by John Stevens
August 3, 2011 3:28 PM
There is a saying that used to come at the end of every G.I. Joe cartoon when the show was on during the 1980s—knowing is half the battle. While it applied to all the little life lessons that the show was trying to teach its young viewers, it also directly applies to success is in the self storage business.
The concept is simple. If you don’t know how to operate a self storage facility, you will have a hard time getting tenants to stick around. If you don’t know how to deal with cranky customers or how to relate to customers in general, you will not have too many.
Those two issues and many other potential ones will be something self storage owners will never have to worry about if they don’t figure out how to entice prospective tenants to entrust their belongings to you and your self storage facility.
To develop business, self storage operators (just like every other business) advertises. However, if you don’t know where to advertise and who to direct your advertising dollars towards, you’ll have just as many open units after your advertising budget is spent as before.
REIS, Inc. would like to help out the self storage industry with issues such as this and have come to an agreement with the Self Storage Association to introduce coverage of self storage related data like there has never been before.
"We look forward to empowering the industry with supply, demand and rent trends for local markets and submarkets. Standardized market information will further enhance self storage's ability to compete for a greater share of capital allocations in a highly competitive marketplace,” Lloyd Lynford, Reis’s CEO said.
Participating REITs will provide REIS with data on individual facilities from around the country including physical and geographical data along with various performance metrics.
With no centralized source of data for the industry, the analytical tools that Reis will look to provide will help with making management decisions as well as figuring out if it is time to buy or sell or just maintain the status quo.
The information will be available through the Self Storage Association. There is no word yet on whether the reports generated by Reis are going to replace the FOCUS reports that SSA already offers on financial data and operating characteristics. Reports will be open to self storage owners and operators starting in 2012.
Sources Used:
“Reis Announces Exclusive Market Data Agreement with Self Storage Association and Three Leading REITs.” Benzinga; 01 August 2011.
Welcome to F.O.C.U.S.; Self Storage Association.