Day 1: Welcome to Boat & RV 100: The Vertical Most Investors Overlook

All right, welcome to day 1 of the Boat and RV 100 series. I'm Joe Downs with the Storage Moguls, and I hope you're as excited as I am to launch this new series. Uh, before we get into it, if you're not already part of the Storage Moguls community, go to storagemoguls.ai and register for free. We are launching that community very soon, like a matter of a few short weeks, so definitely join the waiting list. To be notified about the launch date. Because everything we cover in this series, as well as the last series, the Storage 100, uh, this series, as I just said, and every series that follows— the framework, the tools, deal analyzer— it's all there. It's free to start. No excuse not to be in there. And you can level up at your own pace. It's a no-brainer, folks. In the meantime, let's talk about why you're here tonight. Today, tonight, whenever you're watching, about boat and RV storage. It's the vertical that most investors are completely sleeping on right now. If you came through this Storage 100, you already know the drill, same philosophy, just new vertical. We're not professors here, we're practitioners. We actually own and operate these facilities, which means everything you're about to learn over the next 70 days, Yes, it's the Boat and RV 100, but that's the the brand name here. There's only only going to be 70 days of boat and RV storage, so everything over the next 70 days is field tested. If you were brand new to Storage Moguls, welcome! You're starting the right place. Don't worry about what came before this series. This series, excuse me, stands on its own, although I would highly suggest you go back and watch the. the Storage 100 as well. All right, here's what we're going to cover. Section 1 is orientation, what makes this vertical different and why the opportunity is real. Section 2, deal sourcing and evaluation. In Section 3, we'll cover the financing, which is where most investors get stuck in this asset class. Section 4, all about operations, running a seasonal facility through a full cycle. And Section 5, revenue optimization. We're going to be turning a decent facility into a high-performing one. 70 episodes, one vertical. By the time we're done, you'll have complete operator playbook for boat and RV storage investing. And it's— I think, folks, you're going to love this. So let's start with why this vertical exists. All right. The single most important data point in this vertical right now for everyone New to the boat and RV storage space, roughly 20 new boats and RVs hit the road to every 1 new space. So I'm going to say that again because what I was trying to say, and maybe I fumbled it here, is for those of you who've never seen this stat or understood this before, for every new spot, parking spot, 20 new Every year, new, not used, new boats or RVs. So it's combined 20 hit the road every year, 20 to 1. 13 million registered boats in the US. Add the RVs, add jet skis and ATVs or anything you can or would put on a trailer on top of that, all that demand. And we're not even counting those in the headline. So 20 to 1, you'll see 600,000 boats and RVs. Does not include jet skis, ATVs, or anything on a trailer. All those things take up spots too. I don't have the great data on that, but I do know 600,000 brand new boats and RVs hit the market every year. Not used, brand new. 25,000 to 30,000 new storage spaces are created every year to absorb them. So that's 600,000 new vehicles, 25,000 to 30,000 new parking spots for them. That's not a hot sector story. That's a structural imbalance that's been compounding since 2005. It's not going to correct itself, folks, because someone figured out it was a good investment opportunity. You're looking at somebody who had that ingenious light bulb moment, thought I was going to be the smartest guy in the room. And over the next 9 months, this is years ago, about, but about over the next 9 months, maybe longer, I have a little PTSD from it. I slowly but surely realized, nope, I'm not the smartest one in the room either. It corrects itself slowly, if at all, because of the capital and zoning complexity of building these facilities. That's the hard lesson we learned. That's some of the things we're going to share with you over the next 70 days. All right. Now, as I record this, we're in mid-March. We're at the beginning of the spring move-out season. Boats are going into the water. Depends on where you are around the country, of course. I know maybe not up in Michigan. They just got hammered with several feet of snow, but you get the point. We're heading the spring season. Boats are going in the water. RVs are going to campgrounds, and when they come back in September, October, November, whenever they come back, there won't be enough spaces to put them. That's the market you're going to learn to operate in. Here's the thing most self-storage investors get wrong when they cross over to this vertical. They look at a boat and RV facility and they see a parking lot, bigger units, lower density, outdoor storage. They apply the same mental model and they get surprised. This is not a scaled-up version of self-storage. Yes, you see boats and RVs parked at self-storage facilities, and that's probably the false trap that folks fall into. But the tenant here is fundamentally different. Maybe not the one that's storing at your self-storage facility if you own one, although I would caution you, they probably are a little different and maybe they just don't have many choices. In self-storage though, you're storing boxes someone can't fit in their house, maybe some furniture, but it's stuff that didn't make position A, right? Wasn't good enough for the house, wasn't even good enough for the basement or the garage if they had it, right? It ended up in storage. That's what they think about that particular item or whatever's in that box. They move in, they forget about it, they get their autopay charged every month, they might visit twice a year. Typically, they're not very emotionally invested in what's in that storage unit. In boat and RV storage, it's different. You're storing the vehicle their family memories travel in. That boat is how they spend their Saturdays. Maybe that RV might be how they go camping every summer and create family memories. The tenant visits more frequently on their way to an experience. They notice everything about your facility. Recently, I had Sydney Wilder from Anytime Storage Management on a podcast, the Self Storage Podcast, and she laid out the difference in the customer experience perfectly. In her words, this isn't boxes they can't fit in their house. This is taking their grandson fishing, maybe for the first time. So keep that in mind as we go through this series. Every operational decision starts with that framing. Also with boat and RV storage, there's 3 structural tailwinds that aren't going away. First, COVID. It opened a one-way door for outdoor recreation. Millions of people got into boating and RVing and all sorts of outdoor activities for the very first time. And for others, they got back into it. That behavior is sticky. RV and boat usage dips slightly off the peak, but then returned to trend, to the, to the trend it was on, and continued upward. You don't go fishing with your family for the first time and decide it's not for you. Second, HOAs and municipalities are making it harder and harder to store boats and RVs at home. In dense HOA markets, for instance Boston, waiting lists at facilities can run a year or more. Every new order— ordinance that a municipality puts out is a gift to boat and RV operators. The regulation trend is one-directional. Third, the REITs haven't arrived in force yet. Self-storage is now dominated by institutional capital at the mid to large facility level, and they're starting to take a peek at the smaller facilities and tertiary markets where my company operates. And that's compressing returns significantly in those sectors. There's still plenty of great opportunities out there. I don't want to dissuade anyone who just finished the Storage 100. There's plenty of awesome opportunities, but the REITs are coming and that's going to be good for a little while, but eventually it's going to make things tough. So you need to start looking at these other verticals. I started with boat and RV as the easiest I think for our self-storage-minded folks to take on next. Boat and RV is still primarily mom-and-pop and too operationally intensive for the REIT model in these smaller facilities and tertiary markets. So we're good and we're good for a while there, folks. I'm not trying to scare you, but I am pointing out that they're in the space and there's a creep happening. All right. And back to Sydney's points on her podcast, On that third point, she said, that is what self-storage was 20 years ago. And it's so on point. Where boat and RV storage is today is where self-storage was 20 years ago. So I'm not telling you not to go after self-storage facilities, but I am telling you to pay attention to boat and RV. The window where operators have a structural advantage, which is right now, over institutional capital is real. All right. Before you look at a single facility, though, you need to know what makes a boat and RV market worth entering. So, for example, HOA density, talked about. Higher HOA concentration in the market means more forced demand. People who want to store at home can't. They need you. Proximity to waterways, lakes, rivers, and campgrounds is another factor to consider. This is where the demand originates. If there's no recreational water access, within a reasonable drive, boat and RV demand might be a little lower. Supply and demand ratio for the county is another factor. Pull the county boat and RV registration numbers. How many registered boats and RVs are even in your county or in your trade area? Counting the existing storage facilities, or count the existing storage facilities, I should say, and estimate the total space count. The gap in the registered RV and boats And spaces is your opportunity. Income demographics matter too. Consider this: boat and RV owners skew significantly above the median household income we see in storage. It's discretionary income. Of course that matters. A Class A facility needs a market that can support Class A rents. Also, zoning history. Outdoor vehicle storage is classified differently in every municipality, so spend 30 minutes with the local planning department. Before you underrate anything, understand what the local zoning codes mean and are. And before you do any of that, talk to the boat and RV dealers in your target market. They know which facilities are full and which ones have waitlists and which operators are aging out. That's a 30-minute conversation worth having more than 3 months of— worth more than 3 months of your desktop analysis. All right. 2 things you need to internalize before we go any deeper. These will come up in almost every episode we record here. So seasonality, this is not a bug, it's a feature if you know how to operate around it. The cycle looks like this, and I already covered it. Spring is move-out season. Boats are going in the water, RVs headed to campgrounds. Occupancy at your facility may dip. Summer's the low point. Vehicles aren't in use, they're not stored. That's okay. Fall is your move-in. That's right. It's where you get the rush. This is when your phone rings constantly, waiting list forms, and you can push rates. The seasonal swing is not a problem. It's a cash flow pattern you can plan for, price around, and build competitive advantage from. Operators who treat it as a problem tend to underperform. Operators who build their strategy, their rate strategy and overall strategy around it tend to outperform. Then we have the space economics. Think about this. A 300-unit facility loses one tenant. That's 0.3% occupancy. A 100-space boat and RV facility loses one tenant. That's 1%. Fewer larger spaces means every vacancy is proportionally more expensive. So retention matters more. Relationships matter more. Customer service standards matter more. Those 2 dynamics, seasonality and space economics, are the lens through which we'll look at every topic in this series. Over the next 11 days, we're building your foundation in this vertical. By the time day 11 is done, you'll have a clear picture of the market opportunity, the facility types, the customer profile, and how to screen a target market before you spend a Dollar on due diligence. On day 12, I'll do a live recap. Our lives— our recaps lives are going to be on Mondays. All right. I hope you can make it. I know Monday's a tough night. Most gurus will tell you, don't ever do anything live on a Monday. And I know that. I'm not going to do it on a holiday. But all those other nights are so crowded. And moguls work. Moguls put in the time. So if you're going to be a mogul, we're going to meet on Mondays live, and that's where you're going to get to ask questions. I'll have guests, etc. So Monday, March 30th, that's going to be our first one. That's where we're going to go through everything, everything from section 1 that we just covered. I'll recap it, then we'll take your questions. I'll have a guest, uh, at each stage. I'll have a guest who's an expert in the field for those lives so you can ask them questions. All right, tomorrow, day 2, we will get into the demand data in detail. That 20-to-1 stat is the headline, but wait until you see the full picture behind it. Um, all right, folks, everything we cover in this series has a home inside the Storage Moguls community. The deal analyzer we reference throughout, that's in there. The frameworks, the checklists, the section recaps, all of it free to start. This platform is built AI native from day one. That means the tools work for you around the clock, not just when there's a live session or new episode. So if you're watching this and you're not in the community yet, go to storagemoguls.ai. It's free to join. There's no good reason not to be in there. All right, that's day one. Tomorrow we get into the demand data, or the demand tsunami, uh, that's been slowly mounting And the numbers are more compelling than most investors realize. If you haven't joined Storage Moguls community yet, like I just said, go to storagemoguls.ai, free to join. We might, I don't know where we are on, I was giving away 500, first 500, I was giving away the deal analyzer. I have to check. We probably still have some left. So go join now, register, get on the waitlist. It's launching soon. You'll get the free deal analyzer as well. Please like and subscribe so you don't miss the daily drops or even the lives in this series. And folks, if you're watching this, you've taken either another step or perhaps your first step towards becoming a storage mogul, which means you're going to want to share as many of these videos as you possibly can on every platform you possibly can. The reason is it sounds self-serving, I know, but you need to broadcast to everyone you know that you're in this business. You need to prime the pump, if you will. So down the road, when you need investors to buy your first self-storage deal or your first boat and RV facility, they will already be comfortable with the fact that you've been in this business and you've been in it for a while. I'll keep reminding you along the way, but it's something you have to do. Come on, how easy is it? Right? There's going to be hard things that you're going to do down the road here in any of these verticals. Sharing these videos is not one of them. All right. Don't make me feel bad about asking. See you tomorrow.