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Question for current facility owners. Shane and I have never had a problem allowing our any of our BOG to have a free unit (depending on occupancy, of course). It gives them a different prospective utilizing the facility as a customer as well as an employee. Do any of you do this? If so, what issues have you experienced? Positive or Negative..

You have a 90% occupied facility but a new competitor just opened down the street. Do you lower prices or hold steady?

A big part of self storage ownership is dealing with delinquent customers. While do try to work with people and get them caught up through payment plans, we sometimes end up needing to auction their unit. We just had an auction at our site in SC. There were 6 units up for bid, only 1 was sold and the total amount we collected was $8. Now we were left with 5 units full of mostly junk that we needed to get cleaned out and made rent ready. Instead of calling our BOG, we used the "request cleanout" feature that Storage Treasures offers. Within 30 minutes we had 2 separate people accept the cleanout offer. We still collected the $100 cleaning fee, gave them access like any other auction winner and now have our 5 other units cleaned out and rent ready. It cost us nothing, and now we have a local that has offered to clean out any abandoned units we have. Anyone that has had to pay to have junk removed knows this is a huge win! Even though $8 from an auction seems like nothing, the true value is having clean and rent ready space for the next customer to come in at market rates. We have a few good auction stories to tell but I would love to hear from some of you as well. What's the craziest auction experience you've had at your facility?

Shane and I are very specific with what we look for while on location doing a site visit. We drive around the town and surrounding areas with an entire mental check list. I’m curious what everyone feels is the number one most important thing that you look for in a prospective area