I Bought a FAILING Self Storage Facility

Self storage is one of the hottest asset classes in commercial real estate these days and I'm excited to get my hands on my first one right up the road from my office here in Nashville. However, this storage facility certainly isn't...without its issues. Today, my partner, Jacob, and I will dive into our first month of owning the self storage facility and what we're planning to do with it over the next few years. Originally from Memphis, Tennessee, Jacob Greer has built a thriving business rooted in customer service and community connection. As the founder of 6th Man, a moving company established in 2013, he has dedicated himself to alleviating the stress of relocation through customized solutions and exceptional care. With a passion for helping others and a foundation of family values, Jacob continues to bring a people-first approach to his work, ensuring every client feels supported during one of life’s most challenging moments.

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Key Takeaways:

• Tyler and Jacob bought a failing self-storage facility for $1.7 million, with the goal of turning it around through operational improvements.

• The facility was advertised as 95% occupied, but was actually only 66% occupied when they took over. This was a significant discrepancy.

• The property had a poor reputation with many negative reviews, so Tyler and Jacob plan to focus on improving customer service and rebuilding trust.

• They see opportunities to add 30-40 additional storage units, which could increase the property's net operating income by 30-40% within 12-24 months.

• They plan to be relatively stabilized by the end of the year, and may be able to finish the project in 2-3 years instead of the initial 5-year timeline.

• Key next steps include conducting a cost segregation study, improving operations, raising prices, and deciding whether to keep the existing business name or start fresh.

• Overall, the focus is on operational value-add strategies to turn around the failing facility, rather than major capital expenditures.

About Your Host:

Tyler Cauble, Founder & President of The Cauble Group, is a commercial real estate broker and investor based in East Nashville. He’s the best selling author of Open for Business: The Insider’s Guide to Leasing Commercial Real Estate and has focused his career on serving commercial real estate investors.

Episode Transcript:

Tyler Cauble 0:00

This episode of the commercial real estate investor podcast is brought to you by my cre accelerator mastermind, where you'll get access to my step by step investment blueprint, essentially a library of resources on how to invest in commercial real estate. You'll get connected to a supportive community of other commercial real estate investors that are doing projects just like you. You'll get personalized coaching and feedback from me every step of the way. Go to www.crecentral.com to learn more. Welcome back to the commercial real estate investor Podcast. Today, we are going live with a pretty interesting series that my buddy Jacob and I are kicking off. I bought a failing self storage facility with Jacob. Jacob and I bought a failing self storage facility. We're going to talk about why, because not every asset that you want to buy in commercial real estate is stabilized. If it if there's a little bit of room for you to make some improvements, then that means that there's probably a lot of value that could actually be created. Jacob has been a buddy of mine for years. He's actually basically on the board of my company. I'm kind of on the board of his company as well. Through the Entrepreneurs Organization, we're in each other's forum, and Jacob owns a moving company here in Nashville, and so we're actually deploying a strategy that I really love when it comes to commercial real estate investing, which is kind of hacking the system, right? So instead of just coming in, hiring a self storage management company, treating this just like a pure third party investment. Jacob owns a moving company, so he's got a built in clientele already that's going to be needing storage. He's been on the what is it? The you've been a member of the Tennessee Self Storage association for a decade, yeah, for a decade, and he's been rocking and rolling with sixth man for over a decade as well, right? So, Jacob, that was a brief background on you, but tell us a little bit more about yourself. Yeah, pumped about the opportunity to talk about this. We are, you know, in month one of a takeover of a property, day 20, if you will. So that's the fun, the most fun month. Yeah, it has been story worthy, I think, so far, you know, as far as who I am and what I do, yeah, I own a local logistics company. We focus on household moving, mostly commercial projects as well. About 80% is residential, home to home. About 20% is commercial. We do a lot of different things for businesses, whether it's moving businesses from A to B or final mile, we really find a good sweet spot in large format delivery. So we take anything that takes two people to move, getting it across the threshold, like white glove is what is considered or final mile services. But this is something I've been doing for clients for, yeah, let's say 2015 I started doing storage. We've been in a traditional model that is what you call vault storage, where you have these big wooden boxes, you fill them up and you stack them up two or three high. So this is our first endeavor into what you would call a self storage. Yeah, we're excited because this is something that he and I have been talking about doing. Talking about doing for years, because it's, it's just the next step for having a moving company, right, is buying the places where you're actually going to be storing everything, because it's, it's that vertical integration that everybody wants when it comes to their business, comes to real estate investing. So it's, it's going to be, hopefully, the first of many. I mean, this is a model that that we can go out and prove in many different markets. As Jacob, you know, looks to expand his business outside of Nashville as well. So let's, let's dive into a little overview of the site here first, so you can kind of get an idea of what we're looking at. So here it is, up here in Madison. It's, you know, probably, what, 12 minutes north of downtown Nashville. It's actually relatively close, about two blocks away from my Madison station development that's right here in the center of of the screen there. That's a 32 acre site that I've got a partner on, and we are master planning it for about 2 million square feet of new construction commercial space. So one we already knew that that project was happening, so we were able to work on it. Jacob actually lives not too far up the road as well, so it's a very easy commute for him to get to work now, but Madison is a very quickly turning around part of town. It's kind of been forgotten about for the last 30 years, give or take, but from this location, you're only 12 minutes to downtown. It's actually closer to downtown Nashville than green hills is. So you can tell it's only a matter of time before it really starts to head this way, and it really already is. So zooming in on the side here, it's really, it's several parcels, so it's this grass strip here on the left, and this small building. How big would you say that building is like 400 square

Speaker 1 4:48

feet. It's probably closer to 1800 1800 square feet.

Tyler Cauble 4:51

Yeah, that one is already kind of built out on the inside, but it doesn't look built down on the outside, yeah, which could be used, you know, we've talked about. Putting it up on a Vay and doing photo shoots. And, yeah, I think there's a lot of potential there. It is a blank canvas. And if you see that big building to the left of that grass parcel there, that's the new at&t building. So what the small building is that we took ownership of is the old at&t Switch building. So literally, has brick Foundation, great bones, but it was only used to put operator switches into it. So it's kind of cool to see what, what you know, the time travel of a very small brick building and now next door is there, you know, their main traffic, and where all the lines connect? Oh, at&t. How quickly they grow up. Yeah, they're watching them. That's for sure. I'm getting fiber. So here it goes, yeah. Here we go. Yeah, that's right, 18. T's right next door. So if we don't have good internet here, then what is the point this silver roof line right here is all of the units. We've got 105 self storage units in there, all but 10 on the outside right here at the bottom are actually climate controlled. We it also does this little dog leg right here. So we own a good portion of this lot. You can see there's some vehicles parked there today. So kind of some, you know, vehicle parking, industrial outdoor storage that's going on there. We were planning on keeping that, but Jacob and I were actually talking about other things that we might be able to do about that. So we'll get into that here in a little bit. But we bought it for 1.7 million, and here's where things get interesting. We started doing our due diligence, and it was tough for us to really understand why it was actually worth 1.7 million. I came closer to, yeah, it's probably 1.5 give or take, based on everything that the the owner is giving to us, but they wouldn't negotiate. And sometimes that's just part of buying commercial real estate is you're going to have to accept the price if you want to get the property to us. It's actually worth way more than 1.7 because of the strategy that we're going to be deploying here, which we'll go into detail on today. You can see here, it's got some signage out front. There's a little office right there. All of the units are kind of tucked in immediately behind the office. We actually bought this building too, so we do have a tenant that's in that space as well. So it's a, it's a nice little property on a side street there in Madison. Jacob, talk to us about about finding the deal and kind of what originally drew you to this, yeah, well, being in search to own the bones. You know, I've been in Nashville market doing moving and storage for about 15 years, and that's just always been on the vision board of, you know, not paying rent to a landlord. And because of that, I, you know, save loop net terms, and I get them to send me any self storage in the state, I'm okay to go, even in Kentucky and a little bit of North Alabama, because of just how broad our network is. So it literally dinged me when it came available, because I had already had my specialty property terms in there. You know, show show properties like this. So I get an email, it comes through. I think I caught it day one on the market. And I'm not sure what the timeline was, but, you know, this has been in kind of our next steps. So it was pretty much no brainer to investigate it from then on. You know, this is Madison. It gets a kind of a weird rep in Nashville. I think that's any fringe area anywhere. A lot of East Nashville rejects are out there. Our properties went, you know, our rent went up every year. Too expensive, yeah, and they kind of pushed us down Gallatin pike there, but it being right in the back of my yard, I couldn't help but just go ahead and investigate it. So, you know, loop net sends me an email. I think I kicked it over to you and said, Hey, we gotta check this out. And it maybe was a week or so before we're walking the property. Yeah, we, we jumped right on it. I mean, it was a it was a good opportunity. I think even at one seven it was potentially underpriced. Here's the thing we you know, looking at the listing on correct, see it's still available on there. It looks like it went live in June. We probably started working on it back then, but it took us until probably September for us to actually go under contract. It took a little bit. You all know, I like to take 30 days off every year, December 15 to January 15. So I try never to close deals at the very end of the year. This one was December 31 it was literally New Year's day when we were wrapping everything up, which is fine, it happens. I mean, sometimes when you find a good deal, it's worth to make that happen. And the good news about that is that we did a cost segregation study. You and I haven't even actually talked about this, or we're about to pull the trigger on a cost seg study. Since we bought it on the last day of 2024, we get to take that depreciation. Integration in 2024 since the building was already in use, which is pretty exciting. If you're not familiar with the cost segregation study, it's really where a CPA slash, you know, kind of building engineer comes in and says, Hey, instead of writing everything off over 30 plus years, right? Because we all know HVAC units are not going to last 30 plus years, but that's how the IRS allows you to write them off. We're gonna allow you to do accelerated depreciation over five to seven years on a majority of these items. So I'll be able to take advantage of that in 2024 here's where it gets fought. The occupancy as advertised and as given to us in the rent roll, was 95% Jacob, yeah, heck of a What did it end up actually being? Heck of a policy. I mean, I'm 20 days in to January. I think I'm pretty confident in saying that it is 66% full. There are going to be some nuances. There's always going to be a few exoduses. When this happens, new ownership. It gives people a reason to go. Oh yeah, I forgot about my forgot about that. I need to get it out of there anyway. And you know, here we are. I think that I'm gonna say that that's probably where we're gonna stay. And now we're gonna start to trend back up. And we've already got some inquiries on the spaces too. So, you know the good with the bad. The good is 95% was definitely not true. We're at 6620 days into the year, and I've already got two or three clients that are wanting a piece of the property, 10 by 1010, by 20 spaces. So we'll probably take that 66 to 70 before February. And that's, you know, something that I think is worthy of, just, you know, being proud of it's always going to be different, what they present and what is actual, it's always going to be different. That's right, it's just a matter of how much and, and, you know, there's the gray area. So I think we can respect, like, five to 10 units to be a maybe, or to cancel after you buy. But, yeah, I mean, a 30% discrepancy is pretty big. Yeah, I would agree. I would agree. It's one of those things that, you know, you don't come across too often, but it feels like it was misrepresented by the sellers, maybe by the broker, and so it's a conversation we're gonna have with the attorney. Who knows where that goes. Maybe it's not even worth fighting over, right? Because we've got bigger and better things to work on. I mean, the good news is, we think that we'll be relatively stabilized by the end of this year. Yeah. You know, self storage rents up three to 5% of the units per month, right, give or take. So, I mean, if we're renting up three to five units a month, that's basically three to 5% then we'll be there by the end of this year. Yeah, I think, I think the big challenge that I'm facing, that you know, clearly, I'm fit to do, is taking on the reputation of the property. I mean, it is, oh yeah, it is not in good standing, let's say right now. So I think just by doing a few things, like answering the phone and getting back to people, we'll see our Yeah, 3.3 point four stars on Google. I mean, in almost all of them for the past couple years, are one stars. They all are just like, do not rent here. This place is garbage, horrific. You can kind of tell so it's sold in 2020, yeah, yeah. And and you can tell when it really started to go downhill, because if you go back like before, like six years ago, you're starting to get all these five star reviews, and then all of a sudden, a year ago is when you start just getting loaded with one stars the owner. So, so this is one of the the strategies that I like to use in commercial real estate, which is just an operational value add. So Jacob and I raised capital from investors to do this deal. We have, I think, four or five investors in the project, and as well as putting some of our own money into it as well, and we didn't budget anything for capital expenditures. Now, of course, we have money. We have over $70,000 set aside for anything that happens. But we didn't say, hey, day one we need to come in here and paint this, or day one we need to come in here and build a new building, or redo the parking lot, or anything like that. That's really capital intensive. But we said is, hey, let's just run it better. If we don't touch anything and we actually answer the phones, we actually give the Self Storage unit to the people that are wanting to get self storage units. We can significantly increase the value of this property. Yeah,

I think that, you know, in doing my diligence over the last few weeks, what I realized is there is a pretty high demand for what we've got, and all we've got to do is be able to get ready to deploy that stuff. I will say some of the some of the positive sides of the takeover has been a lot of the automation and processes were put into place to the not the previous owner, but the owner before that. They really created some systems in place to let it be quote, unquote as. Passive as it could be, self storage. I think there's a big misconception of, like, passive income that's across commercial real estate as a whole, or real estate, it's like, oh, it's just mailbox money I get. My eyebrow goes up when I hear that. I think you'd be foolish to assume that's the case. Now, I'm sure there's some groups out there that have really dialed that in and are on a whole nother level. But for a property like this, that is kind of, it's, it's in a downtown adjacent area, you're going to have to have some some presence, and I think that goes back to the value that we're going to be bringing on to the next year. That's right? So guys, as we're we're going through this project, we'll be updating you monthly on everything, right? Whatever questions you have on what it's like to buy a self storage facility. This is my first one. I mean, I've brokered deals for other people. I've been very involved in self storage, but this is actually our first Self Storage takeover. We are self managing. So there's probably gonna be some lessons learned on that one as well. Oh, yeah. And you know, it's, it's, it's been a lot of fun. And y'all know, I'm an open box, so whatever questions you guys have on that, or leasing it up, or, you know, turning it around. I mean, we were having a discussion the other night This, again, this wasn't something that we had planned on doing, but, you know, we were looking at doing these. Well, why don't you tell them? I mean, we're looking at other ways, other income streams. Yeah, I think you know, what I like about this property is it's got a little bit of everything. So we've got a parcel with a flex space, you know, and the tenant, obviously, is already in there, and they're, they're, from what we can tell, is going to stay. But there is a flex place parcel of it. The other parcel is, is literally a vacant building with a blank slate. So there's some opportunity there and then, inside of the storage unit walls, we have four buildings that are climate controlled, a fifth building that's not climate controlled, and probably seven parking spaces that are right now being rented to RV and kind of like box truck size clients and what we're looking at is repurposing that entire space, throwing some gravel down, getting some leveled out areas, and adding units that the same that the previous, previous owner did, which was add 10 units on the back line. They did that by containers. So they dropped a few containers. Obviously, they put flashings and gutters and things you need to do for the water. But I mean, essentially, that is what we're looking at is, you know, looking at the square feet, zooming out, what's the footprint opportunity? And I mean, some quick math I was looking at on one side of the property, I think we could add 2410, by 10s, pretty simply. And then on the other side of a property, we could add about 1610, by 10s, pretty simply. And you do the math on the market there. I mean, I think, you know, for round numbers, it's 100 bucks each, but if we add 40 units to already operating property, I mean, there's some significant upside. Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, we would expect in this area for these types, so like, for us to be in the 60% range for occupancy is incredibly low, right? 95% is realistic. 90 to the 92 is probably where you're really gonna be. So you know, even if we assume 40 units at $100 a month, right? That's $4,000 a month at 85% occupancy. So that brings us down to 3400 and then we're not really gonna have additional expenses on a monthly basis, because they don't have power, they don't have water, correct? It doesn't cost us anything to add them into our system, right? So all of the, all of the infrastructure is already there. So on a, on a, on an annual basis, that adds $41,000 to 40,800 in additional income on the property, and it would cost us less than that to buy the units. Oh, yeah, right. So it's kind of a no brainer. You think about that, like, if you've got a property that has some vacant space, you might be able to monetize it with these types of little shipping container storage units, like what we've got here. I mean, these, they literally bring them in on a truck there. It looks just like a normal self storage unit. They just come in twos and fours or whatever. They'll drop it down and basically put it online. It's ready to go. I think another piece of this that I was unaware of getting into it is with vehicle storage. At least in the state of Tennessee, there is a lot more hoops to jump through. Let's just say somebody stops paying their bill. You actually have to take on expense for the tow truck. You actually have to take on, yeah, you have to get it off your property at your dime. And, you know, obviously get the police involved and go through those steps and for 50 bucks a month, it's not worth it, correct? So, you know, there may be a headache on the back end of some of those parking spaces that we were unaware of. And if we could get, you know, just roll it into an integration of what we're already doing. And and have some outdoor storage units. I think that's probably going to be the direction. Obviously, we've got to, you know, sharpen our pencil and make sure it all makes sense before we start moving things around. But I do see that that's that's definitely our, our potential to grow in that side that's not being fully utilized yet. Now, the the sense that, you know, we'll drop in containers and renting it out for the same amount. We kind of know it's a different client, right? Folks that want self storage that is climate controlled is going to be a total different client, and somebody who's okay to store their stuff in a non climate controlled typically, it's going to be the dictated by the term they're dropping their stuff, you know, if they're in between, or they're going abroad for the summer or doing things like that. They don't care. They don't care. They just need a place to park their items. And, you know, we kind of are aware that obviously it's going to bring a little bit less of a of a ticket in terms of pricing. Yeah, that's right. I mean, the great thing about this, again, you can do this on just about any property, as long as it's zoned. Drop more units like that. If you're bringing in another $40,000 a year to your bottom line, even at an 8% cap rate, right? Like, let's be super generous and say it's only worth 8% that's $510,000 in value for a $30,000 investment. Yeah, we just made 470 grand. Yeah? Like, I will spend that money all day. Yeah, you know what I mean? Like, that's, that's how you really make these projects make sense. I mean, Jacob and I were looking at that, and we're like, Okay, well, we had sold our investors initially on a five year timeline. If we end up spending the money to get those units and get even more tenants in there add that much more value, we might be done in two years. Absolutely, you know what I mean. And that's where everybody starts to get really excited, right? We get excited because the project finishes faster. The investors get excited because the project finishes faster. The bank gets excited because we've paid them back there. You know what I mean? Like everybody wins in a situation like that. Kyle saying, what's up? Guys? What's going on? Kyle, appreciate you joining in. Dylan is saying, Great, live. Appreciate it, man. We I love doing these kinds of things. There's a lot of fun. Any questions that you guys have on self storage facilities, on this takeover, on things that are going on, let us know. Dan, what's going on. Dude, appreciate you jumping in. He's saying, Hey, Tyler, that's a crazy discrepancy with the RIT roll. It is pretty wild. Was it a similar story with the financials you got and or how did that impact your valuation? Do you still feel like it was undervalued? It's a great question. Yes, the financials also showed that it was a pretty attractive deal, too. So I don't really, I mean, that's one thing that we're going to have to sit down and figure out, right? Because we're in the middle of takeover, and when you take over, when you take over properties that have tenants in place. It's always an absolute mess, right? It's always a mess. I mean, Madison station was a mess. I'll tell you guys. Two blocks away, I spent over $30,000 on legal fees just trying to understand the leases that were in place. Because some of them were 30 years old. They were missing pages. Some of them were scanning upside down and out of place and in somebody else's lease. I mean, it was the wildest thing you've ever seen. Yeah? And this one's comical, man. I mean, you remember when we got the keys? It's like a time capsule, yeah, looks like something from 10 years ago. Yeah, that was just kind of left, and there's like, u haul, like company posters in there from like, the 1990s Yeah, yeah. Maybe we get something on eBay for those That's right? I mean, I think that the value is always, at least from my perspective and your perspective, it's going to be different, right? A guy who owns a moving company, who's doing this type of work, day in and day out, and growing a brand, it's going to be a lot more valuable to me, because I'm in a unique position, a guy who, like, on your end, who's sourcing property deals, and looking at it that way, it's going to have a totally different perspective. And I think that, you know, really, we'll know for sure how sour that start of this deal was by the year end, I think, and we look forward to telling everybody about, yeah, I mean, you know, there's, there's definitely, I think, for the most part. I mean, what was kind of funny is I a few of the days I'm over there, the first of the year, you know, people are literally running up to my car saying, Hey, are you? Are you the new guy? And it's like, so you kind of get a sense of just like, how neglected it was. Yeah,

the funniest part about this, I told Jacob this when I when we were in the middle of buying the deal, I think I had just announced the capital raise on Instagram and shared a picture of the property, and somebody that was following me DM to me and said, Hey, I've got a unit there. I haven't been able to get a hold of management for over a year. Can you help us? And I was like, Yeah, give me a week. And quite frankly, we're still going through that. There's still a couple of what I would call customer concerns and inquiries, like, just as simple as, can I get a light changed by my unit? Yeah, you know. So, I mean, look, I've got a reputation based business. You've ever believed that we'll take this pretty serious and it start to gain some traction and rebuild the trust around what we've got out there. That's exactly right. Yeah. And we're actually going to keep. Yeah, or at least at this time, we're planning on keeping it like the interesting thing about buying a self storage facility, buying a car wash or a hotel, you're buying the business with it. And so we have the Google My Business with all of those one star reviews, Oh, yeah. You know, that's a conversation that we've had. It's like, should we shut this down and change the name of the business and go with a new approach, or should we keep it? Because, I mean, Madison self storage has a good name. That's good SEO, and just go respond to the one star reviews of, hey, we're under new ownership. We would love to take care of you if you give us another chance. Yeah, you know. And I think that sometimes when you just respond to those reviews, people like because I see that, I'll go in and I'll look at the one who cares how many five star what's the one star review? And how did you respond? Yeah, if there's a good response on there, I'm like, You know what? They handled it the right way. Yeah, this person that left the one store is probably crazy, yeah, yeah. I think these people were crazy. This was actually very poorly built. Yeah, it's just, I literally think, look, a lot of folks have various things they got going on, and this was not a priority of the owner, right, right? I don't know that. I haven't talked to him, but I can just tell maybe, yeah, that's all that happened here. So it'll obviously be a priority on us. Because, look, we're gonna, we're gonna rush to the finish line and and that five years, we can turn into two or three and repeat this. I think that's what's got everybody excited well. And here's the thing, too, if you buy real estate in the right area, and you just wait long enough, it's gonna be worth something this the previous owner screwed everything up. In my opinion. He did everything wrong. By the book, he owned it for three years. What did he buy it for? I'm not sure. I know the Yeah, I think you can see that, but I do know, like at least part of the story was the pre so, two owners ago, they bought it at the auction block and added value. Took it from about similar story 60% occupancy all the way up to about 95% and look, they, they, you know, life kind of shifted, and they added value, and they, you know, made a transaction and got out of the deal. So I think if it can happen 2017 in Madison, Tennessee, I know we can do it in 2025, that's exactly right, yeah. So looking at it, I mean, we paid, you know, 1.7 million for it, right? He paid 1,000,002 30, so he made roughly 470 grand Now, minus expenses and commissions and fees and whatever. 470 grand in two years. I mean, he actually bought it in 22 Yeah. So he did everything wrong. It's still profited. That's, again, that is the power. Like you don't necessarily have to know what you're doing, as you buy in the in the right spot, it's so, so powerful, that's for sure. So Jacob, I mean, talk to us about kind of next steps. I mean, once you've kind of gotten like, how long do you think the takeover is going to take, and what does that actually look like on a day to day basis? Are you calling these people? Are you emailing them? How's how's that actually look? Yeah. I mean, a lot has been kind of pulling, pulling the yarn ball, right? I mean, just, you would think simple tasks, like getting utilities switched over, even that as a lift on some of this stuff. But I think January is all about just doing diligence around what we have to do to get the operations intact, and then February and March, we're gonna have all the outreach done, and more than likely bring on more more clients. You know, I think we've got a couple in a holding pattern, quite frankly, just because we're not confident that we can start on the right foot. But the way I see it is, we'll probably get to February start to open up some occupancy and bring in some of the newer clients that will actually be our first and then in March, we got to get out there and do some upgrades. And it's not like anything of a heavy lift, other than just some sweat equity to put in, clean the property, put some fencing, up some various areas, and give it a little bit better curb appeal. You know, I think that, like by the spring, we'll really have turned this ship around in terms of the reputation and the trust will start to be built. And, yeah, there's really no reason by mid year we can't get to our mark of, okay, we've, we've got our rent rolls back to 90, 93% okay, let's, let's see how we're going to grow our our unit base. And you know, is that the container out is that a couple of different avenues. I really do think that's a pretty soon decision that we're going to start to pull the trigger on. That's right? I mean, there's so much with this deal that's just an easy fix on the operations side. I mean, the units are underpriced. Yeah, right, oh yeah. They're under least because nobody was answering phones. So it's like, Okay, what's raise prices and what's answer phones? Yep, you know, I mean, it's, it's, it's so easy to just do that. And then you think about adding 3040, more units. Well, we've got 105 now. That's an increase of 30 to 40% on our noi alone, just from those right? And so, you know, we bought it with the understanding that it was a seven. Percent cap rate. It probably was not, but again, if we're able to get it to, you know, increase our noi by 30 to $40,000 more a year. Sign, you know, a market rate lease on the flex building next door. We actually have two flex buildings outside, so sign, market rate leases for both of those then, you know, there's a chance where we could more than double the net operating income in about 12 to 24 months. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think it's rare to find an opportunity like that quarter one we really got. We're trying to, you know, scrub everything basically, and start to, it's, it's a keep and discard kind of moment where there's a handful of things that the previous ownership was doing that we're going to keep, and then there's a lot of stuff, a lot of stuff that they're that we're throwing out operationally. And then, you know, as far as, like, the hey, we're open and we're ready for business. I think, honestly, by mid February, we'll have confidence that all our processes on how we're answering the phone, who's over there at what times, you know, what the customers can expect. We don't want to go start with false promises, so we're just going to be timing that out kind of right in the sweet spot of and we're getting there, you know, probably the next 30 days, will kind of feel confident to say, All right, let's bring on our first client. That's our client into the place. But, you know, I've got my mop out, and you know, the rest of this month is kind of getting it to a normalized situation. That's it. That's all it takes. Sometimes just getting your hands dirty. John is saying, nice. Never heard of these cool I was sharing on the screen the the box, well, self storage units, which are, which are really, really cool. They're portable. Self storage units. So, you know, you order box well, and they'll just come and drop them off, right? They come on on the back of a truck. That's what I mean. There's a lot of different brands out there that do that. It's just happened to be the one that has the nicest visuals for me to show you guys as to what they look like, which you know, hey, that makes a difference. So, yeah, if you're interested in that, go check them out. These types of units are more expensive than if you had a standard self storage building just manufactured and built on site. But they're mobile, right? So that is the big pro for those is, hey, if it's something temporary, right? Like, maybe you bought a vacant lot and you're just trying to find a way to monetize it while you're waiting for land prices to go up so you can flip it, or maybe you want to redevelop it at some point. These are a great unit to just drop there, because you can pick them up and take them with you decide to do that. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. I mean, it's a very specific sector of the storage business, and I definitely see many ways that something like this could, could add some value to what we're doing over here. Yeah, it's pretty cool how they how they do it. I've looked into these guys before. We actually almost started doing this at our property out at peerless mill, but we decided, just based on cost alone. You know what? Let's just go ahead and build more permanent structures. So awesome guys. Well, there you have it for our takeover of a failing self storage facility. This has been fun. We'll keep this going every month. So stay tuned. We'll see you guys in the next one.

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