It's commonly said that the storage industry lags behind a bit when it comes to innovation and technology.
After all, it was only a few years ago that people really hopped on board with online rentals and made them an industry norm!
In this Gabfocus Spotlight, Chuck Gordon of Storable and Raheem Amer of Mini Mall Storage give us a snapshot of where the storage industry is today in terms of the state of storage technology.
Question: "What is the current state of storage tech?"
Check out the video clip below to hear their answers:
In this Gabfocus Session: Storage Tech Summit, Tommy and Melissa are joined by Raheem Amer of Mini Mall Storage and Storable's Chuck Gordon. They get into the weeds about all things tech, including where the industry is with tech, how to best utilize it, and how to fix some common problems.
Check out the full Session to dive deeper!
Don't want to watch the clip? Here's what Chuck and Raheem had to say:
I'd say from my perspective, we're probably—you can think about it maybe in eras, right?
So when we started SpareFoot, the concept of putting your prices on the internet was something that was foreign to most. And the first few years of that back in 2008, was all about convincing people to put your prices online.
Right? Okay.
So that was a totally different state of tech back then.And probably most people at thattime were using desktop-based software. Maybe just the most advanced ones were starting to think about web-based software.
That changed over the subsequent ten years and everyone realized they needed to put their prices online, they needed to be able to take online reservations. They probably should have web-based software. Although I'm always surprised by how many people still don't have web-based software. There's a lot of people out there.
And then I think that the next era that we're in now is the automation era, where we're basically trying to do as much as possible on your computer, your tablet, or your phone.
That includes signing leases, getting access to the unit, interacting in terms of customer service via text or email, really doing everything digitally. And there's different flavors of that. Raheem and I are excited to talk about kind of some different examples of operators that do automation in different ways.
But I guess that's what I'd say the state of tech and storage today is all about utilizing automation."
—Chuck Gordon
"Yeah. Tommy and Melissa, have you ever heard of a double wide? When people used to advertise in the newspaper? Or even in the telephone yellow books. Right?
Technology has come a long way from where we used to do and even that was what, 15-16 years ago? And we have moved significantly.
And I think as we continue to grow and as you start seeing some of this consolidation happen, you can only do that if you tap into technology. You tap into AI, and you're able to minimize how many touch points your frontline manager is having to do to take care of the customer.
And I think that's one of the things that we would love to talk about is how do you take some of that technology that's maybe prevalent in primary markets.
And at least at Mini Mall, one thing we have done is brought that to the secondary and tertiary markets where people are not used to having access control gate systems, being able to rent online, being able to access their unit at any time without interacting with anybody.
There's a lot of different things that have happened in technology, especially post COVID, technology has accelerated over the first two months of COVID on what would happen over course of five to ten years, happened within two to three months.
And there's a lot of changes.
Some of those changes are not good for everybody. I think that's the dialogue that I'd love to dive into is what is good for one person and what is good for another person."
—Raheem Amer
