Whether online or in-person, the rental process at your storage facility is the backbone of your entire business.
Once a customer has decided to rent, you need to make renting quick and easy. You also need to make sure that it doesn't require too much extra work from your managers.
Take a listen as Self Storage Science's Denise Bowley and Bob White Self Storage's Kevin Mullis give us their thoughts on how to optimize this critical part of your storage business.
Question: "How do you optimize your rental process?"
Check out the video clip below to hear their answers:
In this Gabfocus Session: Optimizing Your Day-to-Day, we sat down with Denise Bowley of Self Storage Science and Kevin Mullis of Bob White Self Storage. Their goal? Breaking down the day-to-day management of a self storage facility. They talked about best practices for rentals, move-ins, and more!
Check out the full Session to dive deeper!
Don't want to watch the clip? Here's what Denise and Kevin had to say:
We can rent units a lot of different ways now.
Bottom line is you want that credit card number so you can take the payment and you want the lease signed.
We have started paying our remote property managers $10 for every unit that they close immediately on the phone. So if someone calls and they rent the unit right then and there, they keep a log of all of those, and they're compensated for that.
But we go in and make sure that they've got insurance, they're on auto-pay, the lease is signed.
So we prefer just to rent them over the phone or online, honestly. I mean, that's the easiest way to secure the lease.
And what's different now is that more people are renting online or over the phone in lieu of coming to the property and the manager being able to show the unit and making the connection.
So that, to me, if you're looking for a pitfall, is the connection with the customer is not there like it used to be.
Well, we fix it because one of our operations managers actually calls every single person that moves in, and we also send out handwritten thank-you notes.
So that's how we try to recapture that relationship."
—Denise Bowley
"I would say, for me, I try to get everybody to go online.
I'm the type, I don't really prefer to take a credit card over the phone just for security purposes. And so normally when I get a phone call, I just send them a link straight to our website and let them know that, hey, you can go ahead and secure this online, or you can come into the store and we can do it that way.
But if you send them a link directly to your web page, if you're able to text that over and they can secure that right then, it works.
I would prefer just an online rental over getting it over the phone, just because if you have a manager that's not as skilled with selling insurance—of course we do require it now—but [go to] ourwebsite and make sure you have all of those boxes checked and there's really no having to go back and check that over a manager."
—Kevin Mullis
