Storage Investing in the AI Search Era

2 of our students found a storage facility where the website was unplugged. Not a bad website, just no website at all. You typed in the address, nothing came up. You called the number, it was either disconnected or it just rang and rang and nobody picked up. Most people look at that and run. These guys did the opposite. They called every other facility within about 7 miles and almost nobody had anything available. The demand was there. The seller just turned himself off. He was off the grid. So they bought it and in less than a year they were over 70% occupied. So if you're looking at a deal right now and you can't rent a unit off the seller's website, that might not be a red flag. That might be your upside. Folks, don't forget to join us tonight for our Monday night self-storage show with co-host Kristen Blunk, where we'll talk about why your first rental can own you long before it ever pays you. Kristen's real Indiana rental story and how storage handles a tenant who stops paying completely differently. Tonight on YouTube on the Storage Muggles channel. I'm Joe Downs. Welcome to the Storage Muggles podcast. My company has acquired over 20 storage facilities, over $70 million in assets across across multiple storage niches, and that's what drove us to build StorageMoguls.ai. You guessed it, it's an AI-powered community that teaches people how to buy their very first self-storage facility. Let me introduce my guest today. We have Alex Keller. Alex runs the sales team at Storage Pug. They build websites made just for self-storage. He's been there almost 7 years, and he's probably looked at more self-storage websites than anybody I know. He actually taught our students on websites and SEO last December. Alex, super excited. It's been a long time in the making to get you on here. Welcome to the Storage Moguls Podcast.

Yeah, thanks so much, Joe. I'm glad I'm here. This is gonna be really fun. I've, uh, been catching up on some of the other episodes and you've had some real, uh, some big shots. I got some big shoes to fill today.

No, you're a big shot in my book here, buddy. Um, Alex, as you, if you've been listening, you might know I do some true/false questions throughout the show and it's really just to To give the listeners a nugget, you know, in a fun true/false way. So you ready for your first one?

Yeah, let's do this.

All right. So Alex, true or false? More than 99 out of 100 people who search on Google never click on page 2.

Ooh, I'm gonna say true.

That is, do you want to hazard a guess as to what the click rate is on Google? This is probably before AI too, because I bet you this number is a fraction of what it was.

Gosh, I don't even know where to start because they, they didn't bring back pages.

Yeah, I'll give you, I'll give you, um, to make it easier for you, because this is too hard of a question to guess there. Is it more or less than 2%?

Less.

Yeah, you're right. It's, it was 0.63% on page 2. That's insane.

Yeah.

And now, and I don't know if you saw this stat recently, you know what the Google click-through rate on page 1 is now?

Lord. Uh, I mean, it's plummeting.

It's, it's less than 60%. 65% of Google searches are clickless now.

That's amazing. Clickless. Yeah.

That's insane.

I believe it.

Yeah.

It's all new world.

Yep. Um, Alex, here's a test I want everybody listening to do after this. I want, I, I want them to pull up, um, their own facility's website or, or one you're thinking about buying. Yeah. And try to rent a unit, you know, don't make a phone call, just, just try to rent a unit and, and, right. And, and I think what folks will, hopefully they won't realize for their own, own website, but I, I think what they're gonna see, especially if they're looking at, you know, independent operators, if you go to Public or Extra or CubeSmart, this is not gonna work. But I want you to go to that kind of like that, you know, Bob's Storage or Joe's Storage, that kind of place. And folks, I don't want you to see what happens, but Alex, I want to ask you, how often do you think that test fails?

You know, on the technical side, I would say that, I mean, depends on the test. If the test is, has the owner actually tried to rent from themselves at any point? I would say that fails 80% of the time.

But speaking generally, That's a big number.

A lot of times it's not even meant to be a trap question when I meet with people, but I ask them like, have you ever used this system? And oftentimes the answer's no. But on the tenant side of things, I would say in a normal transaction, in a normal world, if the tenant was in a good place, I would say that should work and they're not going to struggle like 70% of the time. But the thing with storage is that the people using these tools, clicking these buttons, I mean, they're not in their best place, right? That's why they're looking for storage. These tools had to be built for people experiencing death, divorce, disaster, or displacement. Um, and that's kind of a different world for us.

So, so easy, intuitive, frictionless, right?

It has to be crayon drawing simple.

Yeah. So, so when they fail, which Which is interesting. You gave 2 different answers there and they're both right. Yeah. Right. When you meet with people who own facilities, they, they, their own test fails 80% of the time, which is the exercise I just asked the listener to do. You're— but where you're saying when it's set up properly, even then the customer typically, you're saying 7 out of 10 has a, has a, has a successful experience. I don't know about positive experience, but let's say successful experience.

Right.

Right?

Yeah.

So that's really fascinating. In either case, obviously one's worse than the other. Huge, huge amount of opportunity for failure there and frustration even on top of that. So when they fail, what usually is the reason, right? Is it the, they can't find the price or can't tell what's available from an occupancy standpoint? Or is there some other like, you know, just technical glitch?

Yeah, I'd say there's really 2 points of failure, um, or 2 categories of failure really. One is going to be like the technical or administrative, right? So that could just be as simple as, um, the website itself isn't, um, like well-designed for a mobile device. So that could just be as simple as, you know, we see around 63 to 67%, depending on market and quarter, uh, of transactions take place on a mobile device. So in that first bucket, Yeah. if it looks like crap on a, on an iPhone, it's, it's, we're going to have some Or it could be administratively, you didn't need operationally to ask them 17 questions, including their blood type and their mother's maiden name, but you did. And now you've got somebody trying to rent this unit in a McDonald's drive-through with their kids screaming. And yeah, they're going to have to come back or they got a phone call and now they're on that because they didn't get it done quick enough. So that's, that's like the first category. And these are Very fixable things. Just very like, yeah, that's how it works. I was on a mobile phone.

You know what? Thank you for that because I'm gonna let you finish, but I wanna point out that that was such a great window into a customer experience in the McDonald's drive-through because they're moving, right? Or something, there's something displacement going on or something frustrated. They got kids, they're trying to feed 'em. That's why they're in line at McDonald's. The day's already busy. You're frustrated trying to read small, tiny print and click little tiny buttons on your phone, right? And, you know, and if you're my age, you're no spring chicken anymore. And it's, you know, you barely see, you got glasses on, not on, you know, right? And the customer experience just sucks. I'm the type of person that will literally just be like, fuck this. I'm, I'm just, I'm gonna call the next one that, that I, that'll answer the phone. Yeah.

Right.

Because I, I'm gonna do it the old-fashioned way because it's not optimized. I'm sorry, I cut you off, but that was such a great window into the experience. I want people to hear it.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, and I think, you know, there's that, and I'll get to my second point, but there's this obsession with the people who use these tools. And that's one of the hard things for me, right? Because I get to meet with people that own the properties, but the tools that we sell, these websites, these marketing, that, that's not for them, right? The people who use it aren't on these calls. And I think, or listening to this podcast, right? This isn't somebody looking for storage and now they're going to learn about the industry. And I think, you know, to that point, if we look at a modern shopper when they move, cities, you know, their house isn't ready yet, so they get an Airbnb for a month. They banged that out in the parking lot on their iPhone. They need toiletries when they get to the Airbnb. They bang that out on Amazon.com. It'll be there before they are. They rent their car. Everything is so easy. But then when they get to the storage step, well, now all of a sudden it's like getting a mortgage or some antiquated, you know. So I think there's, there's that customer side of things, but The other bucket I was gonna say where, where, where the transactions get thrown off, and this is the soft side, and this is for what it's worth, the side that I see the most people make the mistake in. You can have the mobile-friendly rental flow that only asks for 5 things and it's so easy, but if the website doesn't answer their questions and doesn't make them want to rent from you, well, they're never going to see it. And I think a lot of times we skip right past that, that salesmanship that we would expect from a manager answering But when it comes to the website homepage or how the amenities are advertised, all of a sudden the person whose only concern is, will I be safe? Doesn't get that question answered or has to dig for it. And that is probably the most hidden, you know, you don't have somebody who clicked rent and you can't really necessarily see them drop off at a specific stage or question, but they were there to rent storage, right? So why didn't they? And it typically comes down to that.

That's so fascinating is that, and you're so right, where, where are these self-storage owners or prospective buyers that would be listening to this podcast or are listening to this podcast? Where are they learning about, I mean, on this podcast, but where, where would they otherwise learn about what the true customer experience is unless they're doing a great job with surveys and talking to their customers and, you know, how is the rental experience? But you're right, you just said a lot of people you talk to don't even go through the process themselves.

Yeah.

In fact, folks listening, You should do that. Why don't you get in a McDonald's drive-through or, or maybe Chick-fil-A if, if you can, something—

We can upgrade.

Slightly healthier.

Yeah.

Right. And have that frustrating experience. Put yourself, you know, like think about what the Navy SEALs do. Not that we're saving lives here, but think about what they train for. Right. They train for the experience that, that they have no, you know, they've, or, or they specifically, they, they create experiences that they know they're gonna have to go through or ones they don't know. So they're ready for anything. And that's a lot of times your customer who's about to rent a unit isn't sitting in their office with a, with a latte, you know, and multiple screens up and just having AI compare, you know, this site and this experience to that one. It's, it's more than likely the scenario Alex just painted where like it's chaos going on and you're just, you're looking for easy that you got from Amazon, you got it from Airbnb, you got it from Turo maybe when you rented a car.

Yeah.

Right. And now you're going, I'm looking for that easy button again. And, and the closest facility, the one that pops up is, you know, putting me through, you know, a, a rectal exam, uh, and, and, and, and I'm filing my taxes while I'm in the McDonald's drive-through. So just think about that. What, what is the experience that we're offering for the customer? Alex, you know, there's folks out there who say, and, and hopefully what we just said should answer this question, but one of the things, there's folks we run across who are like, well, I could build my own website. I can do it for $50, $100. Why wouldn't I just do that?

Sure.

What do you say to them?

Yeah, I think for them, I always want to take a look at 2 things. Like, one, what does your market look like? Right? If you are in like a rural market or you're in a place where like you just really nailed down the feasibility, you know, there's right tools, right place, right time. I've absolutely seen people who built their own website and they do really well. I don't think they're necessarily in a place if they're— if their market was a racetrack, They can build a faster bicycle and they can still win that race and they don't need to get a convertible. You're fine. And I think that for, so for some people, I always want to look at the market and what they're up against in terms of competition, supply, demand, etc. The second piece though, is that the business you want to get into, right? A website that works, one of the components is that it's going to have this, this easy transaction flow. And depending on the software that you chose, some of them make that really simple to set up. Some of them maybe come with a free or very discounted website that has that embedded into it. Um, but if some people don't want to be in the business of websites, SEO, marketing, integrations, then you shouldn't be, right? Where could that time be spent and could that delta be reached? And, and ultimately, we tend to find a lot of people don't want to necessarily go down that route, or once they have, then that first thing comes back and it's okay. I've got some goals here, and in order to hit those goals, we need to take this a little more seriously, um, and call in some backup. So it's typically, it's typically a conversation and not a quip. Um, that makes sense because they might be right.

What do you, what do you say to the folks who question whether or not you should even put your, their prices, their rates on the website because they don't want the guy down the street seeing them and, you know, And then you got the, of course we all, we all secret shop. So, you know, they don't want that. So what, what's, what's the pros and cons there? What do you tell them? Yeah.

Uh, thankfully, Joe, that's not a conversation I have to have as much anymore. When I started at Storage Pug, I was really talking, I had to sell people on the concept of e-commerce, but I've had that talk often and it still happens from time to time. The way I always approach that is twofold, is that And I actually had one of my clients explain it to me this way, probably a little bit more eloquently than I'm about to, but essentially there are 2 buckets of potential renters. Bucket one are going to be renters like my mama. My mom does not— she has a credit card, but it's frozen in a block of ice in her freezer, so she has to thaw it out before she makes a decision on credit. That's how she rolls, right? She does not buy things online. Point blank, period. You will earn that bucket's business because you answer the phone, because somebody can meet her on site, even on an appointment basis, to walk her to a unit and show her how the roll-up door works. Whoever meets her expectation gets her business. So I do run into people who tell me I'm at 90% and I don't have online anything.

Cool.

What that tells me is that you are the best phone answering, people taking care of operation that I'm going to talk to today. I do then point out using kind of that as the vehicle, the second bucket and renters like me and my wife who work 8 to 5 Monday through Friday and are heavily discouraged from taking personal calls on the clock. We're going to wind up doing business with the places that let me schedule online because that's where I need to be met. And if they're fine, you know, not having that side of the business, and again, in some markets, Or in some, of course, physical or economic occupancies, maybe you don't have to be as competitive. Okay, that's what you want to do. But I think when it comes to that, if we're not going to have the rates on the website, then we've not built a tool for the people who are trying to use websites to find storage.

I couldn't agree more. And if you look at the trend of who's renting storage, when we start to get into the demographics and you go, you go millennials and then even generation below them. I mean, what are we talking about here? You have to be optimized. Your website has to be optimized. And folks, your website isn't just a brochure. It can be your best leasing agent. And it works at 11 o'clock on a Sunday night. You know, and if it can't rent a unit, then it's not doing its job. And you just heard from Alex and his generation and his wife and They're not calling you during the day and you're not answering at 11 o'clock at night. So if your website can't rent them a unit, if you're not mobile optimized for a Sunday night, you're missing out on rentals.

Joe, that actually brings me, there was a story we had. This was back when I had to beg people to put their rates on the websites. We have an awesome client in Morristown, Tennessee. It is, for those listening, exactly as rural as it sounds. That's why you've never heard of it. And he was adamant, people in this town are not going to rent from me. They're not going to use the web to rent stuff. And we launched the website on a Friday and Saturday morning he got his very first rental. But despite that, he was still right. This was somebody on Friday night who got off work and was renting a unit online. But for them getting off work, well, it was 5:00 PM Pacific. They were moving from Oregon to Tennessee. So the only time they could call was at 8:00 PM Eastern where they were, that office was never going to be manned, you know? Sometimes it's even like, I've got my community, but is my community growing? Because it might not be about renting to them. Displacement is one of the things that drives us to tenants.

Absolutely. All right, Alex, true or false? Everybody who shops online reads reviews first. About 99 out of 100 people. True or false?

True.

I just realized I'm one of the— I'm the one. I never read reviews. But you are correct. That is the stat. Uh, that's why reviews, uh, reviews matter. I literally, I don't read reviews.

I'll say this, you know, like when it comes to the reading of reviews, I think there's levels to it. Um, I would say 99% of people definitely check to see if reviews are there. For me, if it's a zero social proof setting, that does just immediately wake me up. And I don't want to be the first. I don't want to be the first person to go down this road. I might not read the review depending on how expensive the product is, but so long as it has been and it's vaguely okay, 5 stars seems sketchy, but 4.5 sounds legit. I'm going to click, but I think I've in the past have found that product on another site simply because I didn't want to be the first.

That's so funny. I, I, I understand the importance of reviews. I have podcasts, obviously. Um, I have Airbnbs. We have to deal with reviews and ratings and stars. It's like part of, it's part of like how you get, you know, uh, exposure on Airbnbs. You have to maintain it. Uh, but I am, it is funny. I didn't, first of all, I didn't think it would be that high, 99 out of 100. So that's, that's really good for me to learn and know. Um, and, uh, I also, Probably should start reading 'em 'cause I, I'm bringing, of the 100 people surveyed, I'm, I'm that guy. I'm not making it.

We gotta get you on.

Alex, a lot of people don't Google storage near me anymore, or they're starting not to because they open ChatGPT and type, where should I rent a storage unit in this town? All right. Or, or maybe they're putting what, you know, maybe they're even saying, asking chat which storage near me. They're just not on Google is the point. So who decides what comes back and how do I make sure it's my facility when they're on ChatGPT?

Yeah, man. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, I'm sure we're going to get some new names in that pile before long. Fastest growing tech adoption like we've ever seen. There's this amazing breakdown from a guy called Dr. Lee on like tech adoption, and it's like something about like 75 years for telephones to reach 50%, 20 years for the radio. It took around 3 years for 50% adoption on AI tools. So it's a really cool breakdown, but it speaks to how useful this stuff is. So as far as discovery, or as far as AI, the impact for self-storage is going to be like 3 buckets. One, how people find you. 2, buyer's experience. And 3, business efficiency. So how people find you is interesting. I always like, again, put ourselves in the tenant seat. They're the one trying to find us. They're the one using it. What's their intent? Is it informational or is it transactional? What we've seen most often is that AI searches are predominantly informational. So somebody might search for, hey, I'm going to Emerald Isle with 2 kids these age, we're at this level of fitness, help me plan my trip. But they're still going to each hotel, that's each hotel and activity and researching those independently. And they kind of use it for like the starting point.

Mm-hmm.

So for that purpose, how do we stay ahead of like AI search trends? Um, one, I will say with the speed of adoption, this is still Wild West. So if you're listening to this a year from now, what I say could be more right, or it'd be completely discounted. Um, what we're seeing right now is that keywords on the website, the, the words that help Google find, uh, your website on Google search when somebody searches for storage units, Cleveland, Tennessee, is that they're becoming more conversational. Just as you would expect when somebody is using that AI tool. So instead of making sure your website says storage unit in Knoxville, Tennessee, and it still should, because people are still using Google, they ask from their phone in Knoxville, Tennessee, where can I put everything from my 3-bedroom apartment?

There you go.

So the content on the website needs to answer real questions. It can't just be, I wrote 7 paragraphs of stuff for Google. It needs to actually check both boxes. So it's a little trickier to have it sound organic, but that's how people are talking. Plain English matters now.

Couldn't agree with you more. You, you, I don't know if you know this or not, I have another podcast called Successful Idiots and it's about AI and I'm the idiot and I have a, my co-host is an AI guru. So we, and this is what we talk about every week. I'll be recording that tomorrow morning as well. And you could, you were so right. It's, it's a conversation now. You're right. It's information first, but it's actually leading to more transactions. The, and the conversion rate is what, is what we need to key in. I don't know if we have stats for self-storage yet, But in general, the conversion rate is obscenely higher from an AI search that leads to a conversion than from the previous Google search. So I think you're right. It's, it's about on your website, you need to— it's not, you know, if you could publish articles, all great. Yeah, but you become credible and authority. But it's really about AI answering the question and providing information in the conversation it's having with the user. So you nailed it. A 3-bedroom house should be discussed on your website about how it fits in a 10 by 20 or 2 10 by 10s, if that's what you have or whatever. Same thing with anything local. Have, are you, are you working, um, with, uh, uh, with your AEO and GEO, or at least, uh, as you're developing these websites on local events?

Yeah.

Well, because, you know, for, for the local operator, the, the single mom and pop or the, you know, just a couple facility, uh, independent operator. It's David versus Goliath, right? With the institutions and the REITs. So one of the ways they can distinguish themselves is by truly being the local voice so that when you're in Knoxville, Tennessee, you know, what are your, what can you do or what can you do from a StorageBugs standpoint with your clients and their websites to help them be more local? What, you know, do you guys have any framework built up for that?

Yeah, so it's twofold. So one, our internal team. So we write all of our content in-house. So our team does a lot of research manually on the local area. So of course, we can do a little bit with the Google Maps. We can get a good idea of here are the apartments, here are the, like, community centers. For example, for me, I grew up deep in the mountains here in Tennessee. It was about 25 minutes to the closest gas station, let alone my school. So my parents Actually had a storage unit near the school they dropped me off at Monday through Friday because it was convenient for them. It, if you looked on the map, they didn't draw traffic out from the mountains. That's not what happened. Their facility happened to be a landmark. So we're, we kind of know what to look for. And then we are using, you know, emerging tools. Uh, you mentioned, uh, Claude in the pre-show. Um, you know, we're using Claude to, to do maybe that extra level of local research for the market. Of course, we want our team to approve anything that we do. They've been doing it a long time, so they know it's fine there. But I think what makes it special, and I know you mentioned earlier, like, what can independent operators do that maybe like REITs and big dogs can't, is we're talking to people. At the end of the day, you know, if you have a facility, short of me going out there and having lived my life out there, if your first speeding ticket was on the highway in front of your facility, Congratulations. You'll always be the expert in that market. So we actually wanna work with our customers, kind of like questionnaire them both at the onset and throughout the relationship and partnership to let us know that one, 2 key examples I wanna give here, things we've found. Um, so one, if anybody listening to this has ever been to the Smoky Mountains, you went down, your GPS told you to go down Winfield Dunn Parkway, 'cause that's what it's called apparently. Now, I grew up, adjacent to that area, um, I don't know who Winfield Dunn is. I'm sure he was a very important guy, but if you're local, you call it 66. But that's not what it's gonna say on Google. So a local operator would tell us, oh, Winfield Dunn, never heard of him. It's called 66. Another example is this group I met with in, uh, in Oregon, and I was giving this kind of monologue I've given 100 times. To them. And I was like, so if you have any more little neighborhoods, and I zoomed in on Google Maps, it was like a little 20 homes. If you have any more neighborhoods like this or know of any development, that's the kind of stuff you guys are gonna be the expert on. And they laughed because the satellite view was old. There wasn't 30 homes there. There was about 200, but the satellite hadn't gone by yet. It was a massive development with another 50 acres. Well, short of us sending a writer to every town we launch a website in, we never would've known that. So I think that's where with our clients, but I also encourage anyone listening, get with your vendor. And if you built it yourself, you're already in the driver's seat. Talk about the area, the landmarks. And I think that that's where it comes into play.

You know, that's a great point. And, and I'm gonna, I will agree with you that if you're local, like you talked about the speeding ticket, you're gonna know more than, than anyone for sure. But you don't have to be local. By the way, I'm dying to know, Were you, were you related to the Hatfields or the McCoys? Because just picturing this Tennessee mountain man. Yeah.

Yeah.

You growing up.

I will say it's more Reagans than Ogles, but we don't have to get into that today.

Okay. That's the right state though. They were Tennessee, weren't they? Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's what I thought. But so we recently bought a facility in Wilmington, North Carolina. Well, it's in the outskirts of Wilmington, but technically it's Wilmington, right? So how do you differentiate? So we used Claude, I think, to really learn about the local market, our 3 to 5 mile, 15 minute drive time market. And what we learned was, hey, that town used to be called Murrayville. Well, guess what's pop— what's, guess what the local chamber's promoting? Anything Murrayville. They're trying to bring the, bring the local town back. So what did we do? We, we rebranded the facility when we bought it, Murrayville Self Storage. Why would we do that? Well, one, we want to in— you know, ingratiate ourselves into the neighborhood. But two, Now the locals there and the people there, maybe an out-of-towner wouldn't, wouldn't search, uh, Murrieville. And so we wouldn't, we wouldn't win them over. But anyone local is gonna look for Murrieville. You know, where am I? Where in storage in Murrieville? Well, we're the only one that says Murrieville. So that's why we do it. Uh, and folks, I wanted you to hear that. And I, and I love that you guys are thinking that way and working that way, uh, with your clients. Um, 'cause you know, you, you don't have to be, We beat the REIT everywhere, folks. You just have to show up on Google and the reviews and locally in, in the AI answers, in the way that AI is looking for the answers. And Alex, you nail it. It's a conversation. So for the handful of, of searches that matter in your town, you wanna stand out. And that's the fight that a small operator can win. You know, the internet, the, the dot-com destroyed the local business, the Amazons, right? Just to, to, I use Amazon all the time. I'm not trying to beat them up in Too much. But, but it did displace a lot of— it started with bookstores, and then it displaced a lot of local retail. Well, guess what's bringing back local? AI. Because it's so specific, it's so pinpointed. Alex, true or false? When Google puts an AI summary at the top of the page, people click on websites about half as often.

Yes, true.

It is true. 8% of visits versus 15% without the summary, and that's across 69,000 searches according to Pew. That's a big deal. Alex, when somebody's underwriting a storage deal, the seller's website is, if they have one, is sitting right there in plain sight. Most buyers, if they look at it, they don't spend too much time on What should they be looking at before they even make an offer? Like, what, what are the, what are the, like, you know, for me, when I go up to, when I start talking to a facility owner, I'm looking for like 5 key things they're gonna tell me, right? When you, that, so that's my bailiwick. That's, that's my office, right?

Right.

Because I'm the, I'm the, I'm the people guy. So my office is talking to that seller. Your office is the website, right? That's where you live and breathe. What are the, what are the key things you were looking for? Like, where do you start licking your chops? Like, I'm going to crush this.

Yeah, absolutely. It's funny you mentioned that. I just got to hang out with somebody last week. I promise not to reveal the facilities because he's still kind of like in the early stages. But shout out to Brent if you're listening. I had a lot of fun. So what to look for ultimately, you know, I'm always looking for the 2 levers. You know, at the end of the day, for all the acronyms that go into marketing and e-commerce, It's still as simple as it always was. How hard is it to find you when people need storage? And 2, how hard is it to rent? So maybe 20 years ago we were checking to see, is this facility in Yellow Pages? And when I secret shopped the facility, was the manager kind? Apply that to today. If I land on the website and there's very little content, there's no local content, it's not conversational. The things we just talked about, the words on the website do not represent the 3 and 5-mile rings around the asset. Well, that tells me there's something. Google Maps, do they have a good listing or is the only photo one that Google had to send a car by to get? What does that shopping experience look like? Do they get reviews? Because when I think about driving traffic, I'm looking at things like the content on the website for all the reasons we just discussed, Google and emerging AI, but then also Google Maps. So that would tell me right off the bat, okay, cool. When people need storage, there's opportunities here. Second, kind of goes back to that manager piece. So you got the billboards around town, you got your Yellow Pages, but that manager is either good or bad at sales. Does the website show pictures of the product? To put plainly, Walmart has like 10 pictures of a gallon of milk when you go to show it. Do people who've landed on this website before me owning it, did they get the same level of experience Walmart thinks people need for a gallon of milk? If not, it probably stands to reason they've got some conversion problems. When I really started licking my chops is when you see those 2 things converge and they might say things like, well, we're struggling to rent units, we're struggling to raise our rates. Well, you found a couple big tenant acquisition gaps. Where I get scared is when you pull it up and it's, well, the rates are at or above market. I've seen ads in every platform. I love their content, I love their website, and somebody wants to buy it because they're struggling to lease up. At that point, I start to wonder, ooh, is there, is there a demand or a supply issue in this area? Because I think you're doing everything right.

Yeah, that makes sense. And you just reminded me of my favorite, uh, we go through this exercise, um, we, we definitely look at the website. We, we more so spend time on the, on the Google Business Profile. And my favorite Google Business Profile I've ever come across, um, you know, I had a picture of the facility. And then I had a picture of the rates, a picture of the side of the building with the rates painted on the wall. Oh, oh, okay.

Locked in.

But that wasn't the best. The best was the next picture, which maybe was the manager, I don't know, taking a picture of herself in the bathroom mirror, clearly for like a dating website or to text or just to text somebody. I don't know. But that was the third picture on the profile. Amazing.

Yeah, that would be some opportunity That's the shopping experience.

So that might be the bridge to this question. So you previously, when we've had you on, you told, I think in our community, we told, you told our students about a third of rentals coming from the website is a good number, right? So if we could confirm that sellers at zero, maybe because they don't have a website, What does that tell us in terms of opportunity? Is there a way to measure that opportunity or is there a way, is there an approach you take at least? I mean, I want to, no guarantees, not going to lock it in, but based on experience, what does that generally tell us?

Yeah, I would say the safest generalization is that if it's 0%, or if we start seeing like 10%, at that point, before I even look at the website's content, before I even look at the Google Business Profile, before I look at how good of a salesperson is you know, alexstorage.com, I know there's something broken there. There's something that we're not doing. It's probably not that the rates are crazy. It's probably just that the rates are hard to find.

Or the—

when I click rent, it is a form that I fill out and I wait for somebody to call me.

Hmm.

That I just know it's going to be there when I find it. As far as like more specifics, you know, generally speaking, if they start to, you know, Pull those levers. Should we see an increase? Absolutely. And that's when I start getting really excited about helping somebody and building like a case study. But it does vary per— by market. You know, if we increase the conversion rate 10%, but we're in a market that doesn't have a lot of people searching, it's not going to be as sexy as it is if, yeah, D.R. Horton built 500 homes in your backyard.

But from a modeling standpoint, let's say there's no, we've established it's a strong market, good median household income. There's no new developments coming in properly or to slightly undersupplied, right? Is it fair if the seller says, I'm going to use round numbers, I'm getting 10, I'm renting 10 units a month and I'm getting nothing from the website. Is it fair in my underwriting to Well, I'm gonna, I'm gonna put a website in place when I buy this thing and I'm gonna spend some dollars on marketing. So I should probably count on 13 units a month.

Is that fair?

Yes.

Yes. The only asterisk I want to add in there is that of the 10 they're getting over the phone, they're probably not accounting for ones that said, hey, I tried to rent online and I struggled. So there are some cases where, you know, the manager was so good at sales, but it turned out that, you know, a certain number of those were people who were only renting over the phone because every other avenue was shut.

So maybe, maybe 13 is excessive. Maybe I can count on 1 or 2 more that I missed.

I think that would be what you'd count on and we would, you know, hope for more.

Conservatively. Yeah.

Okay. Conservatively.

That's interesting. Yeah. And then what if I'm 95% full? I, we see this too. We'll either happen upon a facility that's 95% occupied.

Yeah.

No website, not spending money on marketing. Don't need to. We're 95% full. Crazy. That's, But you're right. Or I get to 95% because of my website and my marketing. In both cases, should I continue to market? Should I put it in place and market? Do I stop marketing at 95%?

Yeah. So 2 schools of thought here. And obviously, you know, markets have shifted, rates have shifted, but I think first off, ECRI. So once we're physically occupied, now we're stable. Now we're working on economic occupancy. We are doing things that inherently do have an attrition rate. So we're trying to raise the rates and now I need to have still maintain a strong engine so that I can backfill move-outs at these new rates. As I do that—

Using ECRI, which I meant for the listener, is the existing customer rental increase, right? So just raising rates on existing customers. So how— why is— tie that all together for the listener.

Yeah. So, you know, you've hit 95%, you know, you're doing well for round numbers. You have, say it's a 100-unit facility and you got 95 people, and now it's time to, you know, I'm going to raise the rates $5 or $10 or whatever algorithm I'm using to determine what that looks like. Well, as people naturally, or not in this case, unnaturally move out, maybe they're upset, maybe the price is now— the water's gotten hot enough, the frog wants to jump out. Now it's time for, okay, I have 5 move-outs and now I need I might be making more money, but now I've got this, I've created my own occupancy through raising my rates. So that would kind of be the tie.

I think you meant you, I've increased my vacancy by increasing my rates. Yes.

Yes.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So that should, that might scare a few folks, right? I don't want to lose customers. So I had 100 units, I had 95 paying customers. You told me it was a good idea to raise my rates by $5, but I lost 5 customers.

Why was that a good Yeah, I mean, a few ways to look at it. I mean, one, you know, as the market goes up, it's not that your expenses are going to stay stagnant, that county assessor's going to come by at some point and you're going to have a good old time with your local appeals process for your property taxes. But also too, I think there's this conversation about, you know, trying to get that NOI as high as it can be for a possible exit someday. You know, if you're leaving money on the table in multiplications, if we're going to be the guy who's 20% below market just because we're comfortable there.

Yeah. And 5 moving out with a $5 increase, you probably just broke even, right? But your street rate's a little higher. And usually what we find is that our revenue goes up even if we lose a few customers. But all we did was make room for a higher street rate customer that's looking for to rent our unit at the new higher street rate, which by the way, might be significantly higher than a $5 increase on the old rate, right? If the old rate was $90 and I took you to $95, but the street rate's $110.

Yeah.

Because that's what market is. You know, the, the math works itself out there, folks. As long as the occupancy or as long as the, the market demand is such that we can afford to lose a few units to increase the revenue. You know, that, that, that's the name of the game here. And that's what Alex's company Helps you guys with as well. So a seller with no website isn't selling you a problem. That's necessarily, to me, it's an opportunity. He's selling you a to-do list though. And every item on it's gonna show up in the revenue column. Unless you're spending a little money on a website and marketing. But believe me, that's gonna pay off, folks. Alex, true or false? Last one. Some storage facilities get more than 90% of their rentals from their website.

That's a lot.

Is that true?

It's true.

Wow.

Absolutely.

And what, what, what's the scenario where that happens?

Yeah, so it, you know, earlier we talked about how 33% feels, that, that feels like a good number. 33% of your new tenants come through the web. But we do see some people, we have a few customers who are in that 94, 95, 96%. And I think it just goes down to the nature of Of like self-storage. For a lot of people, this is not something they get into because they're excited to shake hands and kiss babies for 40 hours a week, right? Like this is a business that can encourage a lot of self-service. So when we see somebody above the 90%, what that likely means is that they have a very automated property and are in a market where that makes sense to do. So I'll shed some light on that. We've got an awesome customer in Kokomo, Indiana. who owns 2 beautiful facilities and he also owns a bunch of trampoline parks. Well, you're not going to believe which takes more of his time and has caused more gray hairs. It's trampoline parks.

I'm going to go with the trampoline parks. Yeah.

Yeah. We don't even need to talk about the insurance for trampoline parks.

Woo.

So for him, self-storage is something he wants to be in and he's good at, but he is not going to be able to be in self-storage if he has to appeal to the renters like my mama that I was mentioning earlier. He primarily focuses on like me who aren't going to be cause of labor cost. And on his website, actually, he doesn't even allow you to reserve a unit. You can only rent, you can only do the transaction right here, right now. But if you're looking for somebody to call you and take care of you over the phone, there's not even a button for that because he knows that's not an expectation he's going to be able to meet. So why open, why present that door? On the flip side, Market to Market. So this works in Kokomo, Indiana. We also have a client who is in Oak Park, Michigan, which is what you tell people when you don't want them to know you're in Detroit. It's on 8 Mile, like from the Oscar-winning movie. And yeah, 8 Mile is what it is. My mom's side of the family is from there, so I get to say whatever I want. At that facility, yeah, you can rent online, but you can't move in without talking to a manager. They're the ones who give out the gate codes. So for them, you know, they're never feasibly going to find this world where we can let everybody self-serve because it's just not a market that makes sense to do it in.

Trying to picture you on 8 Mile at like a rap battle with Eminem.

You know what I got into growing up is— well, that's for another podcast. All right.

Last question here. There is a book called Be Your Future Self Now. Have you ever read it or heard of I've not.

Okay.

It's a great read. It's by Dr. Benjamin Hardy. He's famous for writing books with Dan Sullivan, Who Not How, maybe you've heard of or read. Anyway, Be Your Future Self Now. Believe it or not, the beginning of the book is about MrBeast. Certainly you've heard of who he is, right? Okay. And the reason he writes about MrBeast is because MrBeast did what the point of the book is. That's why he's the kind of in the opening intro when MrBeast, who's a young guy, he's only 27 or 28. When he was in high school, he recorded 4 videos and scheduled them to be released into the future. He was a YouTube gamer, right? So he had a small 8,000-person following at the time watching him play video games. So one night he recorded these 4 videos, released one 6 months in the future, one a year, one 5 years, one 10 years, right? The 10-year was just released last October. 2025. What he did in those videos was he basically said, this is what I hope I'm still doing at those time intervals. And he set goals for himself. I hope I have this many followers, this, that, the other thing, right? When he hit publish on those, his life changed in that he knew he had to now go live up to those things. Kind of like Cortés burning the ships, your motivations change when there's no returning, you know, back to Europe. There was no return for him. He published All right. So now he's either going to be embarrassed or he was going to meet, meet, meet what he said he would do, right? Meet the, meet the goal naturally. And we've all heard this in sales and in life and, you know, growing up and it's great advice, right? If you don't have goals, if you don't shoot for the stars, you know, hit the moon, that we've heard all these things different, said differently. He actually did it. All right. And so in doing it, he crushed each goal. And so that's why I like to ask this question of my guests is if we got in a time machine, either a DeLorean or a hot tub time machine, whatever, which pick your choice. And we go 5 years into the future. Who is Alex Koller? What are you doing? Where are you? What's your life like? And what are you doing today to make sure you achieve Hmm, man, that's such a fun question.

Uh, so I, I think when it comes down to that, you know, I was actually thinking about this yesterday. Uh, I went to a, a local conference here in Knoxville called 865 Fest. Uh, we don't have like the biggest tech or startup community in Knoxville, Tennessee.

We're working on it.

Uh, but everybody gets together once a year and there's pitch competitions for emerging entrepreneurs and, um, like different, like backed or funded businesses. And being in that room, like full of people who are builders, people who are trying to build out something new and novel, and in a lot of ways help people. This wasn't just, you know, tools or SaaS products, software as a service. You know, people were building films for heat exchangers so that manufacturing has less downtime. I mean, some real practical stuff that was presented on stage. So I've been thinking about that. So I'm glad you asked. When I joined Storage Pub, we were at, you know, roughly 250 locations. I had to purchase my own laptop to work here. And eventually we got health insurance, which is actually a really good plan. Shout out to Tommy and the founders for hooking us up. And we're currently at 2,500. So when I think about where I am 5 years from now, I love talking to people and helping them and occasionally We find out, cool, you're a good fit for the, for what I'm peddling and we can do some stuff. This is an awesome opportunity. But what really gets me going is just general education consulting, helping the independent operator remain independent. And I think the best thing I can be doing 5 years from now is as we grow, I'd like to see Storage Pub get to a point where I've got a whole team of people and it's my job to help them do what I'm doing today. So I still talk with folks, but it's more about hopping on stage, hanging out on podcasts, and then also like doing kind of like sales training and, you know, how, how can we help more people today and affect storage more? That's where I really want to be 5 years from now and help StorageBug get to a point where that makes sense for a full-time role. Um, What I'm doing now, I think a lot of the things I'm doing now, one, kind of diving back in this year to like self-storage as an industry. So earlier this year I had a conversation and I walked away from it and I was like, man, that's the 100th time I've had to have that exact conversation about search engine optimization. And I don't want there to be 101st. And I kind of stopped and I was like, you know, it's time for me to go back to my roots. I need to be a student again. And all year long, I've just been trying to soak up every last piece of storage knowledge like I'm brand new. So making sure, I think, checking myself, keeping myself humble so that way I'm not giving you the expertise from 2024. I got to challenge myself with different viewpoints and continue to remain tapped into that so that the conversations don't get stale for me. But also remain relevant for everybody else. So that's been a fun journey. David over at Apple Storage wrote this insanely awesome, like, SSA recap blog that I've read a couple of times now. That type of stuff I think is really going to help me continue to grow. And then past that, just keeping an eye out for good folks to join the team here at StoragePub. We're not ready to grow out those, those acolytes yet, those, those lowercase c consultants, but I don't want it to be a job search when we get there. I wanna be able to hop on LinkedIn and say, hey, John, it's time. Can you hop on Zoom? I'd love to do a quick interview. And I'd like to have already known him and met him at one of these trade shows. Um, so watch out if you're other vendors, I'm definitely talking to your people for a reason.

Wow. I love it. All right, Alex, thanks so much for, for joining us. It's been such a great guest. Before I forget, how, how could people get in touch with Okay.

Thanks, Joe, for having me today. Really 3 ways to get in touch with me. One, alex@storagepug.com. That's the email address. If you prefer phone calls or texts, 865-413-4031. But if you don't remember either of those, if you just fill out a form on storagepug.com, I've got that on another screen, so I'll get with you as soon as possible.

So it's storagepug.com, P-U-G like the dog. Yep.

Little wrinkly dogs.

And is that your logo too?

Absolutely. It's, it's a, there's a fun story there.

If you find a pug, you're in the right place, folks.

Absolutely.

Hey, this has been, you know, first of all, you should, you should join storagemuggles.ai if you're not already in there. Heck yeah. And just to be part of the community and see what we're building. And we, we definitely need to have you back on in the, in the community on a, on one of our deep dive calls. And I'm even thinking You've been such a great interview. I'm even thinking about having you not at our next event because it's already set, but, you know, we're, we're putting on these workshops around the country. The first one is October 16th in White Marsh, Maryland, which I think you can find it on our website, but it's, it's a full-day classroom. We're going to take people to a facility we own, walk them around. But I'm even thinking about bringing you into one of those going forward because I just, I love your insights into the, into the website optimization, the management.

Yeah.

How that works. Anyway, folks, your, your website is the front door. And hopefully you just listened to Alex and heard from Alex as to how important that is. Because if nobody can find it, nobody can get through it, then, you know, you're completely left to, you know, the old school of hopefully they drove by you and know where you are, right? And don't forget to answer the phone and definitely, definitely don't miss any phone calls. Folks, thanks for joining us on Storage Moguls. Please like, subscribe, and share. If you've got anything specific that hit you today, share it. Remember, if you're in, if you're in this business and you're looking to find your first facility, you're going to want investors down the line. You wanna start sharing things like this. I used to say that on the Storage 100. If you were on YouTube watching those videos, you wanna share these podcasts, share these experiences so people know you are in the business. Also, don't forget to join us tonight, Monday Night Storage Show. With my co-host, Kristen Blunk. We're gonna talk about very, why your very first rental can own you long before it ever pays you and how storage handles a tenant who stops paying completely different. Again, that's tonight on YouTube. You can find both on storagemobils.ai. Folks, there is a seller out there right now who's ready. So stop watching, start moving, go drive for dollars. Definitely send the LOI. We'll see you next week.