The Process Behind 300+ Store Transitions a Year

Every year, Extra Space Storage transitions 300+ properties—a number that includes acquired stores, joint ventures, and third-party managed facilities. Vice President of Operations Support, Bill Mottram, has spent more than seven years guiding this work, moving from transitions manager to director to his current role. He describes the transitions process as, "We onboard and offboard all stores to the Extra Space platform. It's controlled chaos—trying to communicate with several things outside of your control and manage them all at once."

What that chaos actually looks like is a highly coordinated sequence of moving parts. Onboarding a property means bringing it fully into the Extra Space Storage platform—treasury coordination, IT setup, partner services integration, bank account establishment, credit card processing, and brand standards orientation, among other things. Offboarding is the mirror image, helping a store exit those same systems cleanly. Read on to see how Mottram and his team pull it off hundreds of times a year, without missing a beat.

How Multiple Departments Move in Sync

Through every transition, multiple departments synchronize with the transitions team to complete onboarding or offboarding for a store. This includes accounting, IT, partner services, and operations. The teams are not just handing off the project after one part is complete—they work concurrently with overlapping responsibilities and a strict timeline and sequence of events.

Mottram says that the stakes can be high if timing isn't perfect,

"One key thing can be pretty catastrophic. For example, if we don't get a bank account opened or if we don't give Treasury enough time to get tokens to process credit card payments, we can't open the store."

Coordinating with External Partners

The Extra Space Storage transitions team works with sellers, buyers, and third-party partners. Working with external partners rather than internal employees can mean various levels of communication. Partners can range from being hands-on from day one to going radio silent until opening day approaches. This is the transition team's challenge and success—organizing timelines and keeping deadlines despite varying amounts of contact. This is why self storage third-party management transitions can be especially complex compared to a wholly owned acquisition, because external partner priorities may not always align with the internal team.

The Operational Differentiator

At Extra Space, the most important operational differentiator of onboarding a store is not systems or headcount, but rather strong communication. District managers play a critical role in this communication flow, acting as information conduits between the field and the transitions team.

Mottram explains,

"Communication is probably the key ingredient. The secret sauce. Things always come up, the unexpected happens, but when communication is really flowing both ways, we can usually solve for anything."

The transitions team, and other Extra Space teams in general, have established a culture of speedy communication. When unpredictability strikes, being able to talk quickly with other teams can prevent or solve issues. This process of fast information is what makes 300+ property transitions a year possible.

What This Means for Third-Party Partners

For self storage operators considering third-party management, the transition process is often where trust is built. Extra Space Storage's approach is built on a repeatable framework that has been refined through hundreds of transitions and accounts for the variability of external partners without sacrificing timeline or consistency. Partner services, IT, and treasury teams don't hand off sequentially—they work concurrently, so onboarding moves quickly even when a partner's prior systems aren't aligned with Extra Space's platform.

The 4,200+ facilities Extra Space currently operates represent that process working at scale. And because each new transition sharpens the system rather than straining it, third-party partners aren't navigating a learning curve that Extra Space is figuring out alongside them. Instead, they're stepping into a structure that's been pressure-tested hundreds of times over.

For Mottram, that's the point. The transitions team exists so that operators don't have to solve for the complexity of onboarding alone. The communication infrastructure, the cross-departmental sequencing, the established timelines—all of it is designed to get a partner's facility operational and performing as quickly as possible.

Interested in partnering with Extra Space Storage? Learn more about our third-party management program by contacting us at 866-447-6522. And to hear from more Extra Space leaders like Mottram, check out the Inside Extra Space podcast!