Day 31: The Best Market Research Tools for Self Storage Investors (Free and Paid)

All right. Well, welcome to day 31 of the Storage 100. I'm Joe Downs of the Storage Mastermind, as you know, if you've been watching and following along. Today, I want to walk— what a walk and talk, I guess— about one of the most important things you can master, and that's market research. This is where the money is made or lost before you even buy the land. And we're gonna break down for you the tools and resources you need to stop guessing and start knowing. Gonna cover everything from the free stuff you should already be using to the enterprise-level data that costs a fortune, depending on how you look at it. But the goal is simple. You gotta have a complete stack, whether it's free, somewhat affordable, or expensive, depending on how you look at it. Yeah. So you can actually analyze any market like a pro. All right. So let's dive into the different tiers of the toolbox that you need to have. So basically, you have 3 options or 3 tiers of the toolbox. First one is how we started. I call it the Scrappy tier. It's $0 a month and includes tools like Google Earth Pro and Census Reporter. City Data is another one. You have no excuse not to use these. Um, the standard tier is where you're going to get into a little more serious, right? Maybe now you have a facility or 2 and you've, you know, you decided you're really looking. Not to say you can't pay for it when you don't have one, but I think a lot of times people don't want to, and I get it, throw a lot of money at something until, you know, you really know how to use it and you're comfortable with it and you know what you're doing. But, um, in that standard tier, you know, you're gonna be in the $100 to a couple hundred dollars a month for things like Radius Plus and StoreTrack. And this is the sweet spot for most serious investors. And then you have more of the enterprise tier, and that's a little bigger companies. We're not even using it at Bellrose. I still consider us boutique because you can spend tens of thousands of dollars on things like CoStar and Yardi Matrix. And we found we don't need it. That's up to you if that's what you want to do. But before you think it's nuts to even pay for any of this, Remember the brutal truth: data is cheap, but mistakes are expensive. So you can save a couple hundred bucks a month on tools, but one bad deal could cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars to even millions. So think about that. All right, so let's start with the best free tools available. Google Earth. All right, so starting with that scrappy tier and the best tool, Google Earth. It's the king of free tools. You must Use the historical imagery feature. That's— this is like the greatest gift I can give you. And it's not about looking at it today. It's about looking at the path of progress over the last 20 years so you can spot exactly where the rooftops are moving to. You know, if you toggle back and forth between 10 years ago, 15 years ago, you could see where the growth is moving, see the direction of it. You can also verify when a competitor actually broke ground, which is pretty interesting, not just when they opened. So if you're not using that timeline slider, you're flying blind. And really, Uh, on, on using, relying on potentially stale data. I mean, the data is good, but the, the, that's the Google slider and time bar gives you a visual of what's actually happening in that market over what period of time too. You can even see like, oh, slow, slow, boom, all of a sudden rapid growth. So this tool gives you the visual proof of market momentum, and that's what you need, and it's very helpful. So, uh, but you need more than just visuals. You need hard numbers, which brings us to what many consider the gold standard for supply data. It's one of the only ones we pay for. It's Radius Plus, one of the only tools we'll pay for, and it's one of the best all-around tools. I gotta throw StoreTrack in there too, but I'm demonstrating Radius Plus for you here. So this is a tool that gives you 2 of the most critical metrics for self-storage, and that's supply per capita, supply index we also call it, and then the rental rates in a lot of markets. So remember, you want to target markets with less than 7 square feet per person if you're looking, especially Especially if you're looking to build. Anything over that's, you know, caution flag first and then red flag over 10. You also want to see rental rates ideally, ideally, this is a wishlist above $1.25 per square foot. Some of that's going to have to do with your unit mix, but you know, if you can find that over $1.25, less than 7 square feet per person, you're onto something or you might have a pretty good market there. So, and Radius Plus is maybe the quickest way to kill a bad deal or validate a good one. So, and you know, it's looking. It's essential data layer for any serious investor. So, but even with Radius Plus, you're going to need to pair that with some demographic data. So while Radius Plus gives you the supply and the rates, a great resource for, and it's free, is Census Reporter gives us the demographics and it's completely free. As I mentioned, storage follows rooftops, but more importantly, it follows the money. So you need to target a median income above $50,000 a year, probably minimum. And you also wanna see positive population growth trend over the last 3 to 5 years. So look at the housing mix too. Is 60% owner, 60% of the houses being owned versus 40% renter mix? If they can get that 60/40, that's a great sign of stability. So that's a tool that lets you visualize the income distribution showing you exactly where the wealth is concentrated. So that's nice. You can't analyze a market until you know if you can actually build there, by the way. So you need to become a zoning ninja before you ever pick up the phone and call the city planner. You want to sound like you know what you're talking about. So use MiniCode to search for the magic keywords like mini warehouse or self-service storage to find the exact zoning code you need. Then you jump into the GIS maps and you're looking for the zoning layer to confirm the parcel ID and verify the lot dimensions. So, I know that sounded like a lot. Not that difficult. It's kind of step by step here. But you want to do that before you call the city or, or whatever the municipality planner is. You want to know the answers before you do that. So, you jump into the GIS maps and confirm that zoning layer to confirm the parcel ID and the lot dimensions. So that you know what you can and can't do before you call them, because you're not asking them what the rules are. You're telling them what you've found and then asking them to confirm it. So once you know the rules of the land, then you can start— in addition to that, by the way, you can start spying on the competition. So now that we know how to figure out where we can build, let's figure out who we're going to crush it or to crush. So your competitor's bad review is your future profit, and SpareFoot is the Expedia of storage. So it gives you real street rates, not inflated numbers from brokers' pro formas. So look for the desperation promos from your competition, like first month free or massive discounts. That's going to tell you their true vacancy rate and how badly they need to fill units. But the real truth serum is in the Google reviews. So you're not looking for compliments there, by the way. You're looking for operational failures, deferred maintenance, And value-add opportunities you can exploit. Like, for instance, if you see a comment about like the gate's been broken for 3 weeks and the manager's never in the office, well, you know exactly where to focus on your marketing then when you take over. These are pretty powerful tools, but they can lead to a common trap. So careful out there because I've given you a number of tools you can use here, and now I'm going to give you a rule. And that's the one tool rule, or at least, I don't know, not 10 tools rules. Analysis by paralysis is the number one killer of deals. So if you're using 10 different tools, you're going to get 10, potentially 10 conflicting data points, and you're going to run the risk of waiting for the perfect results to moons align. And the net result In reality, it's going to be you're going to do zero deals. So remember, progress over perfection here. So stop waiting for perfect. Pick one tool, maybe a second one to help you, you know, really one strategy with one or two, maybe three tools that helps you master a process and a system and then trust that data. Is it always going to be perfect? No, but neither is mixing, you know, competing tools like StoreTrack and Radius at the same time. Well, this one's at that point. Don't Go with one or the other and then give— match each one up with their complements. Today I covered Radius+. The goal is to buy a deal, not write a thesis paper on the storage market and every possible way you can analyze this stuff, right? That's why we're doing this Storage 100. So pick, pick one method, master it, and let's get a deal. It's the only way you're going to move forward here. So what's the final takeaway from all this data? You've now got the best free tools to find deals, analyze markets, and spy on your competition. And now you have the knowledge to find a deal and the permission to stop overanalyzing it. So hit the like button for me if you found this valuable. If you want to continue to get more of this brutally honest expert-level content, hit subscribe so you don't miss the reminder about tomorrow's video drop analyzing market trends and projections. That's going to be an important one. And of course, when you subscribe, you get all the notifications for the lives, and we've got one coming up to recap this entire section. It's one coming up in just a couple days. And then lastly, share this with a data nerd who needs to stop guessing and start knowing. They'll thank you later.