When was the last time you adjusted your street rates?
Whether you raise or lower your rates shouldn't always be based just on your competition. Thankfully, our expert panelists were able to give us some outstanding guidance on rate management.
Let's listen to Alyssa Quill (Storage Asset Management) and Jeremy Rollwitz (The Jenkins Organization) talk about rates and rate management.
Question: "How do you know when you should adjust your rates?"
Check out the video clip below to hear their answers:
In this Gabfocus Session: Understanding Data and Reports, Tommy and Melissa spoke with Alyssa Quill of Storage Asset Management and both Jeremy Rollwitz and Cherolyn Johnson Chiang of The Jenkins Organization. The topic at hand? Data reporting and how to understand it in order to make informed decisions about your self storage business.
Check out the full Session to dive deeper!
Don't want to watch the clip? Here's what Jeremy and Alyssa had to say:
Depending on the market, your rates can change on a daily basis.
Is that a needed approach?
Maybe, maybe not. But I think if we want to have our best foot forward and have the optimal rate at that time, we need to consider adjusting that rate on a daily basis depending on the demand hitting your propertyand then other factors within the market."
—Jeremy Rollwitz
"I think if I just own one property by myself, and I was running it myself—so I didn't have access to the revenue management software that our groups have—I would probably look at my rates once a week.
Look at the move-in activity, maybe even every two weeks, honestly.
Street rates, I'm talking about. Maybe every two weeks because you need a little bit of time to see how the market absorbs it.
And so I'd look at the lead activity that I'm getting, the close rates by unit type, and the move-in activity that I'm getting for whatever, my 10 x 10's.
And if I got a bunch of leads and none of them are closing, I'd adjust my rate down.
If I got a bunch of leads, they all rented immediately, as soon as I talk to them. I might try to inch it up, inch it up, inch it up until it starts to slow down.
And if I'm really slow like it's just crickets, then I'd really be looking at my competitor rates and pull it out further. Like, can I pull people from further away if I dramatically dropped them instead of pushing them up?"
—Alyssa Quill
"And sometimes the key isn't just dropping rate.
Maybe we're a little bit more creative with a concession or something we can offer the customer to kind of sweeten the pot.
I don't want to create that knee-jerk reaction.
Sometimes it's necessary, but other times I think we can just kind of sweeten the pot, add a little concession here and there, and still have them take action and still obtain that higher rate.
So that's really what I look for as well, is how can we be creative here? The optics. How are the optics going to look to the customer?"
—Jeremy Rollwitz
"Good point.
And also, most of the software packages offer some sort of dynamic pricing built in.
Like in Sitelink, for instance, you can build in push rates that automatically, like, hey, if I bump to this occupancy and stay there for a period of time, ask 5% higher.
You just have to set it up.
So if you spend 20 minutes setting those things up, the software will help you."
—Alyssa Quill
