How do you evaluate the way your facility is being managed? How do you know if the way you do so is fair to your managers?
A facility in one market may never have a chance to perform at the same levels as a facility in another market, so how can you even start to compare numbers?
In this Gabfocus Spotlight, we hear from a few experts on the topic of figuring out if your facility is being mismanaged. Listen in to hear from Adam Steckler (StorageMart), Drew Pearson (Pearson Partners), and our very own Tommy Nguyen!
Question: "How do you tell if one of your facilities is mismanaged?"
Check out the video clip below to hear their answers:
In this Gabfocus Session: Revitalizing Your Storage Business, Adam Steckler of StorageMart and Drew Pearson of Pearson Partners joined Tommy and Melissa to talk about how to breathe new life into a self storage business.
Check out the full Session to dive deeper!
Don't want to watch the clip? Here's what Adam, Tommy, and Drew had to say:
We have a lot of KPIs. We're a data-driven organization, so we're taking a lot of data, bringing it back to a data warehouse. Right?
We're blessed to have this large organization. So we take all this data, and again, you don't have to do this at the same scale, but we bring all this data back. So we'll look at at how many move ins are happening, how many move outs are happening? Even basic things.
Are we upgrading the way we want to upgrade? How many discounts are we giving out? Are we actually offering the street rate or people moving in at discounted rates? Or they upgrade it to a better unit.
And what we do is we compare them to their peers.
What's happening at the other stores? Again, we're lucky enough to have bigger portfolios. When you have multiple stores in the same metro area, you can start comparing and looking for the anomalies. Why is this store closing reservations at 75%, but this other store is only at 30%?
Let's dig into it.
Is it a staffing issue? Is it a training issue? Maybe it has nothing to do with the facility. Maybe we're doing something completely wrong on Google. Maybe our Google listing isn't right. We've had Google listings we found. Right?
So it's this digging into it to then research what is the issue.
But we believe it's a data driven approach. When you're trying to look at 300 locations, it's hard to individually talk to everybody. So we're looking for signals in the data that say, hey, there's a problem here. Let's dig into it and find out what's really going on."
—Adam Steckler
"I love the stat of the reservations conversions. Right?
I audited—I don't know, audit is a strong word—but I reviewed this portfolio's data. They had 60 locations, I think, and we discovered that across the entire portfolio, only 27% of their reservations were being converted to a lease, which is like that was shockingly low.
Right?
We were expecting to see like 50% to 60% conversion on reservations, but we saw 27.
Overall, generally, this is a well operating machine. And so it's like, well, we're operating well, but could we operate better?"
—Tommy Nguyen
"Oh, man, we could talk for days on that.
I will say first, the key metrics are so important. If you're just monitoring occupancy or maybe your economic collected rent, there's more to look at there. In addition to those metrics, we're looking at maybe unavailable units. Maybe there's some units that we can't rent.
Why is that? How do we bring those back online?
We are working really hard to dial in our we call it lead to lease conversion rate, which I think is what we're talking about.
That's kind of the tip of the sword.
If you can convert more of those leads, you're going to have a higher occupancy and a higher rent."
—Drew Pearson
