The Self Storage Data Gap That's Costing Investors Money

A full market evaluation, population, completing supply, rate trends, growth signals. That used to take 2, maybe 3 hours, and you'd be pulling pieces of it from 3, 5, 7, sometimes 8 different websites, hoping you didn't miss the one number that mattered. My guest today built that tool that compresses that into minutes. And here's the thing that makes him worth listening to. He's not a software guy who's never owned a facility. He personally bought 11 of them first, and I love that. By the end of this conversation, you're going to understand why storage is a data business and why where you get your data determines your financing, your insurance, and maybe even your opportunities. I'm Joe Downs, and welcome to the Storage Moguls Podcast. My company has acquired over 20 storage facilities, which is over $70 million in assets across multiple storage niches. I've seen this business from a lot of different angles, educated hundreds of students, and learned firsthand who succeeds and why. And of course, that's what drove us to build storagemoguls.ai, which is an AI-powered community with the tools, the structure, and the guardrails to teach people how to buy their very first storage facility like bowling with bumper rails. And that's why we launched this podcast so that I could bring you guys like today's guest, the, the, the lenders, the brokers, the other industry pros, as well as the real people who have successfully purchased their own first self-storage facility. So you can hear their stories and learn this business from the folks living every day. Today's guest, Noah Starr, is both an industry pro and someone who's bought his own self-storage facilities. He is the CEO and co-founder of TractIQ, which is a market intelligence intelligence platform tracking over 70,000 self-storage facilities nationwide, folks. It's trusted by TractIQ, that is trusted by Brookfield, Public Storage, and even Nuveen. And be— but before he built the data, as I mentioned, he personally owned the facilities. He founded Star Equity in 2022 and acquired 11 self-storage properties across 4 states. And after underwriting billions in commercial real estate at Anheuser-Busch Holdings and Stonebriar Commercial Finance, he built his own mini empire. Noah, welcome to the Storage Moguls Podcast.

Joe, thanks for having me. That was an awesome intro. Excited to talk about storage and data and all of it. It's great to be here.

You know why I'm excited is because I, and I hope the listener feels the same way I do. Anyone who's done this first, And then built a solution around what most likely gave you fits and frustrations is someone who really understands the business and the plight of everything we're all going through. As whether you're buying your first self-storage facility or your 11th, 12th, or 24th, which, which for me would be my next one, we're still all intimately involved in the same thing with the same headaches and problems and looking for the best solutions. And you went through that first and then went out and built that for you, I'm sure, right? And then realized, hey, I can, I can build this. I think there's some people that are gonna want access to what I built here. Is that, is that roughly how you, how you, how this TractIQ came about?

Yeah, happy to give an overview on my journey. I'll just touch on that point briefly where I feel like the best products that are built in society come from people who have genuinely experienced the pain and have genuinely understood the industry and the pain points that they're trying to solve. So I think that gives us a leg up at TractIQ and why we still have so much to build, but why we've also made so much progress in a short period of time.

I believe it's, uh, the saying is necessity is the mother of all invention. And I feel like that's what you did here.

I think so.

No, before, before we get started here, I'm going to be asking you some true/false questions along the way. Here is your first one. True or false? Self-storage asset values have fallen by more than 40% from their 2022 peak. Is that true or false?

You know, questions like this, I think, demand really understanding the data, right? When we're talking about asset values, are you talking about the market value of all of the self-storage facilities in the United States, which we estimated to be about $450 to $500 billion last year. Are you saying that in 2022 that was really $550 billion and it's fallen, you know, 40%? So that to me is like anything with AI or data. I always like to really understand the root of what we're talking about, especially as it relates to cap rates and occupancies. And all of it, because it's so nuanced. I think wherever you're getting that source, 40% feels, I'd say, high. But I think for us, I would be able to give you after this call an actual number of what I think the total value of the asset class has been since 2022.

I love that, but your intuition is also on point. So the source of this is, is we're tweaking information from the State of Self-Storage Market Report. So the answer is false. You're right, it's high. That report is suggesting that they have fallen from the 2022 peak around 25%, not 40%. So it was one of those— I'm not trying to trick you, of course, but the reason for the question is there's the perception out there that it's fallen by more than 25%, and that's just simply not the case. And the data, the data that probably might have been supplied by you backs that up.

We provide the data for the Self Storage Almanac, so we're actively doing our valuation of the self-storage industry as of now for the 2027 edition.

Oh, well, I'll have to add the Self Storage Almanac as a source here for future episodes. Now that I know that you're providing that data, that's great. So let's start with basic math on how most people evaluate a storage market today, because from what we've seen at Storage Moguls and how we, we kind of teach and coach one direction, and I feel like we're doing it against the market, and I think we're doing it the right way. Because most of the folks we come across don't even realize that you really should be underwriting the market first. They just get right into the deal and they forget about the market. And our position is, I don't know how you can create a pro forma for a deal you're looking at buying if you don't understand the market first, because the market influences all of your assumptions. So to that end, a full market evaluation, which would be pulling population data, Competing supply, rate trends. That used to take 2 to 3 hours, maybe longer. And I mentioned in the opening, that could have been 5, 6, 7, 8 different websites you're going to, hoping you didn't miss something. And I'm thinking, Noah, that's probably what you were living through while you were in the process of buying your first facility and then next 10. Walk me through what that old— 2 to 3 hour process actually used to look like site by site.

Well, you know what's really interesting is what you just described is true, and I'm happy to do that, but it totally ignores what the actual operating performance of a given submarket is, right? Nothing that you just described talks about occupancy because it's been impossible to get that data. None of that describes NOI margins, Or achieve rate per square foot across all the different operators, right? You actually think about what makes, like, how do you determine the performance of self-storage in a hyperlocal or submarket area? In any other asset class in the world, you would talk about occupancy, you talk about the in-place revenues, you talk about expense ratios, NOI, all of it. In self-storage, we talk about supply per capita. We talk about Demographics, which are all really important. But I would say this kind of observation that I had a number of years ago led to TractIQ, where you kind of talked about this a little bit in the opening, but I used to be in the institutional investment world. I first got into self-storage back in 2018, financed a handful of CubeSmart and Public Storage ground-up construction projects, learned how resilient self-storage has been throughout cycles. How it's a bet on American mobility, American dynamism, and it made intuitive sense. I was basically in corporate America for, you know, 5 years. I had done a lot of really big real estate projects and other kinds of investments, but I'd always wanted to be an entrepreneur since middle school. So in April of 2022, I left my corporate job the same week that I got engaged to my now wife, the same week that we closed on our house. And the same week that I bought my first self-storage facility outside of Houston. So I don't recommend doing all of your life events in one week, and we could talk about the planning that went into that, but that sprung me into building a self-storage investment company that you talked about briefly, where I acquired 700,000 square feet across Texas, Tennessee, Arkansas, Michigan, and Ohio, had institutional investment partners, and focused on value-add. opportunities in undersupplied and growing markets. And I had this massive problem with data. You talked about the time savings, right? Yes. If you wanted to understand just square foot per capita and ownership breakdowns, you'd have to go into Google Maps, actually find every facility, maybe manually measure each one, try to track down the parcel owner and try to track down the actual owner rental rates. You go to everyone's website, Demographics. You, there's a lot of free tools available, but you'd have to go get all that. You call the city to go get the permit data, whether it's housing or commercial developments or storage developments, to really understand what does demand look like in a market. Not to mention underwriting the actual deal itself, whether it's the rent roll, the P&L, the occupancy stats report. All of that took a lot of time. But the problem I faced, and I'd imagine the problem a lot of listeners face, Is yes, it takes time to do that, but the data you have access to is so infinitesimal. It, it's so small relative to who you're competing against. When you're, Joe, if you're going to buy a $5 to $10 million property in a secondary or even maybe now a tertiary market, you're going up against Public Storage where now the NSA acquisition puts them in every single secondary and maybe even some tertiary markets. You're going up against really well-capitalized large operating platforms who have so much data at scale. So how could you compete with them on finding an off or an on-market deal if you don't have access to this data? So that kind of led me to build our own tool internally, and we actually stumbled onto TractIQ on page 10 of Google by chance. We wanted to license data from them to build our own thing and The founder of TractIQ actually passed away a number of years ago. So when we wanted to license data from them, they were like, what if you just acquired us and partnered together? So that's what we did originally to really bolster our investment company. And then people wanted to sign up and I felt really uncomfortable where I was competing with customers on deals. So I actually publicly committed to no longer buying self-storage facilities, more than 2 years ago in favor of building the best data company in the industry and really attack the problem head-on of, yes, we're going to have great demographics. Yes, we're going to have great rate data from websites and permit information, but what we really need is occupancy data. What we really need is achieve rate data. We really need to understand the fundamental performance of a market so that everyone can make better investment decisions. And that's what I've been really focused on for the last 2 and a half years.

That's fascinating. Quite a story. And I had no idea that TractIQ existed. I thought you and your co-founder just created it. So how did that go down? So you stumbled upon him and what were they doing and who were they?

So TractIQ was originally called SSDMS. It was founded in 2018, which is why we have data that goes back to 2018, by a guy named Tom Halliton. And he worked with a really great team of engineers to stand up the product before, unfortunately, he passed away, I think in 2021. So TractIQ kind of sat there. It was being maintained, but it wasn't really being invested in. And they had a very few number of customers until we took over in March of 2024. And at the time, we decided to really invest in data quality, really invest in our customers, our support, our technology to build the best data company in the industry. But the honest truth was when we bought TractIQ, it was so that we could make better investment decisions. But we just had a lot of people that kept signing up and put us into a position where, no, we actually need to go all in on TractIQ and genuinely build the best product that I as an investor needed.

That's, that's what a great story. Um, that's an even better story than I thought. So what was the process like? What was the pain for you like before that? You're out there trying to buy your first or second, maybe even your third facility, trying to put together all the, the data that you need. I mean, I, I— what's funny is even at Bellrose, we, we use your service, but we still have Spreadsheets, right? Where we're still pulling in some other data here and there and, and analyzing it. And now we're using a lot of AI as well. What did, what did the old process look like? I wanna, I wanna try to paint the picture for the, for folks that maybe are thinking about getting into this business and they wanna know what it's gonna be like. What does that process look like before TractIQ? What does it look like if we just, if I just subscribe to your service? Like what is the time savings? What are you aggregating for me that you, I used to have to do manually?

Yeah, I would put this into 3 different buckets, but we'll focus on the first 2: finding deals, underwriting deals, benchmarking your portfolio. So I'll start in that order. So finding deals, everyone can go look on the listing services to go find on-market facilities. That's pretty established. But what if you want to try to find off-market deals, right? Or even if you want to find all the on-market deals, you have to go to a bunch of different locations to do that. So for us, like what I used to do to try to track down owners was a combination of driving around to facilities or sending postcards and making phone calls with owner information. And when I was an investor, I actually sourced a 9-cap off-market from a 72-year-old owner who had index cards, all the things that you wish And what did I have to do? I had to find the storage facility. I had to do— find the parcel owner of the facility, which is usually an LLC. You have to then investigate who is the actual owner of the LLC, what is their contact information, right? That all takes a lot of time. And the way that this really works is not if you do it one time, it's if you send 1,000 postcards, right? Every single quarter or every single year, depending on your scale and your scope. And it that in and of itself can be a huge effort. With Tracked IQ, in terms of finding owners, we track over 72,000 storage facilities across the country. We're the official data provider for the Self Storage Almanac, and I am not joking when I say in 30 seconds you can build a custom list of all of the owners in Texas that are. Non-REIT-managed that haven't sold their facility for 10 years but have an upcoming loan maturity in the next 18 months, whose rates in the last 12 months are either down 20% and maybe there's new competition coming into that market. Ding, ding, ding for all the reasons why that owner might be wanting to sell. You can download that list in 30 seconds. And we've had groups in the last week, one just found a deal off market for $11. you know, $11+ million and another deal for $8 million just by using our owner data. So that's kind of like finding deals in and of itself is such a tedious process that takes a lot of time. And when you layer in our data, we can cut that into the fraction. But that's like bucket 1 before I go into buckets 2 and 3.

Pretty amazing there. That's a pretty handy tool. I remember when I started, that's Not at all how we started. We were buying lists of facilities and trying to sort in Excel, sort the REITs out and the institutions out and the multi— if somebody owned more than 3 or 4 or whatever, we just figured we wouldn't bother them. And then, we loaded them into, I think, Google Sheets or whatever for tracking and calling. But we were blind. We were literally dialing blind. And by the way, I love that you said you were driving around looking for storage facilities, and I hope all of my listeners caught that, and I hope all of our students caught that because it's the single number one thing I preach the most to everybody is go drive for dollars. All right, so that's bucket 1. Tell us what's behind door number 2.

Door number 2, we talk about underwriting, right? So you kind of painted the picture well of, okay, let's say now you have a deal. Let's say you're looking at a 40,000 square foot facility in Waco, Texas, and you want to know if this is a good market for you to invest in and a good property for you to invest in. So what do you need to do to do that? Right? You need to, of course, get the in-place data of the storage facility. You need to underwrite it, understand what's the current cash flow of that facility today, and then you got to build a projection model of what. is that cash flow stream going to look like in the next 5 years? If you come in, manage it with your own management company, or you hire someone else, maybe you're going to expand the facility, do value-add, whatever your plan is. How do you actually know what rents you're going to be able to charge in the future or today? How do you know what occupancy rate you're going to be able to stabilize to? What do you think? How do you know what your expenses are going to look like, whether it's property taxes or insurance or all of it? You need to build a projection model that is in a downward scenario going to protect you and be able to still pay the loan or do all the things you need to do while also creating upside opportunities for you to have a successful investment, right? And historically aggregating all of those data points in many ways could be impossible, whether it's occupancy or Achieve Rate data, unless you have a big portfolio or work very closely with large operators. But even just understanding what are the rental rates of all the competitors, going to everyone's website and looking on August 17th, which is when we're shooting this podcast, looking at every competitor's website today and saying that's the rate, I think is underwriting from 5 to 10 years ago. But today with seasonality, with daily rates, with promotions, with all the other things that go into a market, You don't want to look at what today's rate is. You need to understand what the last 3 years of that facility has done every single day, and that is factored into your projections when you're modeling revenue. So bringing in all of that data into one place is really how TractIQ started, and that's what we focus in on so that in 3 minutes I could look at any property in the country and generally have a good idea If like what my projection could look like on that facility, what the market dynamics look like, and if this is a, a good opportunity for me to invest in. And the last piece I'll say is we launched this a couple of months ago, but I mentioned occupancy and Achieve rate data. We now have that in TractIQ for more than $50 billion of assets across the country where you could look at a facility's historic occupancy since 2017. You could look at their historic revenue and each expense line item all the way down to NOI to really understand how has the competitor facilities, how have they performed in the last number of years relative to the subject property that you're looking at? So you can understand, is this an undermanaged property with a lot of upside? Is this a They're never going to be able to do these revenue numbers again because the market has been overbuilt and all the competitors' revenues have been dipping, right? All of that goes into really understanding what you're looking at with the goal of avoiding deals that don't work for you and won't achieve your goals and finding and focusing the ones that will actually make you money and be successful.

I have a question. So And I love that you have historic rates, and now you're saying you have historic— more than just rate data. Um, I, I understand if, if, uh, if a competitor or facility I'm looking at has published rates on their website, you're grabbing that information and you're grabbing it historically, right? How are you finding out about occupancy and revenue and expenses and How are we getting that data? I mean, that's the million-dollar question.

It's the impossible dataset. You have to understand, when we started TractIQ 2 and a half years ago, took over the company, the amount of people who told me that getting occupancy data would be impossible is dozens. How are you going to get operators to share? And this is, I think, when you take persistence from our team and curiosity and speaking and being relentless about solving a problem, we realized Well, how does multifamily get occupancy data? How do other asset classes get occupancy data at scale? And how do you get it in a way that's standardized and structured and correct? And that's where the CMBS market comes into play. So in our case, we actually partnered with a company called CredIQ that focuses on CMBS data, where now for all of these locations across the country, more than 4,000 locations, We now have their occupancy and their financial statements since 2017. So that is how we're getting this data. It's actually public data, but you have to, you know, be licensed with the SEC to be able to tap in to get this actual stream of data. And that has been such an unlock for our customers and for the storage industry, I think this year, where for the first time we now have access to a portfolio That's bigger than all the REITs and in all markets across the country.

So that's CMBS data and that's brilliant. And I think you said $50 billion of asset value across 4,000+ locations. And $50 billion out of how many billions?

I would say the storage industry around $450 to $500 billion, so to speak.

So roughly 10% of the industry you're able to really know everything about intimately. They're probably the larger facilities because they're CMBS loans, right?

Mostly primary and secondary markets, for sure.

Are you working on an unlock for the other 90%, the non-CMBS?

Of course. You don't know what's funny though, and I'm sure you've experienced this, anytime you make progress on a really important problem, People will be like, that's cool. So like, what about all the rest? Right?

Yeah, I'm asking you, what about all the rest?

You know, that data would require the industry coming together to actually share it in a way that protects everyone's anonymity, but also gives folks and operators and investors value.

It's gotta be a trade. There's a, there's an information trade that has to happen.

That's right. And hotels, the, you know, STR reports are standard there. So it's, it's a problem that has again historically been impossible. We've added 4,000 facilities. Now how can we add another 40,000 facilities? And that to me will take, that'll take some time. It'll take trust and it'll take us building a product and a service and a team that people would really be excited to participate in something like that.

Well, I'm glad to know you're working on it. Folks, that's the core idea right there, that storage is a data business and where you get your data from can determine your financing, your insurance, and you just heard it right there, your opportunities. So, you know, cutting a 2 to 3 hour research process down to minutes or even seconds is maybe what I heard. Doesn't just save time, it means you actually catch the things that used to slip through. Including deals you might not have seen. Now, true or false, top self-storage REITs are outspending independent operators on digital marketing by roughly 1,000 to 1. These questions are hard.

1,000 to 1, meaning a REIT will spend $1,000 for every dollar an independent operator will spend on marketing?

That's the way this question is being posed.

1,000 to 1. I think it'll depend which independent operators you pick. I would say that's way too high. I don't think it's 1,000 to 1.

All right. Well, according to the State of the Self-Storage Market Report, which is no self-storage almanac, the— I'm kidding. The top REITs spend $250 million annually on digital marketing and dominate the Google local search. Whereas independent competing for the independents competing for that same search terms, it is saying they're being outspent by 1,001. But that, that probably is just on the— let's see, this report notes that local search is one of the gaps that actually is closable. We'll get into that with AI in a minute.

But well, what I would like to do, and I can come back to you on this, but we actually released this a couple of weeks ago.

So for folks watching on YouTube, we've got a TractIQ report up.

Yep. So we looked at over 1,000 locations that have CMBS loans, and we actually looked at expense ratios, NOI margins by operator type. We looked at it across states, we looked at it across MSAs, and we actually— so you can even see we have expense ratios by state, by operator, all of this. So when you say to me like, oh, how much do REITs spend on marketing, digital marketing in this case, versus independents? I can actually show you, right? We'll break out marketing and you can kind of see like what percent of revenue all of these different facilities are spending on marketing, which is anywhere from 0.6% to, you know, call it 3%, give or take. But I have to think in here, I can come back to you. You can even see we have sophisticated versus non-designated versus REITs, and we have their expense ratios by all operator types. So I think I can come back to you with some data on, if you look at the sophisticated and non-designated groups versus the REITs on marketing spend, I don't, it's not going to be 1,000 to 1, but maybe In that they were referring to digital SEO spend.

It could be. And also when you add the other, because you're looking at the CMBS data, maybe as you add the rest of the dataset, it opens up a little more.

Exactly. And that's where it really, it always comes back to anyone who asks about self-storage, like, oh, should I invest in self-storage? Or it is so intentional, or it is so important that you focus on Like being really nuanced when we're talking about marketing spend. It's what kind of REITs is it? Managed stores or owned stores? What kind of markets? What kind of, who are you comparing it to? All that stuff.

You know what I'm learning, folks listening, I'm learning real time is I should, should be very careful with my true/false questions with the data guy.

100%.

No more true/false for you.

I just hate, I just, I just don't like being wrong, but I'm gonna learn from it.

No, no, I love it. Well, listen, I'm walking into the lion's den here with supposedly with data and getting chewed up and spit out.

Well, hey, those are their conclusions that you're doing correctly. So I'll just have to come out with some data to help on that. I love it.

I love it. We'll have to switch our source here too. All right, I want to understand how somebody ends up building a data platform for an industry because most tech founders I meet, have never actually owned the asset they're building software for. So you went the opposite direction most people would expect. Analyst, then acquisitions, then actual owner, then founder. And I think that order matters. So you had an econ degree from UT, Hook 'Em Horns, All-American lacrosse, Hall of Fame at UT 2024. What carried over from that into how you approach this business?

Are we talking about lacrosse in particular or all of what you just said?

All of what I just said. You got the econ degree, obviously very successful at lacrosse at UT. What did you draw on from those 2 things?

Yeah, I would just say one of our co-founders, Ethan Gallois, he's our chief product officer. We played lacrosse together at UT. We were co-captains of the team. So lacrosse has been such an instrumental part in my entire life, as we talked about earlier. Work ethic, persistence, working with a team around a common goal, leadership, all of that comes from sports and lacrosse in particular for me. And then economics and business and entrepreneurship, I studied all of those in college. And thank goodness I studied economics. You know, at the time in school, I remember, and I have to think there's a lot of college students now really curious about what major should they pursue. For me, I'm so glad I did economics and business because my entire job now is all around data, is around, you know, how should we think about the future performance of an entire asset class, real estate in general, all of it, and being able to go all the way from high-level macro data insights to I can look at a single deal in your market and be able to communicate ideas. All of that has shaped me in really important and profound ways. But really all of what I've been doing, I've wanted to be an entrepreneur since middle school. I read books around about Steve Jobs, about all of the startups during the dot-com bubble, All the way through the Great Recession. And I also come from a family of entrepreneurs. My dad is and was an entrepreneur. He started his own investment company when he was 27. My grandpa, my mom's dad, was an entrepreneur in the food distribution business. And then my dad's great-grandpa was also an entrepreneur in the clothing business. So I come from a long line of entrepreneurs, and I have to think all that had to do with why I also wanted to be an entrepreneur. But I tried to set my professional life up to put myself in a position so that I'd be able to take a leap of faith and become an entrepreneur, to go into the arena like Teddy Roosevelt, who was my favorite president. And all of that shaped who I am and who I was and why I wanted to do everything I could to try to not just become an entrepreneur, but a successful one.

Man in the arena is the quote I have on my wall. And I'm gonna give you a little PSA. I actually have an hour left. There's a, I think it's only 2 parts Netflix series on Teddy Roosevelt that is out recently. Phenomenal. And you know, he made mistakes and he learned from them. It's really interesting to, you know, we only ever hear about the, the, uh, the most, uh, or the accomplishments of Teddy Roosevelt. You don't hear about the mistakes he made, and he made plenty of them, but he learned from them and then, and got back up and kept going. It was very interesting. Some of what you're saying there along the way, uh, sparked a couple questions in my head. Was there ever a deal when you were in your— what, what period of time were you buying 11 deals? Was that over 2 years or 3 years?

'22 to 2024.

Okay, so, so 2 years, pretty, pretty good activity, by the way, during COVID Wow. Were there any deals you lost that you're kicking yourself in hindsight because of bad or missing data? And/or are there any deals you won that you wish you didn't because of bad or missing data?

100%. Transparency is our number one company goal, and I think it starts from me. Why also did we start TractIQ, right? I got involved in a lot of deals. Some of them did extremely well. That 9-cap that we sourced off-market from that owner, I flipped it within 6 months at a 5 cap. We did extremely well on that deal. There were some other deals that we did really well on. There were then most deals that did, eh, not good, not bad. Maybe there was a minor return. And then there were some deals that did really badly. And people, I think, in our space don't talk a lot about bad deals. I try to talk about bad deals. We'll get to the data, but why did I get involved in those bad deals? But when you go through it and you have capital calls and you have performance issues and you have lender conversations, it is incredibly stressful, anxiety-inducing. It's as real as it gets. And to me, those are the moments that matter the most to demonstrate if you're a genuine person and you have good integrity. Because those are the moments that really show your true character. So I've tried to do that in the best way possible. But why did I get involved in those deals? You kind of talked about it a little bit. I was acquiring in a really crazy time. This is the post-COVID boom of self-storage where you now in 2022 and 2023, you had historic high rates across the country, historic high occupancies. Across the country and historic low cap rates and interest rates across the country. In hindsight, was buying self-storage in 2022 or any real estate in 2022 or 2023 a good idea? No, it wasn't. There's a lot of things outside of my control, whether it's interest rates, whether it's macro demand drivers, whether it's buying a deal at a 4 or 5 cap. that cash flow at the time. But now, if you're going to sell that deal for a 6 cap, even if performance hit or slightly was below your projections, there was not much you can do about it. So that's where timing really comes into play. But also where I made the most mistakes was focusing to what you said earlier on the facility. Less around the market. So this facility was 96% occupied. This facility grew revenue 10% year over year. This facility had a really good tenant base. This facility was cash flowing. What about the new facility that's about to open across the street? That's 90,000 square feet. What about all of the slowdown in multifamily and a lack of new housing developments coming into the market? What about the fact that when I— there's one market in particular, when I bought it in 2022, there were zero REITs in my trade area. Now there are 6, right? What happens? Or how are you— those are all the mistakes that I made, was not being really dialed in into understanding new competition or even understanding what other facilities around me are on the market. How much more institutional is this market going to get? All of those led to me making some mistakes where I think I've gone through the trials and tribulations of what it means to have a bad deal. I really get it. And that is why we work so freaking hard to make sure the data is right and that all of our customers and the industry have the right data so that they avoid bad deals, right? And that's like the number one thing. I hope people find off-market deals. I really do. But I would rather them find the right deal and avoid— it's not about finding an off-market deal. I want you to find a deal that does not make you lose money and lose sleep. Like, find a deal that cash flows in the markets that work, that will match your goals, that will actually give you the life that you're here to build and to avoid the deal that's in an oversupplied market with a ton of new competition and occupancies dipping and achieve rates dipping. And we want to make sure you avoid those deals.

Yeah, that's, that's a great, not just point, but soliloquy you just gave there because yeah, sure, the timing was bad, right? We know that now, hindsight, By the way, Bellrose, everything you just said, we're living through and have lived through. There's so many ways, and we— this, we teach this to our students all the time. There's so many ways to hide data or to omit data when you're in a transaction, if you're the seller, I mean, or to color something looking this way to make it look like this is what the facility is or will do or does or whatever. And To have the data you are providing, to be able to slice and dice it and look backwards and forwards and sideways and 3-dimensional in some cases, that is such a game changer for folks like you and I who can appreciate that having lived through what we can now look back with hindsight being 20/20 and say, ugh, we made a mistake. We didn't make a mistake in the moment. We did the best thing. I'm sure you did what we did.

Yeah.

We're doing the best thing with all the knowledge and most the best information we have available to us. But even then, there were still ways to hide what was going on in the industry or that or that market or that or that facility itself. And that's again why it's so important to understand the market. You know, the old school and the way sometimes is still being taught is or the the business to new folks is oh you just could you know buy you buy it just goes up and it's like well no it doesn't just go up. There's a lot that goes into this. And by the way, what am I paying for it? How am I financing it? And what are the assumptions I'm making to achieve whatever you're asking for in price or cap rate? So having something like AttractIQ to help us slice and dice that data is just, it's such, it's like having AI today, whereas you didn't 5 years ago even for most people to To start marketing campaigns or whatever you're doing. It's it's it's the assistance that we need when you don't have when when you don't live in the market and you don't have twenty years of data in the market and you're not an owner in that market yourself. You know that that that's that's the tool that you need that's that was missing for a lot of us. And again, the industry has changed. You know, it used to just be we'll teach you how to buy it and you'll be fine and you'll sell it later for more. Well, it doesn't always work that way anymore. The the business is crowded. There's a lot of Wall Street. Money in here. You know, it's just a different business today in the last 3, 4 years than it was 5, 6, 7, 8 years ago when I even first got into it. So, and folks, how you get into this business, whether it's through underwriting or through ownership, or through building the tools other people use, like Noah, the path proves the same thing. You don't need a storage background to start. Either. So that's what one of the things I love about where this business is headed for someone who's new is they have all the tools now between Storage Moguls, between TrackedIQ. I mean, the information is out there, the people are here, they're willing to help and able to help in a way that wasn't possible before. I feel like the, the industry has matured at the, at the beginner level, if that makes sense. And I know you Your clients are REITs all the way down to someone buying their first facility. But that's the state of the industry today. It's actually matured and the playing field, thanks to companies like you and people like you, is leveling off. If you're a first-time buyer, you still don't have the capital stack of public, but now you've got the data that they're operating with. And now you've got a lot of the tools that Noah and I didn't have. 5, 6, 7 years ago when we first started doing this. True or false? How many homes sell each month in a given market has almost no bearing on the self-storage occupancy trends there.

I'd say that's false.

That is false. Finally, we agreed on one. Per the State of Self-Storage Report, housing turnover actually has a 0.58 correlation with changes in average REIT occupancy, which is a meaningful relationship. So when home sales pick back up as rates ease, that wave of deferred moves feeds directly into the storage demand. It's exactly the kind of signal that shows up in the tracked level data before it shows up in your leasing office. All right, here's a fear I think almost every first-time storage buyer has and doesn't say out loud. And, and I've asked other guests this before, and I'd love to get your take on it. I'm gonna overpay for it. Or, I'm going to buy into a market that's already saturated, or, and I'm not going to find out till it's too late. I don't— that's not a paranoia. It's a healthy paranoia if it is paranoia. But it's, it's— gosh, I think it's one of the first things that we hear, we hear from folks who are new is they're worried about the deal going bad because they just don't have the information or they don't know how to understand the information. And sometimes that even comes down to research that looked complete but wasn't. Because if you, if you're, if you're a member of Storage Moguls and you do what we say, you know, whether you use your service or do it manually the old way, you're probably going to end up with complete information if, if you do what we say. But most, a lot of folks out there don't have that playbook. So I could see where there's a lot of consternation, right? Because I can go to, you know, first of all, we live in the information age. You can find anything on YouTube or AI. So I can go, if I find the wrong person, I can find someone says, oh, you need to know the supply index and, you know, look at your competitors' rates and, and that's all you need to know. Right. And if I follow that piece of advice, well, I've got some information, but it's not complete. And a healthy skeptic looks at that and says, okay, well, there's 2 pieces of data, but what don't I know? And I think that's the fear that a lot of people are having. And it's a good fear. It's a healthy fear to have. How does TractIQ remove that fear? Walk us through specific market data, even where the data tells one story, but the naked eye or the uninformed eye sees something else. Like, how does your service provide me all of the information that I don't even know that I need? Like, what does that process look like? And how revealing is it to someone who's just using this for the first time?

So with everything that we will ever talk about at TractIQ, it's everything is trust but verify, especially in this age of AI. And we have an AI connector, so you can actually connect TractIQ's data to any AI tool that you use, which is awesome. And you could even ask Claude or ChatGPT to trust but verify everything and show all the work. I think for us, it really comes down to, is the data that TractIQ providing accurate? And comprehensive and trustworthy, and then what else do I need to do to verify it in due diligence? And what other things am I missing? And generally, when you're even working with AI or any consultant, right, asking all those questions can get you a long ways. But at least for TractIQ, you put in an address, any any property in the country, you'll get the demographics, you'll get the rates for all the competitors, you'll get the new competition for storage. You'll get housing, all the new housing coming in, or all the new commercial developments coming in. You can see a flood zone map, the traffic counts, and then if there's CMBS facilities in the area, you'll get occupancy and achieve rates and full P&Ls for all those in the same workflow in a minute. And then, you know, so if we're providing all of that data to you instantaneously, The exercise can, I think, instead of focus on how do I get all this data, it's how do I verify all this data and how can I spend time on the most important insights the data tells me or the most important omissions the data tells me? And that's where I think the opportunity still lies for investors where you have a foundation of really great information. What is that information telling you? And to your point, where can you disagree, right? Let's say for instance, you're looking at a site in Austin, Texas, and in the 3-mile trade area, the square foot per capita is less than 7. The rate trends across the competitors over the last year are up 20% year over year for both Webb and Street. Let's say that there's a huge new housing development, 1,000 units, you know, $500 million coming in, is supposed to deliver next year. Right? All of those are good. But what if a new storage development is about to break ground and you see that in TractIQ? And what does that do to your underwriting? Maybe it scares you off. What you can do and where the opportunity exists is something like, well, let me call the city and verify if that project's actually coming in. Let me also call the developer. of that facility, which we have the information on, and verify that facility is coming in. And let's imagine you do call the city and you do call the developer and they say, you know what? We've decided not to do storage. You now have an edge over everyone else where you went and verified that, oh, that facility actually isn't coming in. So what does this mean? It means now the rates are up 20% year over year. It means that the occupancy is looking good. It means that this market actually Maybe has another three to five years of really good runway because there's not new competition coming into your hyperlocal market. That in and of itself, you can understand is an opportunity that other people are now not seeing, but you're seeing it because you're taking the initiative, you're taking the data that everyone has, and you're going a step further. So there's a lot of opportunities that exist like this, and but it always comes down to trust but verify. That development site, that tract that you said was about to break ground was probably correct when we put it, when we got that update from the developer 6 months ago, 3 months ago. But something could change, right? Things change really fast. Financing changes, macro environment changes, everything. You know, you can't predict the future with 100% certainty. And, you know, but even I'll take this a step back and you think of the stock market. Right. Compare the information at your disposal when you go buy Apple versus you go buy a storage facility in America. It's night and day. You're going to have historic earnings for decades. You're going to know all of their competitors. You're going to know market share. You're going to know their entire P&Ls. You're going to know management commentary for the last years. It's all going to be embedded in your AI. You're going to know bid-ask. You're going to know pricing, liquidity, all of it for just that one company and all of its competitors. In storage, we are so far from that where there's still information asymmetry that we are trying to solve. But does that mean you can't make money by trying to figure out when the right time to buy Apple is? Of course not, right? Of course there's still money to be made in the stock market. That's why it's used by now more and more Americans every year. So That's, that's how I like to think about it. But we still, as an industry, you still compare buying a stock on the New York Stock Exchange to buying a storage facility. That's the gap that I'm trying to solve.

I love that. I want to, for the, for folks at home who keep hearing maybe some jargon, I'm hoping you can break down for me. So I know you're providing things like population density per mile, households, renter percentages, median household income, poverty levels, just naming some of the ones, right? When we talk about tract level, right, which is what you guys— that's how you measure it. What does that mean? Can you break that down for someone who doesn't know? What is a tract level when we're talking about, you know, your neighborhood size census units?

Depends how deep you want to go. But in terms of demographics, if you drop a pin around your house, and you say how many people live within 3 miles of your house, How is— how are we able to tell that? Right. And that's kind of what you're asking is, okay, for us at TractIQ, tract coming from census tract, the census reports data. The smallest level it reports is a block group. Then they'll report census tracts, then they'll report zip codes and counties. And all of this feeds into demographics. So the smallest level that the government actually provides is what's called a block group. And this is— could be a mile, it could be— depends how big it can be. In more dense areas, it'll be much smaller in terms of total size. And then in, you know, more rural locations, they'll be bigger.

Now you're saying the government— is this— does this have to do with literally like our voting tracts or precincts and districts? Is it the same?

So when the government does the census every 10 years, but then they update it every year. They will actually do a survey of the entire country at the block group level to try to say, okay, at the block group, here's how many people live in this area. And then you can derive all the demographic profiles around all of those locations. So for us, really what a storage person or storage investor's trying to do is they're trying to say within 1, 3, 5, or 10 miles, Or a 5, 10, 20-minute drive time around this point? What is the demographic or market profile around it? We're able to provide all of that because we go super granular to the block group level from things like the census and others to be able to provide a holistic demographic dataset.

When you say block, do you mean like a city block, that type of thing?

No, I mean like a block group.

How many blocks equal a tract, or how many blocks would there be in a 3-mile Radius of my facility?

It'll depend. Not all block groups are created equal. So I think this is a visual thing where I could show you what it looks like. But, uh, yeah, super granular demographic stuff that we're going into here.

Yeah. And I understand, and I don't want to get too technical. I just wanted folks to understand where, where is, what's the source of the data? Like, where is this coming from? Because they're going out, you know, if they're doing it manually, they're going out to different websites. Are they pulling the same information that you're pulling? Is it as accurate? You know, that type of thing. It sounds like maybe it's not, right? If I'm getting the free information.

Well, it'll— it depends. If you're talking about just demographic data, we do our own analysis around a given point to determine how many people live within that radius. And that's where lots of different demographic providers could differ as it relates to storage facilities, right? In terms of website prices, right? We'll get that, those pricing updates every single day from the website, right? So if you're going to the website and we're going to the website, it should be the same. If you're trying to get parcel information of who the owner is at the parcel level, right? All of that data is going to be correct and, you know, is publicly available. But then you, we layer that with other datasets like the CMBS dataset, like all the deals that have been put in by brokers. We have over $570 million of deals in TrackIQ right now, right? So we'll layer in public data with private datasets in the same ecosystem.

Amazing. We're going to have to get you, uh, onto— into the Storage Moguls community and do some, you know, demos and break this whole thing down because there's a lot of stuff I know you want to show visually. It just doesn't translate well to a podcast, but You know, I don't— I think of all of the folks that I talk to out there, the folks we, we've educated, students, whatever, I think— and, and I'm gonna throw us in this category, Bellrose— I'll bet you we're using— I'll bet you the range of, of use of what you're providing is probably 10 to 30% of, of actual— I'm just going— I'm listening to it. I'm looking at You know, I've done some research on what you guys can do. I've talked to Jack a lot about it, and I know we're just scratching the surface of the data that you're collecting and that's there for use and analysis. I just, I know we're only scratching the surface of it. How do folks get in touch with— what's the right way to get in touch with you? And I don't want to get into what does it cost and all that. I'm sure it might depend. I'm sure you have different levels of service. Is that right?

That's right. Yeah, you can reach out to me on LinkedIn at Noah Star. You can also come check us out at trackediq.com. Come book a demo, come talk to us. And then our pricing transparency, number one company goal, right? Our pricing starts at around $300 a month for our pro tier, and then it could scale upwards depending on, you know, users and what kind of data access you want. We then also work with really great masterminds like yourselves where if, you know, money is the reason that you're unable or can't get access to great information to make sure you're doing, you know, the right investments and finding the right deals, come talk to us. We generally want to work with people and we think that good information, accurate information should be accessible to everyone. So, you know, encourage you to come talk to our team if that's an issue.

That's great. So, LinkedIn or trektiq.com, book a demo. There's a link there, I think, right?

That's right.

Wonderful.

All right.

Well, before we wrap up here, I have to ask you the question I ask everybody. You've heard of the book, Be Your Future Self Now. And of course, MrBeast, in the beginning of the book is about MrBeast. And so, let me tell you, Why he's the most followed person on YouTube. Noah, just briefly. So when he was 17, and this is only about 10 years ago, he's a young guy. He was a YouTube gamer and he had about 8,000 followers watching him game on YouTube. But this one night, and I think it was October of 2015, he decided one night instead of studying for a test, he was thinking about his future and he recorded 4 videos that night. One video was set to be released in six months, the second in a year, five years, ten years. He recorded them all that night, and he set goals for himself. And I hope in six months I'm doing this, and one year I have this many followers, and five years, and ten years, and I better still be doing YouTube. And who knows? And it got pretty reflective as well. And but what he did because he recorded them. And then he scheduled them for future release dates. He essentially did what Cortez did, and he burned the ships. He said, "I'm putting it out there publicly that this is who I'm going to be on this date." So if somebody checks in on that date, he's either successful or a failure. What happened? He blew away like thousandfold every single. Benchmark he set for himself in those few, you know, every one of those goals. And the reason is, and this is what the book is about, when you set that publicly stated accountable goals, when you set those for yourself for the future, you now have to live up to them. So the point is, Dr. Benjamin Hardy, the author, is his point in the book is you need to actually start living that today.

Right.

Being— doing all the activities and the things that that person 1 year, 5 years, 10 years from now would have had to do or is doing. All right. So the question I ask my guests now is, and we're not going to do them all, so I just— I picked the 5-year window. If you got into a time machine and you went into the future 5 years and, you know, had an out-of-body experience looking at yourself like Michael J. Fox, who are— who do you see? Who is Noah Starr? What is he doing? Where is he? Does he still live in Austin? Does he still own 11 facilities? Is he, is he still on Trek IQ? You know, who is he? What is he? And what are you doing today to make sure that that's the person you see in that environment 5 years from now?

Yeah, it's an interesting question. And I think everyone, if you haven't done this exercise, I think it's so valuable. So important. I did something similar many years ago. And so if you asked Noah Starr 5 years ago, Where would you be in 5 years? I definitely wouldn't say being in charge of a self-storage data company, but what I would've said is I am going to leave corporate America to be an entrepreneur and ideally be married with my wife and potentially a healthy kid. I would've said something like that. And I talked earlier about setting up my career so that I almost have to be an entrepreneur. Because I'm gonna put all of the plans in place to make sure that happens. I totally subscribe to that notion. I think 5 years from now really starts with, I'm so grateful for where I am right now. Like in this moment of time, you know, I could talk to myself when I was in middle school, which I'm probably, you know, 11 to 13 years old, which is, gosh, you know, 17 to 20 years ago. And said, okay, you're going to be the CEO of an amazing data company in real estate that has really excited customers, really excited employee base, really exciting roadmap. And you're genuinely, I think, making a difference in a really important space. At the same time, you're in a happy marriage with a beautiful, healthy daughter. I would've said, sign me up. So I do want to take stock of, I do feel really grateful. And 5 years from now, I think, you know, I want to be an incredible father. I never want to miss a game or a dance recital that my daughter does. I hope she's healthy and I hope I have a really great marriage. On the company side, we're building TractIQ for the long haul. We're not VC-backed. We're a founder-controlled company. I think we've been operating it well from the beginning and we've set ourselves up to continue growing in a responsible way that also allows us to add tremendous value to the self-storage industry. So our mission is to build the source of truth for self-storage so that no real estate or no investment or no operating decisions are ever made in the dark in the entire industry. We're going to keep building towards that. And, you know, so I say all that to say, we don't— I don't want to sell the company. I don't want to be retired, and I want to continue doing work that I find Inspirational, passionate, and excited about.

I love that you've already done this exercise for yourself. That's— Noah Starr, you are a star. As far as Mr. or Dr. Benjamin Hardy is concerned, I would say you are a star. No, I love that answer. That's great that you've done it. And it sounds like you've achieved— see, that's the thing. You just never know. Like, you achieve some of the things that you thought you would, And you were probably doing those things back then. And you also achieved something that probably wasn't in your plans, right? And that's MrBeast could not have imagined that he'd be where he is. His goals were so embarrassingly pitiful compared to where he ended up. And I say that in a good way and out of a ton of respect for him. You know, he didn't even set his goals that high. He set them nowhere near what he actually achieved. But But, but because he set goals, he actually was able to achieve and far up for, you know, 10x, 100x, 1,000x what he, what he wanted to. And, and it seems like you're on that path as well. So, folks, Noah's whole path proves the point of this episode. He didn't start as a data guy. He started as a first-timer buying and, and, and piecing together the same scattered information you're dealing with right now. I'm dealing with right now. And he built The Fix because he needed it for himself. Again, necessity is the mother of all invention, and storage is a data business. And where you get your data from determines your financing, your insurance, and your opportunities. Just remember, folks, every week on Storage Moguls, we're covering the full storage verticals: self-storage, boat and RV storage, pro storage, industrial outdoor storage, truck parking, small bay flex, light industrial, all of it. So please like, subscribe, and share. And here's why that share matters. When you share this episode, you're telling everyone in your network that you're in this business. And I tell you every week how important that is. So continue to share because that signal goes a long way. If you are not a free member of storagemoguls.ai, I don't know why not. storagemoguls.ai. There's tons of information there. We don't ask for a credit card. It's free. You should join it. Folks, there is a seller out there right now who's ready to sell. So stop watching, start moving. Drive for dollars. Send the LOI. We will see you next week.