We're going to talk about how to get started with self- storage without tenants toilets, trading time for money. So, here's the question I have for you. What if you could buy a storage facility without dealing with a lot of the traditional headaches that Matt just talked about, right? Dealing with toilets, you can do it even if you don't have your money, your capital, right? So, one of the biggest limiting beliefs I find people have is this belief that they're either intimidated because it's a larger asset class and they feel that they need to have hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars to buy these assets. Well, I'm going to show you today how you can get involved in this asset class even if you don't have capital, right? Leveraging other people's money. We're going to talk about how you guys can find these opportunities, how you can fund them using other people's money, how you can do this within a 6 to 12 month period. Um, again, even if you don't have any experience, I'm going to share with you just a portion of my portfolio right now. And that that portfolio might take me an hour, an hour and a half, a week to run, manage, and operate. And so I truly truly believe that anybody can do this and achieve financial freedom through self- storage and and doing it in a way that's very scalable where you don't have to have a bunch of employees and you don't have to have a big team. Here's a small portion of the portfolio. This um these two deals on the left. I just recently sold these within the last like seven, eight months. Um just over 640 units, 80,000 square feet of storage. Each one of these I'm going to walk you through as a case study. Um and this is just a portion of it. There's been deals that we've closed and I've closed with students uh since then. But um this you might look at this and say, "Hey, there's no way I could go buy that." Trust me when I tell you I'm not any smarter than you. I don't have any special skill sets. I just got sick and tired of chasing residential transactional deals. And I said, "How can I apply what I've learned in single family and apply it to a bigger asset class?" Okay? And that's essentially what I've done here. And I think what I what my aim is to show you how you can do that as well. So here's the the first facility I bought in Mississippi about a 43,000 foot facility. I didn't use any of my money to buy cuz God knows I didn't have $1.592 million. Uh so I was able to get SBA financing. SBA is the Small Business Administration. I didn't even touch on the fact that storage is an actual business. It's a B. It's a retail business, but it has the benefits of real estate. So, cash flow, depreciation, appreciation, all the tax benefits and the reasons we love real estate. Storage has that, but it's an actual business. So, the SBA will loan you money to buy a storage facility. Well, that's exactly what I did here. I got 85% SBA financing. The only problem was I needed about $350,000 to get into the deal, which was basically 15% that the SBA was requiring I put down plus some money to to put into the facility. So, I leveraged what's called an equity partner. Basically, somebody who had money that wanted to get involved in storage, but didn't know or have the time to find it and put the deal together. So, I brought him in. I gave him a piece of the deal. I ended up buying the facility for just under 1.6 and just under three years later we sold it for 2.495. So you can do the math on what our net profit was. Now keep in mind we also cash flowed every single month. So it was a super profitable deal that didn't take me a lot of time. Now I spent time trying to find this opportunity. And the way that I found it was by tapping into my relationships, right? I think one of the themes you'll see with all these case studies and Matt I think it was who was the the second gentleman that spoke or maybe it was the first one but someone you know you did a great job of talking about the power of community and the value of publicly sharing your win and what you're working on. Well, the reason Matt is is 100% spot on and that's so valuable is when you put yourself out there and you share what you're doing and what you're looking for, it opens the door and the opportunity for others to find out what you have going on and how they can potentially benefit in working with you. And so, if you get nothing else out of this talk, but you're in the chat connecting with each other, building relationships, it's going to open up so many doors and opportunities for you. And every single storage deal I've done has two things in common. Number one, I didn't use any of my own money. And number two, that was only possible because of my intentionality around building meaningful relationships with people, right? Doing what you say you're going to do, presenting opportunities and just focusing on giving and contributing versus asking and extracting. So, that was how I was able to get this deal. Um, and I have videos that break down in detail like exactly how it was structured, how did I find it, how did I operate it, how did I sell it. So, happy to share all that with you guys. But, um, this is another one 100% purchase with private money. I don't even have this on here. In fact, today I released a YouTube video. This very deal, I got paid $250,000 to buy it. So, people say that, "Hey, wait a second. How did you get paid to buy a storage facility? Didn't you have to buy it for 1.2? Well, because of a relationship, I got presented with an off-market storage deal, what we call a pocket listing. And because I knew that I was buying it at a deep, deep discount, I was able to raise $1.45 million from private lenders. My purchase price was 1.2, but I knew that I could take on the additional leverage because I had a lot of meat on the bone. And so, I borrowed 1.45 45. At closing, put a quarter million dollars in my pocket. Got a wire from the title company. Obviously, it was a,000% disclosed to the lenders and everybody involved. And in October, I ended up selling this facility for 1.99. So, I got paid upfront to buy the facility and then generated some cash flow during an 18-month period that I owned and operated, ended up selling it for 1.99. And this was because I built a relationship with the broker. Back to my previous point, when you just connect with people and seek to build relationship, you have endless opportunity to be able to do deals and grow with other people. Okay? So, all of this is because of what I believe is the most valuable capital you can spend your time raising. It's not private capital, right? It's relationship capital, guys. So, think relationally, don't think transactionally. Um, and then here here's another example. Amelia Personal Storage, a facility I still own today, uh, bought it on 90% seller financing. I leveraged a private lender for the 10% that I needed. And today, this facility generates, yeah, it it varies, but anywhere between three and 3,500 bucks a month in cash flow. Um, this facility we're actually in the process of selling so that we can then take that money, put it into another facility, and we're probably looking at selling it. I think right now it's on the market for 2.8, right? Right. And so we bought this for 2.1 using none of my own money. And it's a super super easy to manage and operate. So these are just a few examples, right? Like that's a picture of me and my partner that I brought into my first deal when we sold the deal. We were signing the docks. That was uh October of last year. Uh seller financing, private capital. Um so let's get tactical now, right? because really the the foundation of how you guys can go and start finding these opportunities for free is just jumping on Google Maps. So, let's first identify um what do we look for in a market? So, generally speaking, I like to look for storage in what I call tertiary or secondary markets. What does that mean? I'm not looking at big cities like Miami or Dallas or or Los Angeles. I'm looking for small towns that have anywhere between, let's say, 5,000 and 70,000 person population where the average medium household income is $50,000 or greater and where the population ideally is increasing over time. So, in a moment, I'm going to show you guys how you can jump on Google Maps. So, if you go to maps.google.com and how you can put in any city, state, click on the nearby, and pull up all the storage facilities in the area. And this is what we have specific training on to have virtual assistants go out there on a daily basis and build our list of storage prospects of mom and pop tired storage owners. So here's something that's super interesting that that I I think you guys um will again find interesting that I didn't know. You know how in in residential Matt like think of why do why do we have motivated sellers in single family? It's usually financial distress, physical distress, right? Maybe the propertyy's vacant or dilapidated. There's circumstantial distress like divorce, death, right? You think of all the D's in storage. I would say in my experience, 80 to 90% of the time, the reason one of these mom and pop storage owners is interested in selling is because, in fact, let me kick it over to you guys. Put in the chat, what do you think are are what do what would you say is the main reason that a mom and pop storage owner is deciding to sell their facility? And Matt, if if nothing pops up in the chat, give me give me your thoughts. What you think? We got uh age and retirement so far or the first two. Bingo. Retirement. Most of the time, these mom and pop storage owners are in their 60s or 70s. They've been operating this storage facility 20, 30 years. By the way, many times they're not they're not treating it like a business. You'd be surprised how many storage facilities don't have a website, don't have any automation, they haven't raised the rates. Well, that represents an incredible opportunity for you and I to go in there and do what we call light value ad to be able to now increase the value of the facility, generate, you know, increased occupancy, generate more revenue, and that has an exponential increase on the overall value of the facility. So, um, here's what we're doing. We're going to Google Maps. We're look, these are the things that I like to look for on Google Maps. I'm looking for no websites or I'm looking for outdated websites. Any storage facility that I come across, and again, this is something that we have specific training for virtual assistants to do. It's super simple. Anybody can do this, is if the storage facility doesn't have a lot of Google reviews or they have poor Google reviews, we automatically add them to our list. When I have my virtual assistant go to the contact us section of the website, we often find emails that are personal like at Yahoo atgmail, anytime you see that, it's a strong indication that these are mom and pop operators. Um, and here's a here's a perfect example. If you go to Google Maps and you just click on, you know, type in any city, state and then you you click on this nearby button, you're going to find what's called the Google map pack. So essentially what it's going to do, Matt, is it's going to bring up all these red dots that Google picks up. Um, and here, so here they are right here. And I realize this might be tough to see, but this right here is called the Google map pack. All these red dots. Well, what's cool is that one of the things we train virtual assistants to do is you guys, everybody here knows about driving for dollars, but have you guys ever gone flying for dollars? So flying for dollars is on the satellite 3D view of Google Maps is we literally just have her looking over the top and we look for the long rectangular buildings that kind of look like caterpillars and oftent times our virtual assistants are able to spot facilities that don't have a Google My Business listing. So, think of the equivalent being the vacant house in your favorite zip code to buy and wholesale properties that is not on one of the niche lists, right? That's kind of the equivalent of finding a a mom and pop storage facility that doesn't have a Google My Business listing. Um, so as our virtual assistant is building our list, either we train them to smile and dial and we also send direct mail to them or you can pick up the phone and smile and dial. What's so fascinating to me is that I probably say 30 to 50% of the time when you call the actual storage owner is going to pick up the phone, right? And so, you know, we don't have to usually skip trace, although you can skip trace. Uh, if you go to openc corporates.com, that's a free resource to just put in the entity. And I find that they're pretty good in terms of uh locating the registered agent or the owner of that entity. But this is a very methodical way that we have our virtual assistant building our storage prospect list. Sometimes I talk to people and they don't know or aren't aware that just like you can wholesale a single family house, you can wholesale a storage facility. I've done it numerous times. Um here's one example that I like to share just because it's kind of got an interesting story. I uh I got a call and this is about two years ago or so at this point. I got a call from a lady who got one of my direct mail pieces and she kept it and she called me two years later and said, "Hey, Alex, I you know, you sent me this letter about two years ago. I was thinking about selling and now I feel like the time is right. Are you still interested?" Well, super long story short, I ended up uh getting this facility under contract for $400,000. This is located in Nacatish, Louisiana. You can look this up. Um, so put it under contract for 400 and I decided that I wanted to wholesale this because I was traveling. I had a lot going on at that time. So I ended up finding a buyer who bought it for $550. So I generated and I realize you can't see this, but the wire down here net profit $150,000 and this was pure pure net that came from a direct mail letter. So the day of closing I asked her I said something has just kind of kept me up and I'm curious. You said, you said that you kept my letter for two years. And I said, why? And she goes, well, every now and then I get letters from people asking about my facility, but I felt like your letter was very personal and you had a picture of your family, which I thought was very endearing. She used the word endearing. So, I'm happy to share with you that letter that breaks down, I think, what makes it so effective. But direct mail, cold calling, relationships, the this is the same exact thing I did for 14 years when I was wholesaling single family homes. So again, I think one of the big points that I want to like drill down here for you guys is that whatever you're currently doing now in single family translates over into storage. Thanks for listening to the Deal Machine Real Estate Investing podcast. Please leave us a review and follow along wherever you're listening to your podcast.