitting in there. And by the time that they make their monthly payments, they could have just literally thrown the washer and dryer, take it to the dump, you know, whatever. It doesn't make any sense. It isn't always like that. But a lot of times I've seen where people just. They just seem to store some extra things, and then they forget about it. They put on a credit card and forget about the. The unit in storage. So I do think it's a myth that it's hoarding, because that's not true. We do have business use. We do have people who. Their father, mother, whoever family member passed away, and they don't want to get rid of their stuff yet, so they put it in storage. People have a life crisis they're going through, and they need to downsize or whatever it is, and they put their stuff in storage. It still has meaning for them. They don't want to get rid of it because they will use it in the future. So it's not just like, you think store, you think hoarding. I remember one guy told me that before. I was like. I thought about it afterwards. Like, that guy doesn't know exactly what he's talking about because it's just a stereotype, which is fine. I get people. I get that. But oftentimes people do store things that are important to them and have some sort of emotional value, and so they utilize the storage facility.

Right, okay. And then as far as trends, what are you seeing evolve is. I know you've mentioned the technology.

Yeah, yeah. So there's more and more of use of technology in self storage to offset management costs. So if you have a manager, you maybe pay them 50, $60,000 plus payroll taxes, et cetera, medical benefits. And in some cases there isn't a whole lot to do at a facility. And so the owners look at that and say, well, how can I maximize my dollars here? By implementing some level of technology. And so you have some users or some owners that are implementing kiosks. So when you just like when you see at the grocery store and maybe at the airport or whatever, something similar where you walk in, there's a big screen, you walk up to it, you hit some buttons, and obviously you rent a unit that way without actually ever having to talk to a manager. And then others are taking it to a level where you have almost like a giant. It's like a FaceTime situation where you walk in the door, the screen turns on and it's actual person behind the screen, like much like we're talking right now, it's in real time and everything. But the manager isn't actually physically at the facility. And so they can help answer any questions that they, that you might have or whatever, but. And help you rent a unit, but they aren't actually physically there. The benefit with that is that that one person can then quote, unquote, manage. And I say it that way because they're not actually there at the facility, but they can manage 3, 4, 5 locations as a result. Because if you have foot traffic, traffic that comes in at storage, there isn't that much foot traffic that comes in the door. Depends on the time of the month, et cetera. But you won't get as much in the middle of the month as you would at the beginning of the end of the month. So you can still hand. You don't need as much on site personnel. And there's other things that they're implementing within the storage space in regards to technology. There's several companies out there doing it. I think in some cases it does become cost prohibitive because it's expensive for that tech. It doesn't always work right. But they're working the kinks out. And I think, you know, you'll probably see more and more of that as we go in further into the future, especially with like chat, GPT and all that stuff and online, you know, chatting tools, et cetera. I know today, like my wife, if she orders something online or she needs to talk to Somebody, she just hits the chat thing and starts talking to like whomever it is. And that's almost easier than trying to make a phone call or go back to the store or whatever. So it's very common these days. But yeah, we're seeing that again. What you're renting is just a garage space, but the way to do it is changing and evolving over time.

So my, my lawnmower guy got a little close there. I. I don't know for sure if you.

I didn't hear a single thing.

You couldn't really. Okay, well, so the recording should be fine. Let me ask you though. I toured a facility, a new build recently and, and they had. Where you drive in to the middle of the building. Are you all seeing some of that spring up now?

Yeah, it depends on the location and just like the size of the building, etc. But that's obviously convenient for the customer to be able to load and unload. It could be a selling point as well to be able to load and unload out of the elements, which is always a nice thing. We've seen that for a long time where it depends on the building and all that. But you might have like pull through loading and unloading zones where literally they can like drive down the middle of the facility, park somewhere within that space and then unload and load their stuff up. So yeah, that's pretty common. Not at every facility, but it's. That concept has been around for quite a while.

What about. Why don't you talk about some of the new things you're getting into that are different from the self storage?

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. So I'm relaunching my podcast. I put it on pause. You mentioned early in the bio I should have updated that, but I'm putting that on. I put that on pause like in 2020 or whatever it was the storage Investor show, because I was Busy obviously with passiveinvesting.com to go find deals and get deals closed and all that. So I pivoted and focused there, which is great. Now we're a little bit of a slow time and I'm like, you know, I'm going to relaunch that podcast, but not just talk about storage, self storage, but expand that into flex warehouse space and industrial outdoor storage, which is very interesting. Obviously boat and RV storage is part of that self storage kind of thing, but it's almost its own asset class. And then of course, self storage, so it's easier to find people in the self storage industry. I know those folks. But we're expanding it out and hopefully. I'm not sure when this recording will come out but maybe by the time you're listening, just take a look the storage Investor show. Search for that on your player, your podcast player and we should have some episodes out regarding self storage, industrial outdoor storage, flex warehouse space, anything with a roll up door, that's what I want to cover and get into. So it's interesting. It's a little different obviously management style and leasing structure and all that. It's not rocket science but it's just a bit different product type and I think it's interesting to learn about and invest in.

Right. And I totally. As we discussed before we started recording, I love industrial. I think that that's kind of the backbone of America really. And all those interesting little businesses back in the flex or the big industrial spaces are, are important to.

Absolutely.

There's places for them to be. So I think it'll be a real good. I'll be listening to see what you're.

Oh absolutely. I appreciate that.

Yeah.

The little, the little flex warehouse space, you never really think too much about that. But there's all kinds of like companies that aren't huge companies but they are the, you know, the entrepreneurship that we all talk about like they, that's what they're doing, providing services. I've seen architecture firms utilize industrial flex warehouse space as their office and that's pretty cool. Like there's one here near where I live in Concord. So yeah, it's, it's, it's really interesting. I think it's cool. There's some class A stuff, smaller class A stuff I think looks really nice. I've seen some like big Boy toy, Big Boy Toy type storage.

Right.

I've seen that pop up. They have one here in Charlotte and if anybody listening knows I'm talking about it's in Cornelius. It's called Hyde Park. The guy who owns it, there's a couple partners that own it. They own. They built one in Daytona as well. Hyde Park. H Y D E Park. And it's like a, it's like fortress style where everything faces in so that all the doors and all that face inward. Nothing faces out towards the streets. And it's like tilt, like nice concrete tilt up walls and all that. And then you go into each bay. It's like, I don't know, I don't know, like maybe call it 20 by 50, something like that. And then they have a mezzanine level in there that you go up a little slight a flight of stairs. You put Your little office there, if you want to. Some of those guys just use it for like a little car showroom. They're like retired here. There's like race country here. So you'll have like guys who do racing and all that. And they have like their own little kind of man cave, quote unquote. They get away and go hang out over there. Then all the guys hang out. Guys and girls. Yeah, they all hang out within the space. It's like a donut. And so the middle, like the outside is built out. And then the middle has like a building in the middle too. They all face inward towards each other. So if you're driving by, you can't see in the facility. You don't even know what's there. Right. You just think, oh, it's some companies or whatever. But no, it's actually retired guys who store their motorhomes and cars and all that stuff. And then one guy has like a auto detailing business in there, so he's the smartest guy in all of Charlotte. So he just goes around to all those guys inside there and details all their cars, which is amazing. So. And there's like a brewery on the outside that faces the outside, so people come to the brewery and hang out. So, yeah, it's a really nice concept. That's not quite the Flex warehouse, you know, thing, but we're seeing some people try to emulate that concept. I think it's hard to do now because the way that they did it, it's class A with the tilt up, like concrete walls and all that. And that's the way you want to do it. But it gets expensive for the land and then obviously construction costs have gone way up, so your rents need to be high enough to cover that. And that's a little bit of a stretch, I think, depending on where it is. But anyway, I just went on a long rant there, but yeah, that's. We'll be covering stuff like that. Anything with the Roll up tour.

Interesting. All right. All right. So tell people how they can reach you.

Oh, they can't. No, I'm just kidding. So they can. They can reach me on LinkedIn, Twitter, slash X. Just look up at the Chris Bennett a little at symbol T H E K R I S B E N N E T T at the Chris Bennett. It'll pop up. You can also catch me on the Storage Investor Show. I always ask for feedback so you can send a little. And I get that feedback as well via email. So I read every single one of those. So, yeah, that's it.

I almost forgot, though. I need to ask you my regular question.

Sure.

Is there a pivotal person or event that brought you to where you are today or that's pushing you towards something today?

Yeah, the event was me going to school. So I didn't fill you guys in on this one, but I went to Chapel Hill when I was, like, in my mid-30s to get my undergrad, not get my MBA or anything like that. So I don't have an MBA. I just have my undergraduate degree. But I went there in my mid-30s with my family, my wife. I was married at the time. I had one child. I wasn't planning to go there, actually had to have major surgery at the hospital there. I discovered, quote, unquote, the university while I was in school at community college. So I went to community college in my 30s, got my associate of Science. Prior to graduating, I obviously I applied to Carolina, and then I applied to UNC Charlotte. If I did not get into Carolina, I would just go to UNC Charlotte because that's where I live. But lo and behold, I did get into Carolina, and that just going through that process was extremely difficult. We had a second child when I was there at the hospital. So two kids doing my undergrad in my mid-30s. I felt like a fish out of water because everybody there doing their undergrad is in their 20s, early 20s. I was like the old man, but I had no gray hair then, so that helped a little bit. Uh, and then I got into the real estate private equity fund that they have at the business school. Um, and that really helped kind of set the stage for everything else. That is just my own story. That's not. Doesn't have to be. Obviously, that is not everybody's story. But I went there older, as an older student, and I knew why I was there. Obviously, I had a drive and determination to make that successful for myself. So I did everything I could to do my best there and obviously find the right position when I graduated and moved out. And it worked out that way, so that was pivotal. And then I always go back. Like I mentioned earlier in the. In the show, I go back and we do case studies with students now. That's always a lot of fun. Giving back and helping and answering questions, et cetera. So. And now, I think, pressing forward. Nothing. No. No one person. There are obviously people online that we follow. You know, Alex Hermosi, I think, is a great one. People don't like him because he wears a nose strip and tank top with giant muscles and talks about business. That's kind of funny, but he's given away a ton of free content and helping people. I think it's great. I can't fault him for that. But Justin Welsh is another one who doesn't do anything online except he. He writes and he'll do, like, podcast interviews, but he's not a vocal person or visual person. He's a writer. But he inspires a lot of people, including myself, to, you know, step out, do your own thing and all that. I have lost jobs in the past, and you realize nothing's ever secure, and so nothing's secure. You know, we could think that we have a job, we're going to have a job for three years, and then, lo and behold, recession hits and everybody's let go, and that can happen to anybody. So I've gone through that process in the past, and I just don't like anybody having control in that sense. You know, I want to be able to control my own destiny. So I like those kind of guys and gals, and they kind of inspire me to do what we're doing now.

Great. Great. Well, that's fantastic, and thank you so much for coming on the show. I will, Yenny, appreciate it, letting you know before it goes live, and you'll be able to take a look at the show notes and whatnot, and so super will be sure to have a chance to promote it as well.

Awesome. Perfect. Yeah.

Well, thank you very much.

Thank you. Thanks, Jenny.

Welcome.