Self Storage Investing for Beginners: Why Joe Downs Says This Niche Is a Hidden Goldmine

Joe Downs (00:00)
a lot of asset classes in a recession get crushed. We don’t get crushed because of the nature of what we are. People are downsizing, getting laid off in recessions, they’re moving back in. What are they doing? They’ve got all this stuff and it’s gotta go somewhere. So we actually do pretty well. There’s an initial dip,

Cody Crabb (00:02)
Sure, yeah.

the cat stuff. Yeah.

Joe Downs (00:23)
slight and then it picks right back up.

Cody Crabb (01:57)
Welcome back to the Real Estate Pros podcast. I’m Cody Crabb with Investor Fuel. Joining me today is Joe Downs from Storage Moguls. Now he started as a student in self storage education and he grew into an operator and a teacher in the same exact place that he was learning in. And now he’s helping lead the next generation of storage education. We’re gonna talk about self storage, we’re gonna talk about specialization.

⁓ and kind of what people are maybe missing out on in this niche, because it sounds like one that we haven’t gotten too much into that, at least on the podcasts I’ve done. So I’d love to hear more about that. So Joe, thanks so much for joining us today.

Joe Downs (02:34)
Cody, pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.

Cody Crabb (02:36)
Of course, yeah. So let’s get this short version of your story here. How did you get into self-storage in the first place, and then how did you get to the point where you’re like, I’m teaching now. I’m teaching the same exact stuff.

Joe Downs (02:50)
I’ve tried and tried to make it a short story as to how I got into it, this would be maybe my best attempt. I learned the hard way that I was ⁓ looking backwards, because I think I’m slow in the uptick, that I am in fact a serial entrepreneur. And ⁓ the way I got into it was by, I’m not going to say failing, I had some failures along the way, really only one.

The other two times I had to reinvent was the industry or the economy or something moved away from me. It wasn’t anything I did. But you find yourself in positions where you have to reinvent and ⁓ self storage found me to be honest with you, I got an email at the right time. And if I had received that email any other time, I probably would have deleted it. But I was in that one of those in betweeners where my my other industry was moving away from me, which was distressed debt.

and I was actively, openly looking for other real estate ventures. I had been in real estate. ⁓ Distressed debt is real. was, you we bought mortgages on real estate. So I’m in real estate when I say that. ⁓ It’s just that that particular niche had moved away from me and I got an email about self-storage that blew my mind, frankly. It wasn’t the subject line, it was the body of the email. It was the line in the body of the email that said,

80 % of all self-storage facilities were owned by mom and pop investors. And I was shocked, frankly. ⁓ I would have thought 80 % was owned by public and CubeSmart and Extra Space. yeah, I mean, and by the way, coming into that, I don’t know the first thing about self-storage, like nothing, never even rented a unit. If you’d asked me to just, yeah, I knew other commercial real estate asset classes. I had just raised a lot of money for, ⁓

Cody Crabb (04:22)
Yeah, no kidding, yeah.

That’s even more, that’s even, yeah, wow, you don’t even know how to, that’s crazy.

Joe Downs (04:40)
Multifamily office and I’m at a bunch of conferences and you see the industrial guys. I anything about that either and ⁓ You know strip mall retails, right? But no, I’m never saw self storage guys there and And so I get this email about about you know, 80 % are owned by mom and pop and I like whoa That means there’s opportunity here because where you have mom and pop you have dislocation and fragmentation and opportunity

And turns out I was right. ⁓ That doesn’t mean I’m, know, a stop clock is right twice a day too. But in this case, I was right. ⁓ I, the email came from a guy named Scott Myers, who was the first one to start educating people in self storage in that, that we all know of. Now there’s, I think there’s three or four out there now. But I went through his academy and ⁓ here I am on a podcast telling you that not only do we

Did I go through it? Did we start buying self-storage facilities? In fact, we got up to 20, is what we’ve acquired so far. We got a couple more in the pipeline, and now we’re building different niches in self-storage. We learned about different niches in self-storage. ⁓ And now, that same academy, I’m actually on the stage at those events speaking, and now my company does the education fulfillment. So, full circle, who knew?

Cody Crabb (06:06)
Wow, so,

yeah, no kidding. So before we dive in too much further, you mentioned you’re kind of niching down. I’d be curious to know, what are a couple of those new ones that you’re trying to explore?

Joe Downs (07:06)
Yeah, well, let me give you the lay of the land. By the way, I think there’s like technically 28 different niches in self storage. I think that you’re really niching down to get to 28. But ⁓ the main ones, you have self storage. In fact, our ⁓ digital platform we’re launching, which was AI powered. It’s going to be amazing for as an education platform. I can talk about that later if you want. But the six major niches we’ll cover.

and educate folks on our self storage being the primary. And I always say self storage is what brought you here because it’s the one that we all kind of understand and have seen and maybe used. ⁓ But it’s all the others that make it so much more exciting. So self storage, then you have pro storage. Pro storage, you consider self storage as the B to C, business to consumer, it’s where Cody, you store your most cherished treasures, right? You put them in a

and a 10 by 10 dark unit somewhere that’s not in your house. We have to say, you think about it, these are the treasures, they didn’t even make the spare bedroom or the garage or the basement. They made a dark, dark metal box somewhere. But anyway, so that’s the B2C, right? I call that today retail, right? That’s the consumer storage.

Cody Crabb (08:08)
It’s like you’ve seen it. Yeah.

Yeah, they’re so precious we can’t keep them in our house.

Joe Downs (08:33)
So pro storage then would be the B2B. So it’s bigger units for businesses, contractors. But then also, I always say B2B, but also high net worth C because our units are so big you can drive an RV into them or store your boat. So we have customers that have that $300,000 RV they don’t want to just put in a parking lot or their driveway or something like that, right? So they want a nice place to store it. So that’s pro storage.

Cody Crabb (09:00)
It’s like small warehouses

almost.

Joe Downs (09:04)
Truly, storage used to be called mini warehouse, right? And this is actually what we’re building in pro storage is mini warehouse. right, you know, it’s, yeah, yeah. So our unit sizes are 400 square feet, let’s say to 1,000 square feet. Whereas in self storage, you know, your most popular size is the 10 by 10 I alluded to, that’s 100 square feet. And you might see,

Cody Crabb (09:07)
So yeah.

gotcha. That’s actually what you would think of when you, yeah.

Gotcha, okay.

Yeah, I’ve definitely rented a few

of those.

Joe Downs (09:29)
Yeah, right. So, and you might see some unit sizes that get up to two and maybe even up to 400 square feet in traditional self storage with an eight foot ceiling. Right. So it’s just really big, but you know, you’re not driving any vehicles into it with an eight foot ceiling. So you, but they’re very rare. I mean, you’re 10 by 10, 10 by 15. Those are your most common sizes. Um, five by 10, right. So right. The, the shoulder, the collar of the 10 by 10 is your most popular three unit sizes.

Cody Crabb (09:44)
Mm-hmm.

Gotcha, okay.

Joe Downs (10:34)
So it’s a different level up, if you will, as the ProStorage. So you have the SelfStorage, ProStorage, then you have SmallBay Flex, just staying with that, which is now you’re getting into maybe your smallest unit size in SmallBay Flex is probably seven, 800 square feet, but you’re going up to 2,500 to 3,000 square feet, part of which is an office, that’s the Flex part. it’s still that, it’s kind of a hybrid of

Cody Crabb (10:59)
I

Joe Downs (11:04)
Are we retail? Are we office? Are we warehouse? It doesn’t know what it is. You’ve seen them, you’ve probably been in them where it’s like, it’s the real estate version of the mullet, right? It’s all business up front and party in the back. that’s what Small Bay Flex is in varying sizes. So you can kind of see, you can walk up the size ladder. And as you go up the size ladder, the typical size anyway, the average size.

Cody Crabb (11:10)
Kind of all of them. Yeah, kind of that’s the flex.

Yeah.

Joe Downs (11:32)
you also see the function change a little from consumer to business to business with employees, because in pro storage we don’t have anybody working there, it’s just storage. And then ⁓ we can go outside and we have iOS, industrial outdoor storage, there’s all kinds of things you can do with that. And then you have Boat and RV storage, which is loosely related to iOS because Boat and RV is crazy.

Cody Crabb (11:43)
Yeah.

Joe Downs (11:59)
You could be literally just a parking lot, which also could be iOS, industrial outdoor storage. Or you could have canopies. Or you could have three-sided buildings. Or you have fully enclosed. So boat and RV spans the gamut. And then you have, what am I missing? ⁓ and then ⁓ these are all so related. You could see why we’re gonna teach them all, because when you find one piece of industrial land, you…

Cody Crabb (12:02)
Wow, holy cow.

wow.

Yeah, no kidding.

Mm-hmm.

Joe Downs (12:28)
need to look at your market, look at what’s available to you, but you can do anything, any of the above with it. The last being parking. So you could park boat and RVs, you could park cars, you could park construction equipment. And then there’s also a company that you could literally just build a site for called Truck Parking Club. they are, think of them as the Airbnb for truckers. All right, and so we have a, we have a,

Cody Crabb (12:52)
Hmm.

Joe Downs (12:54)
two acre lot in Wilmington, North Carolina that was actually part of a pro storage facility that we developed for parking. And we got truck parking club there. And there we’ve got people rent either by the night, by the week or by the month from us. So you get the full gamut. So that’s what to me, I love self storage, but gosh, I love even the niches as much because now when we look at, we teach people to do this, look at a piece of dirt, look at your market, we’ll teach about an underwrite at all.

Cody Crabb (13:10)
Hmm.

Joe Downs (13:23)
But you’re not limited to just self storage. There’s with one, the same piece of industrial land for the most part, it’s going to depend on zoning and municipalities and all that stuff. But for the most part, you could do any one of those six verticals on the same piece of dirt.

Cody Crabb (13:26)
Yeah.

And I like that it very much can depend on your market and you know, that’s, well, I mean, of course it can, but I mean, like, you could eat, that’s not a hard conversion to make. mean, that’s not building an entire new, you know, that’s something that could be done pretty seamlessly. So ⁓ I guess ⁓ for an investor listening, let’s say someone is, ⁓ they’re in,

Joe Downs (13:44)
Well, it has to.

Cody Crabb (14:05)
like single family, multi-family housing, and they hear about this and they’re like, oh man, that sounds interesting. What are some of the pros and cons of storage versus like having tenants and people live there and whatnot?

Joe Downs (14:24)
I mean, do you have all day for the pros and cons of storage tenants versus residential tenants? I mean.

Cody Crabb (14:26)
⁓

I was gonna say keeping a box

that doesn’t move or talk or break your toilet is one thing. yeah. ⁓

Joe Downs (14:36)
Right. No emergencies. ⁓ No,

but seriously, ⁓ obviously, look, anyone who’s in residential and I have been in the past and frankly, I still am because I own short term rentals. And, you know, you’re still dealing with those headaches that you just dealt with. It’s just they’re not long term. And and you also have a different business model there. So it kind of makes it worthwhile because you bring in so much more revenue from an Airbnb than you can from just an annual tenant. But so you deal with the headaches at that point. But

⁓ Let’s just talk about your real estate progression. How many single family units can you actually manage at one time? How much can you grow that portfolio? If you buy a rehab and rent a three bedroom, one bath house or whatever your niche is, how much can you grow the value of that asset over five years? These are questions that I can answer for you in Self Storage.

Cody Crabb (15:14)
Hmm.

Joe Downs (16:16)
And on top of that, if you said, I’m not a single family guy. I buy 10 to 20 unit or 50 unit multifamily buildings. Well, that’s wonderful. But now you’re dealing with 50 to 20 to 10, whatever that number was, tenant headaches for, and what does that building cost? Million bucks? Let’s just take a million dollar example. For the same million bucks, I can buy a self storage facility, deal with,

Very few tenant headings have more tenants, more risk diversification, and oh, by the way, let’s talk about the financing of it. I or my students can use an SBA loan. You can’t. So million dollar acquisition, you need 300 grand down plus CapEx, which I guarantee you is more than mine. I don’t know, you’re probably a $400,000 capital requirement.

between down payment closing costs and capex and I’m being generous I think maybe you can go 250 down and we’ll still get you to 400 with the rest whatever for 450 I think that’s very fair million dollar ⁓ self storage facility acquisition you’re 10 % down so with 400 grand and by the way I can roll my closing costs and my capex into that if I so choose

So for 400 grand, could probably buy, being conservative, at least two facilities, maybe three, probably three actually, if I have 400,000, to your one. I’m going to be able to grow the value of my facilities for sure in five years if I’m buying them right. Let’s just assume you buy both as best as you can, right? I’m gonna grow my value.

over five years by four to 500 grand and you are not.

Cody Crabb (18:15)
See that’s, yeah. And how much more work. I even if you do, that is so much. I I’m just thinking of all the, mean utilities alone. thinking of stuff like that, like stuff like that starts to really, really mount up. So being able to kind of focus that in.

Joe Downs (18:15)
Maybe you are, but I doubt it.

and then what happens

when they don’t pay? Mine’s gone in 45 days, yours state dependent, but probably a year.

Cody Crabb (18:42)
and you might end up on

storage wars. See, that was another question I had for ⁓ you. Is that like a real thing that happens? You auction off units and stuff like that?

Joe Downs (18:51)
We absolutely auction off units and we do we have third party companies that do it for us. They do it online. ⁓ We don’t deal with any of that nonsense. These are not revenue events for us. These are get the units emptied and re rented again. You hope to recover some back rent by selling off. We’ve already talked about the treasures that didn’t make it even to your garage. Right. So

Cody Crabb (18:58)
Wow.

Yeah. Yeah, sure.

Which frames

really well how much you’re really getting for those.

Joe Downs (19:15)
Yeah, I’m not gonna comment on storage wars. I think there’s already been lawsuits over that. ⁓ I’ll let you decide how real they are. ⁓ I’ll tell you this, I was always suspicious of the Flip This House shows that would flip houses for 12 grand or 15 grand of capital investment. I’m gonna leave it at that.

Cody Crabb (19:20)
Yeah

Yeah, I had to at least give it a quick mention because I knew everyone was thinking it the whole time. sure.

Joe Downs (19:47)
Yeah, look, it was great exposure for the business.

Have I watched it? Yeah, sure, it’s fun to watch, but ⁓ we don’t typically find too many treasures.

Cody Crabb (19:57)
Yeah, I’d imagine so. I imagine they film a lot of those before they actually…

Joe Downs (20:00)
By the way, you’re not, we’re not

even allowed to. Most people don’t know that. We’re not even allowed to enter the units. You just take, open the door, take a picture from the outside.

Cody Crabb (20:05)
that’s true.

Yeah, that’s, was gonna say, I mean, they don’t on the show either, really. I mean, that’s, yeah. So, okay, so that, gave me a lot of reasons why self-storage is awesome, and just storage in general. ⁓ I’d be curious to hear what you think are maybe some of the disadvantages. I have a feeling that there aren’t gonna be too many because it sounds like you kind of avoid a lot of the headaches that you would otherwise, but.

Joe Downs (20:30)
Yeah, I mean, there certainly can be if you don’t buy it right. ⁓ But if you buy it, but that’s true of any real estate asset class. If you buy it right, it’s really because we don’t have as many external factors we can’t control. I just think it by default comes with less headaches. You know, the in the residential world and the office world. Gosh, the office world got crushed because of COVID.

Cody Crabb (20:39)
That’s true.

Yeah.

Joe Downs (21:00)
we were deemed essential. There was never a better time in the history of self storage than during COVID. So it’s just, I’ll tell you, the toughest, I’ve only been in the business for seven years, and I’ve seen the data and I follow the trends and admittedly they did not keep very good data on this. There wasn’t a lot of reporting on it going back 30 years or even 20 years. The last 20 years have been pretty good. I would say 2023 and 2024,

Cody Crabb (21:00)
Yeah.

bet.

Joe Downs (21:31)
maybe leaked into 25 was the first time I think self storage experienced. It’s been through recessions and it’s proven to be recession resistant, not proof, resistant. it’s had some hiccups, but the lows are really high. They don’t hit that. It’s more like you you maintained. You didn’t grow, right? During a recession.

We struggled in 23 and 24 and it was not a recession. It was a period of stagnation. And what happened was, and I don’t think the industry has ever seen it before, the real estate market didn’t collapse like it did in 2008 and nine. It did not. In fact, values went up everywhere. That’s because nobody moved. So what we saw was a collapse of the transaction volume. And if you could ask any realtor, any…

title insurance guy, any mortgage broker, what their 2023 and 2024 was like, it wasn’t good. And self storage felt that same impact because we do need people moving. That’s a significant portion of our occupancy. It’s not. Yeah. So the doubt, I guess that’s a downside, but that was a downside. That was downside for everybody. I think I don’t know how well nobody was, uh, uh,

Cody Crabb (22:40)
Yeah, yeah, when you say that, that makes a lot of sense, yeah.

Joe Downs (22:54)
singing from the rooftops that I recall in any real estate asset class in 23 and 24, with the exception of industrial, because we saw, and large industrial, not small, because we saw the paradigm shift that’s happening with how we get our goods, right? They’re delivered to our door now. And so you’ve all seen the million square feet distribution centers that are popping up left and right on the sides of highways and near highways, know, off of state roads, et cetera.

⁓ By the way, that factors into why we’re building pro storage. ⁓ other than that asset class, industrial, in that timeframe, I don’t think anyone did well. So I’m not trying to evade your question at all. I hope I’m answering it. It’s just I don’t see a ton of downside to self storage as long as we’re operating in any market but a stagnant market where we had inflation to boot.

Cody Crabb (23:39)
I know what you mean, yeah.

Yeah, and to your point there, think ⁓ your point is not like there’s nothing wrong with self storage, it’s perfect and everything always goes great. You’re saying it maybe has some of the problems that your traditional real estate investments don’t have, but ⁓ you eliminate so many of the other ones that it maybe kind of just cancels them out.

Joe Downs (24:15)
Yeah, true, but because of, like, a lot of asset classes in a recession get crushed. We don’t get crushed because of the nature of what we are. People are downsizing, getting laid off in recessions, they’re moving back in. What are they doing? They’ve got all this stuff and it’s gotta go somewhere. So we actually do pretty well. There’s an initial dip,

Cody Crabb (24:25)
Sure, yeah.

the cat stuff. Yeah.

Joe Downs (24:45)
slight and then it picks right back up.

And then in good economic times, people are just spending money and buying stuff and, know, item A was went from the main room to the spare bedroom to the garage to the unit. don’t, God forbid we throw it out.

PSA to everybody out there, don’t throw anything out, store it. But.

Cody Crabb (25:03)
You sound… Yeah, it sounds like you’ve entered my mom’s house at some point.

Joe Downs (25:10)
Yeah, anyway.

Cody Crabb (25:11)
⁓

Yeah, well, so I think ⁓ this is really good call out because I think a lot of times on this podcast we just kind of get into the typical single family homes, multi family, we kind of talk about the same stuff, but things like this I think are really good because there’s certain kind of people that would never have even thought of this that this is perfect for.

Like this is probably a really good move for some, like a W-2 person that is trying to like move away from that. Cause it seems like a great way to kind of get your foot in the door without having to do this mess. I mean, like you said, a parking lot could be considered storage. so then from there you can build up from there. So it seems like a great way to kind of start out.

Joe Downs (25:57)
You nailed it. Here’s who we see come through our academies husband and wife one of them or both of them have the W-2 and they’re looking to One of them or both are looking to do something else. It’s not by the way. We’re not a microwave business It’s a crock-pot business, you know one facility one facility can change your life, but it might take one two three before you’re Finally out of whatever it was you’re doing. It really just depends on the size of situation whatever but I gotta tell you

Every time I talk to somebody who, and we talk about what’s your best deal. You’re it’s always their first one. And they always made four or 500 grand on the first deal. It’s incredible. And by the way, every one of those stories starts with I’m jealous because my first facility was actually, we paid 1.5 million. I think the better store and we crushed it, but that was, we got lucky because it was COVID. we, we, we over crushed what we should have crushed. We would have done well, regardless. We crushed it because of COVID, but

I want the story and I’ll never have it because your first one’s your first. I love the I paid four hundred thousand three fifty six hundred thousand and it’s worth eight hundred nine hundred a million now in three years four years five years. Those stories are out there everywhere. But who do we see we see husband and wife teams come through we see the two brother in laws we see the two neighbors who are always you know having the Friday beers around the fire pit. We should start a business and then one of them brings up self storage. Next thing you know you’re at our academy.

We see the solo preneurs who are the sales folks, the medical sales, the software sales guys who, or women, you know what I mean when I say guys, ⁓ who have that free time, right? And who can look for deals and do things like this. They’re budding entrepreneurs with high paying jobs, right? Who have time, who want another way.

Cody Crabb (27:43)
Yeah.

Joe Downs (27:55)
Or the last category of people we see is high net worth, high income. ⁓ We have doctors and dentists come through. Lot of income, but it’s all taxable and they’re looking for the real estate play, but they have no time for single families and they don’t really want to invest passively in other deals and LP deals and everything. They want their own. So we see them come through and we help them get their own deal and start building portfolios for themselves.

Cody Crabb (28:05)
Yeah.

Yeah, think that’s neat. think this is kind of a great way to, ⁓ I love hearing about, like I said, the niches where people can kind of maybe find a better fit for them if they have one. ⁓ So okay, we talked about the risks, we talked about the pros and the cons and things. ⁓ Let’s say someone is going to, they’re like, okay, I’m sold, let’s get into this, I’m gonna buy a parking lot.

Like, where do you even find these things? I mean, this sounds like these wouldn’t be necessarily traditionally in the same places as your traditional single-family homes and stuff. I mean, I’ve never been on Zillow and seen a parking lot. So I’m curious where that goes.

Joe Downs (29:01)
Yeah, yeah, you’re not gonna find the sun’s yellow. ⁓

Well, so let’s separate a little bit here. There’s way more self storage facilities than there are these other scenarios. However, there’s way more land than there is anything else. So ⁓ let’s start with the low hanging fruit. Self storage facilities. There are self storage brokers that specialize in this like Marcus and Mila chap, ⁓ Matt.

There’s some big names you get everyone listening, anyone listening would recognize and then there’s very industry specific names. Literally it’s all they do is self-storage. So like the Lindsay Group and Matthews Group, you wouldn’t know them from anything but self-storage. But Marcus Millichap, who’s one of the biggest in self-storage also does other asset classes. know, Cushman and Wakefield, all the big broker churches have their own self-storage arm. ⁓ They’re Loopnet, Crexie, those are popular.

commercial real estate sites, you will find them. then believe it or not, there’s wholesalers on Facebook groups. ⁓ There’s, forget the name of one Facebook group, it’s like 80,000 members of it. Be careful out there, folks, because not every deal you see is a deal. But ⁓ I should say every offering you see is a deal. Because the deal is a deal. Everything else is elite. ⁓ And then ⁓ if you look at the other asset classes that I named,

Cody Crabb (30:17)
Yeah.

Joe Downs (30:28)
Yeah, you’re so like iOS and small bay flex and land. Now you’re into the more traditional iOS broker. You will see the self storage guys in that space. Obviously it’s very connected. Same with boat and RV. ⁓ But it’s it’s it’s matching up with brokers that are going to have access to that inventory. Or you could do it also the way we do it. So we don’t we’re not just we don’t.

our entire business at Bell Rose Group is not relied just on brokers. We have a team of VA’s, small team of VA’s and we have lists of all these facilities. You can buy lists of anything, anywhere, any of anything these days. So we have them a cold calling basically and really warm calling. So kind of a hybrid between a cold and a warm call. We’re not trying to sell them anything. We’re just trying to build relationships, but ⁓

because it’s a weird sale. I’m selling you to sell me your facility, Kind of flips the whole thing on its head there. So it’s a little different.

Cody Crabb (31:32)
Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, you

just catch the right person at the right time. They might have thought of this already and yeah.

Joe Downs (31:36)
Well, that’s

one way. So that’s your shotgun. You need a lot of volume for that. And we have one deals that way, but that’s not really a successful recipe. So building the relationships in a pipeline is the better way to go about it. You can get lucky while you’re doing that, but the focus should be on building out that pipeline of potential relationships. ⁓

Cody Crabb (32:00)
Yeah. Yeah, but same sort of thing

though. You’d think I need to sell and then you think back to when you got that call and that’s hey, maybe they’d be interested. Yeah, exactly. ⁓ This has been really interesting and really helpful. I really, really appreciate all your insights here. So where do you see the biggest opportunity in your business specifically? Not necessarily storage, but in this education place, you said that you’ve got an AI platform.

Joe Downs (32:09)
Yeah, you want them thinking of you, right?

Cody Crabb (32:28)
that’s starting to roll out here and I’d be curious to know more about that but also like what you know what is it that you’re what opportunity do you have going forward?

Joe Downs (32:29)
Yeah.

Right. Yeah, thanks. ⁓ So as you know, I was the student sitting in the chairs, then was up on the stage. And ⁓ that was Scott Meyers Self Storage Academy. Very close friend and mentor. He’s kind of stepping back. He’s, you know, he’s moving on to better pastures. I don’t know if they’re better, whatever he’s moving on. He’s he’s he’s been doing it for pushing 20 years. So it’s understandable. I

think the industry’s changed a little bit as well. ⁓ When you’re interacting with students, you’re taking them from I’m not even sure if I want to do this to I can’t believe I just closed my first deal and every interaction between we’ve had them all with so many students. ⁓ You pick up a few things along the way and what what what I found out was we needed a different way to teach it than the way we’re teaching it to get people more immersed in it faster because it’s a little bit like drinking from a fire hose at first.

Look, I’m no Elon Musk. I’m not that smart. I think I already said in the beginning, I’m slow on the uptick and I will back that up the more you get to know me. But the way we’re successful is the full immersion into it because even a dumb guy like me can get this. So ⁓ what we’ve done in launching this AI and I’m a huge AI guy. So, and I told you I host the podcast ⁓ where I’m trying to help people like me.

use it, understand that it’s so powerful and we can use it to our benefit. So I’ve designed a platform with an AI consultant that takes all of our knowledge and it delivers it to you, yes, in the old way with me and the rest of my team who are in the various, as we get into the segments of the business where that’s their specific field. Yes, those videos are part of it.

However, we’ve taken that and we’re running it through Google Notebook LM and I’m creating a video, not just of me talking at you, but now a video with graphics in it and then an infographic. And it creates a podcast, ⁓ flashcards, mind map, quizzes. So for each subject we drill down into, you will have, I think it’s called adult learning theory. You will have,

you will be able to soak it up in every form. It’s called multimodal learning. In every form we can give it to you in. Because, know, Cody, you might be a visual learner and maybe I’m an audible learner, or maybe I’m both. You’re going to get it all and that’s going to get you up to speed faster. And then on top of that, we’ve got a community where people can ask questions. It’s like being in a Facebook community. It’s built on go high level. If people know what that means.

And it’s, you’ll log in, you’ll have your video course library for whatever level you’re at. There’s multiple levels to this thing. You can start for free, by the way, and level up if you want to. There’s no pushiness to it. You want more, it’s right there for you to access more. ⁓ And you’ll be able to ask questions inside the community, go into breakout rooms. We’ve got… ⁓

Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, there’s not a night Friday nights are off, but there’s pretty much some sort of live class happening or conversation happening Monday through Thursday every night around ⁓ self storage or any of the verticals. ⁓ The first vertical being launched is self storage, then we’ll be adding each of the other verticals as I, as I mentioned.

Oh, the last piece that I want to say is in the community, and this is one of the key features, so it’s me, there’s five of us on our team, they’re all operators. None of us are professors of this. We are by default teaching what we do in the morning. One of our taglines, we underwrite at night because we do it all day. We can show you how to underwrite at night because we do it all day.

with a bottlenecks in education. I don’t care what the course is, is access to the guru, access to the teacher. It’s at night, you miss the class because you were at your kids, whatever sports game, whatever. You miss the live class. Sure, there’s recordings, but what if you have a question that nobody asks? So the whole genesis behind our platform is we will have our clones there, meaning you can ask a question

you will get a response that’s the collective wisdom of the five of us and all of our knowledge. And on top of that, it will point you to a video which will explain exactly in further detail if you’re still not sure the question you’re asking. So you got a question about ⁓ seasonality of ⁓ boat and RV and what you should do in the spring to get, or the fall to get ready for the boats and RVs coming back to move in. You throw that question.

you’ll get a response if it’s two o’clock in the morning, you’ll get a response from the community. And then you’ll also get, hey, go watch this video over here in this course that answers that question will remind you. it’s that we’re removing all the boundaries and all the bottlenecks of, of, you know, these courses that people pay for. lot of people pay a lot of money for these courses. They just aren’t able to get the value out of them that they want. We’re trying to compress it.

Cody Crabb (38:15)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Joe Downs (38:20)
and make it so we’re always there for you, whether it’s me live or not.

Cody Crabb (38:26)
Wow, okay, yeah, that’s very true. I I’ve thought many times about how I wish I had AI in college, and it’s probably a good thing I didn’t, because I think there’s so many things I’ve been able to learn just because I can say, teach me this way. so that’s pretty neat that you can use a metaphor that I’ll understand or tell it to me in a story. There’s ways to do it where it’s gonna be so much more effective for the individuals because it’s how they learn or whatever.

Joe Downs (38:41)
Yeah.

Cody Crabb (38:55)
Okay, well this has been really great. I really appreciate ⁓ you digging into this and giving us some information. ⁓ Where can people find this information? You said that there’s a free tier, so that’s already a great place to start.

Joe Downs (39:09)
Yeah,

absolutely. ⁓ Go to ⁓ storagemoguls.ai. Naturally, I couldn’t go dot com. I had to go dot AI. So storagemoguls.ai. ⁓ Right now, we’ll be live. I’m not sure when this episode airs. Maybe it’ll be live by the time it airs, but don’t worry about it. It’s still free. If you get there and you find just a registration page, great. Just register. It’s launching soon.

Cody Crabb (39:37)
Awesome. Yeah, I can’t wait. I’m going to definitely check it out myself because ⁓ as not not I’m not super into investing investing in real estate and stuff. This is for sure caught my eye more than other stuff because it seems so much more attainable. ⁓ So that’s very interesting. I’m to learn some more about this. ⁓ Thank you so much again for all your all your insights and ⁓ listeners. If you’ve gotten something out of this, I’d love to we’d love to hear from you about your thoughts on self storage and things.

You can reach out to us go ahead and subscribe on the YouTube channel ⁓ real estate pros YouTube channel and For now, we’ll we’ll see you next time.