RAI Commercial Group provides investors with local market knowledge, property-specific expertise, and custom-tailored marketing plans to help achieve your investment goals. We offer specialized industry knowledge that leverages proprietary analytics and services to match the right buyers with the right properties while maximizing value for investors of self-storage facilities. We study the local markets and keep up with monthly, quarterly, and annually recorded transactions and trends to provide our clients with top-notch guidance.
Self Storage Buyer Advisory
What Makes Self-Storage so successful within the greater Commercial Real Estate Investment arena?
It comes down to a few factors, especially flexibility and low overhead. Together with increasingly mobile lifestyles, the market is perfectly calibrated for a growing self-storage sector.
Flexibility: The Key to Self Storage Investing
Though the word self-storage tends to conjure up a singular image of a garage or closet-like spaces—and many do look like this—part of what makes this market so profitable is that it can shift to meet the needs of the local community. Flexibility is a virtue and easy to achieve in the self-storage world.
Increase Revenues by Upgrading Infrastructure
Since infrastructure costs are fairly low to begin with, there is no reason not to upgrade a self-storage site to make it more appealing. For example, while almost every self-storage site uses a gate code to monitor who comes in and out of the site, that cannot prevent theft by unit owners. Consider upgrading the units to install door alarms that are coded to individual users, rather than just using locks that someone else can cut.
Move with the Market
Based on the community, some storage companies provide storage calibrated to wine collectors. Others emphasize climate-controlled spaces that can be beneficial to antique collectors who want to protect their finds. These varied offerings emphasize the importance of listening to customers. When a customer is looking for a particular kind of storage, it is worth noting the request and seeing where it might fit in a business’s overall strategy.
Self Storage Seller Advisory
Now is the time to capitalize on your self-storage properties. The global pandemic spurred residential migration that led to a great need for storage units across the country. The growth occupancy rate is growing an average of 12.4 percent in 10 feet by 10 feet self-storage units according to Yardi Matrix’s recent data. RAI can help you facilitate the disposition of your asset so you can capitalize on the cash flow to reinvest on new acquisitions.
Pricing
RAI will help determine the right price for your property. We bring all of the necessary elements to gather and evaluate the data needed to price your facility correctly. We compare your facility to others on both the national and local level. Since many properties are being sold to national buyers, the larger national perspective is very important in today's market.
Presentation and Exposure
To effectively market your facility, RAI will develop a professional, detailed, and credible marketing packet. Such a presentation should include the location of the project and its competition, professional photographs of the facility, demographics of the market area, financial information, unit mix, site layout, and any other information important to the facility. RAI will then market your facility exclusively to our substantial buyer database that includes private investors, REITS, and institutional buyers.
Negotiation and Documentation
RAI will help you in the negotiation of both price and terms. Since the buyer is likely to know that the broker is experienced in these transactions, he will know he cannot bluff the seller into agreeing to onerous terms. Although it's probably best to retain and use an experienced real-estate attorney to help with the sale, the broker--whose experience may be helpful to the attorney--should also be prepared to help in documenting the transaction.