Ever wondered how to navigate the promising world of self-storage investing? Well, wonder no more as we bring in experienced entrepreneur and real estate investor, Alese Johnson, to share her wealth of knowledge. We'll discover how this industry offers a steady cash flow, notwithstanding the market's unpredictable roller-coaster ride.
In this insightful discussion, Alese uncovers the potential returns, the key role of cost segregation studies, and the tax benefits that can be reaped. We'll also zoom into the exciting tech advancements such as 24-hour rentals, e-signatures, and government-level identity verification that are reshaping this sector. Expect to be enlightened as we uncover how these innovations are revolutionizing the self-storage industry.
Finally, we share how you can reach out to Alese for those thirsty for more knowledge on self-storage investing. We'll take a peek at the complexities of the merger and acquisition process and underscore the significance of due diligence. Whether you're a greenhorn or an industry veteran, this episode promises to be a treasure trove of useful insights that can guide you through the universe of self-storage investing. Learn more about Storage Trader at: https://storagetrader.com/, and Tune in!
Ever wondered how to navigate the promising world of self-storage investing? Well, wonder no more as we bring in experienced entrepreneur and real estate investor, Alese Johnson, to share her wealth of knowledge. We'll discover how this industry offers a steady cash flow, notwithstanding the market's unpredictable roller-coaster ride.
In this insightful discussion, Alese uncovers the potential returns, the key role of cost segregation studies, and the tax benefits that can be reaped. We'll also zoom into the exciting tech advancements such as 24-hour rentals, e-signatures, and government-level identity verification that are reshaping this sector. Expect to be enlightened as we uncover how these innovations are revolutionizing the self-storage industry.
Finally, we share how you can reach out to Alese for those thirsty for more knowledge on self-storage investing. We'll take a peek at the complexities of the merger and acquisition process and underscore the significance of due diligence. Whether you're a greenhorn or an industry veteran, this episode promises to be a treasure trove of useful insights that can guide you through the universe of self-storage investing. Learn more about Storage Trader at: https://storagetrader.com/, and Tune in!
Hey Mark, hey Elise, how you doing. I'm good. How are you Doing? Great. Thanks for giving me your time today. Oh, you're welcome, man, thank you. Thanks for having me. I'm going to go ahead and say hi to you. Hey Mark, hey Elise, how you doing Now I'm good, how are you? Doing. Great Thanks for giving me your time today.
Mark Perlberg:Oh, you're welcome, man. Yeah, always happy to help another VISTA member. Yeah, it's a great organization, right yeah?
Alese Johnson:So, and how's your week doing? Oh, it's been crazy busy here, oh yeah.
Mark Perlberg:Yeah. Always busy in my world. Lots of stuff happening. Little rock, arkansas. All right, you went to school there, yeah, and paint bill.
Alese Johnson:How about you?
Mark Perlberg:Where are you? Atlanta, yeah.
Alese Johnson:Lots of traffic and hot weather.
Mark Perlberg:Oh yeah See, I don't, I don't drive.
Alese Johnson:So the traffic issue is not a thing. But yeah Well, I mean, I drive every now and then, but I usually just walk around my bike everywhere. Gotcha, that's pretty sweet.
Mark Perlberg:Yeah, it's a good deal.
Alese Johnson:Well, hold on one second. I'm going to get myself some water and hope that my cat doesn't eat my food and conversation, all right. So what we'll do is I have some questions on self-store and you know some of the things you're working on in your story and you know, just be a casual conversation and I'll chime in here and there and talk about the tax benefits and oh great. And then At the end of it we will It'll go out to my podcast, my YouTube web and my YouTube, my Instagram and all that stuff as well, and yeah, and then I'll also send a newsletter.
Alese Johnson:To our clients in our audience Saying hey, if you're interested in learning more about this investment strategy, we just had a great conversation, cool, cool, all right. So, elise, I'm going to go into the formal recording in about 30 seconds, okay, yeah.
Mark Perlberg:I'm down a few of these. I got the drill. Awesome, all right, hold on Now.
Alese Johnson:Sometimes my voice is too low, so I got to talk into this thing. Yeah, okay.
Mark Perlberg:Can you?
Alese Johnson:hear me.
Mark Perlberg:Yeah, you sound fine, okay, cool.
Alese Johnson:All right, I'm excited today to introduce you to Elise Johnson. She is an experienced Entrepreneur, real estate investor, specializing In self storage and some other things as well. She'll be able to tell you a little more about what she's working on, very excited to talk about her business, the numbers, what it's like investing in self storage and what you could do and the things that they're doing. That they're doing in the past, they're doing in the past.
Mark Perlberg:They're doing in the past, but we're not going to be doing that Just to say this is just a lot of experience or money to still see the benefits as for in taxes and in cashflow for investing in self storage. So, elise, please introduce yourself in 60 seconds or less, if that's possible, I will go into. I'm doing bank consulting and major acquisition conversions with really big banks across the web and I got into real estate investing as a good place to park some of that money that I made consulting and it turns out my favorite investment was in self storage and I decided to do a lot more of that, so that's how I got here.
Alese Johnson:So self storage to me is the thing I like about it is how unsexy it is. Right, yeah, because you put on HGTV, everybody's renovating and fixing and get all these. You know these folks are watching HGTV and they decide to flip and they inflate the market and everybody knows about single family, multi family and obviously you can make money in there. But it seems to me that there's some advantages to self storage in terms of seasonality and saturation and issues that are in other areas you don't have to deal with. But does my assumptions make sense here when I'm saying all this?
Mark Perlberg:Yeah, it is profoundly an unsexy business. I mean people come use our services to store all the stuff they don't want in their house. I mean how not sexy can that be? But the thing is is they can't let go of that stuff and so they will come rent a storage unit forever. We had customers that we acquired when we bought our first facility that were still with us when we sold that facility last year and that was well over a decade.
Alese Johnson:And so you know you hear a lot of people sometimes obsessing over the fluctuations in housing markets and pricing and is there going to be a drop, is there going to be a spike or is there going to be a housing? You know, is everything going to be a major correction? Do you worry about those same things and see as much fluctuations and economic impacts from the economy on self-sortage?
Mark Perlberg:Not as much, but we're not immune to it either. I mean we've seen some crazy cap rates in the last year or so post-COVID in the storage industry facilities. That in tertiary markets that used to would go for an eight or nine cap. We're trading at five caps there. For a while that strikes me as a little nuts, but that's starting to come down now. I've seen a number of deals going across my desk in the eight cap range in the last week. That seems a little more reasonable to me.
Alese Johnson:Great, now let's break down the numbers here. Let's say and obviously you can't promise any numbers, but let's just talk about. Yeah, you always got to say that Obviously, nothing is promised, but on, let's say, a typical deal that's successful Within reason here, if you put in $100,000 at an eight cap, would that be equivalent to saying that your distributions would be similar to 8000? Because you're leveraging, is your cash on cash a little higher as a limited investor?
Mark Perlberg:Well, gosh, you're asking me. I can tell you I can't do math in my head. Your audience is going to love that. They're probably all accountants who can just rattle those numbers off, and that's not me. I can tell you that you can expect what felt like pretty decent returns to me, Although in my experience I personally was playing for the long game and really just wanted the equity out at the end. I was never trying to take money out every month. I specifically didn't want to For my own tax strategy.
Alese Johnson:Yeah, then, so far as on the exits is where you're typically seeing a lot of the value, do you guys refinance? Or now, with interest rates, is that less of an appealing yeah?
Mark Perlberg:We played that game every time we had the chance over the decade that we own storage facilities. Yeah, you just refinanced to get the interest rates down, because certainly you don't want to pay too much money for your storage facility or for the money that you're using. Yeah, I would not refinance in this market, though, unless the interest rates go down, but I think a lot of people are being forced into. They had five year refinance requirements, and so they're having to go to the market and work out new terms. I think that's really hard on some people. Where their numbers worked nicely, cash flowed at 3% money, but now that they've got to get 7% or 8% money, depending on how well your banker loves you and where your market is it's sometimes a lot harder to make the cash flow work every month. So if you're playing for monthly cash flow numbers, that gets hard.
Alese Johnson:Yeah, what I've seen is a lot of people saw a lot of success when they started investing in maybe five or six years ago, and a big portion of their success just came from the inflation and the rising prices of the property. So maybe they bought a rental property or multifamily where it wasn't cash flow positive and it was a headache, but when they sold they had an exit of six figures in capital gain yeah. So you have a lot of those campaigns now.
Alese Johnson:Yeah, so you have a lot of people who maybe weren't so successful as landlords, but it seems to me and correct me if I'm wrong, I'm wondering your opinion here A lot of them have a lot of cash. They didn't really run a very cash flow positive business, but because of the capital gains they have this almost inflated sense of confidence. And what's going to happen when you can't rely on for some of these folks in maybe the residential areas where it was like you could buy anything in 2008 and you'll look smart 10 years later, Right?
Mark Perlberg:Yeah, except those of us who actually own property going into 2008 didn't like that so well. But yeah, yeah, those people need to check their egos at the door on that, because timing can make a lot of us look smart when really, strategically, we weren't.
Alese Johnson:So some of the exits I see on syndications we typically see a good syndication have like a five or six year exit. At that time, anywhere from 50 to 100% capital gain. What would we expect on a successful exit for self storage?
Mark Perlberg:Well, you know that requires a crystal ballmark and I can't predict the market five years out. I can tell you that I 3x my own properties on the ones that I sold in January. But that was proper market timing and just sheer luck. But if I got back into the market right now with it being so high and then was planning on selling for five years, I don't know that those huge multiples will still be available. It's just, you know, we're back to that cracked crystal ball.
Alese Johnson:Yeah.
Mark Perlberg:So if you're buying at the top of market, it's like buying at the top of the stock market. You got to figure out what your strategy is.
Alese Johnson:Yeah, okay, and so some of the things about that. Now, if you're not a CPA, you may not be able to answer this question here. But what I'm wondering is so I'm assuming you do cost segregation studies on all of the self storage, absolutely. So if you're a limited investor, what percentage of your investment do you get as a, would you say people may get as an induction in year one from the cost seg? So let's say you're a hundred, you know you put $100,000 in. What do you think the tax deduction from the cost seg in year one might be for someone like that?
Mark Perlberg:There you go with another math question, mark. If you can, it's fine. I can't give you a number but I can tell you that from my own experience doing cost segregation is dramatic, especially that first year tax deduction was huge for us because so much of a storage facility is in equipment and you know things that you can classify and deduct out that first year. So you got to do a cost seg study when you acquire a storage facility. Absolutely.
Alese Johnson:Do you see, maybe like and again, this is a question where, unless you're in finance, this might be tricky to answer. So it's all right.
Mark Perlberg:You're getting me with the heart ones.
Alese Johnson:This is the last number of this question, don't worry. Oh good, thank you. So you got 20% of purchase price to 40% qualifies for bonus, or what? Is there a range that you typically see?
Mark Perlberg:I think your numbers are pretty reasonable 20 or 40%.
Alese Johnson:Okay, great, great, yeah. The cool thing that I like about the self storage facilities is you know, we just had a conversation with some of our other clients on oil and gas.
Mark Perlberg:Yeah, I saw that yeah.
Alese Johnson:So it's awesome stuff and you get passive income. Your first year you have a loss that will offset your W2. So let's say you know. Let's say you don't have rep status and you can't. You're in the position where you can't manage a short term rental Landlording is not your thing, but you still love real estate.
Alese Johnson:You can reduce your taxes with some of these investments in oil and gas, and then, eventually, though, that oil and gas is going to start generating some profit that could potentially be taxable.
Alese Johnson:You could take some of your tax savings and combine it with a strategy like this, where you're still doing nothing at all and you're going to get that one year one loss from the cost aggregation to offset the passive income generated from your oil and gas. So now you have cash flow that is going to be untaxed, which is a beautiful thing, Right, yeah, you know, compared that to your W2. I mean, some people they they're always looking for ways to reduce the taxes from their W2, but there's also something beautiful about having cash flow that is untaxed. So right, yeah, and uh. So one of the things I also I really found interesting about what you do is with storage trader. It looks like such a simplistic way to, as a consumer, to to go on the website, evaluate deals, and it looks like you can invest as little as $10,000 to start being an LP in some of these storage facilities. What led you to create?
Mark Perlberg:that vehicle.
Mark Perlberg:Because every cocktail party I went to, people would tell me, uh, once they heard that I did storage investing, they were going oh, how can I get involved in that? I don't, I don't want to buy a whole facility, I don't want to have to learn when it takes to run one, but I sure would like to invest in one. And uh, you know, we would just commiserate about that being a problem. And uh, so I finally decided well, that's a fixable issue. We can create a marketplace where, uh, all my friends and people like them can come find facilities that they want to invest in and then satisfy that desire to own a piece of a storage facility without having to develop the tops to manage one effectively or to do the whole big, you know, multi-million dollar investment to purchase the entire facility.
Alese Johnson:Yeah, cause you know, when I see with other syndicators they usually require a minimum of 25 to 50,000. And then there's all these regulations where you have to have a developed relationship with them, with evaluating the PPMs, and there's all this paperwork and it's really tricky for people to get started. But with this type of vehicle you can be, you know, relatively quickly with you can go in. Maybe you don't want to spend 25 upfront, you could put 10, as little as 10,000 upfront and you're still going to see a lot of the benefits here. The tax benefits in year one might be helpful. You'll see potentially some cash flow and some at least what we're hearing here potential significant capital gains as tax advantaged as well.
Mark Perlberg:Yeah, that sounds about right. I want to be clear that each one of our deal sponsors uh sets their own terms. So on, on one storage facility in our platform, you might see a minimum of 10. On another, you might see a minimum of 50 or 100. It just depends on the specific opportunity. But yeah, you're right that syndications can get a little complicated. Now, we do. We're not a crowdfunding platform. We do require that the people who come invest with us are accredited investors and they have to submit the paperwork to prove that, and they also have to go through FINRA verification to prove that they're not on the PEPN sanctions list. So we need to know on all sides that we're dealing with legitimate investors here in the US. But we make that super simple and it's cost painless, as we know how to make it and still satisfy regulatory requirements.
Alese Johnson:Yeah, yeah, and that's another thing here.
Alese Johnson:So when you're forming a partnership where there's limited investors who aren't making decisions, a lot of people don't realize that you're issuing securities and there's heavily regulated, and we have a lot of our clients who would go and form handshake deals and not even have anything written up limited partners and now we're like you're putting yourself at risk here for all sorts of challenges and you're out of. You know the partnership is out of compliance. Yeah, there's not even any sort of partnership agreement or anything and some of these folks get started. So if you're that, you know this is like. This is a really good example of a tight process for raising capital and if you're at a beginner's stage, you really want to think about if you're going to partner with anyone and in particular, with someone who's not a family member and they are going to be a limited partner.
Alese Johnson:You really want to make sure you're doing this in a compliant manner.
Mark Perlberg:Absolutely you do, and we're going to. We require deal sponsors to submit all the paperwork that they normally would in a deal room for their bank or a private investor, and my partner and I review all that documentation. We want to be sure that we fully understand the deals that are being offered around our platforms. So we do pretty tight due diligence. Now, certainly don't take our work for it. We hope that, or we insist that the people who invest in our platform do their own due diligence and they have to sign off that they've, you know, done all the appropriate researching review themselves. But they do have the confidence that we've looked at it pretty closely before we put it on the platform.
Alese Johnson:Yeah. So one thing that I think is that people overlook with this as well going back to some of the tax stuff here is that when you do that year one cost segregation study, this is a great way as a capital gain strategy from other real estate.
Alese Johnson:So if you have, a failed 1031 exchange and now you have all this cash from the sale. You're like what can I do if I want to continue to invest and offset the capital gains? Invest in real estate. That's doing a cost seg. The losses can offset your capital gains even if you don't have real estate. Professional tax tax.
Mark Perlberg:Yeah.
Alese Johnson:Yep, and you know. Another thing I saw about your background is you're helping people out with due diligence on deals and you have your company that does that. Can you tell me a little more about the due diligence process and how you're helping people out?
Mark Perlberg:Are you talking about specifically with Sword Trader? Are you talking about something else you saw in my resume? I believe I saw it with Isaac.
Mark Perlberg:Yes. So that is a company that I developed about eight years ago to do due diligence in the mergers and acquisitions space because I used to implement mergers for really big banks and we saw that there's a tremendous failure rate because the average person who's trying to acquire another company statistically will not put adequate amount of time into digging into the company. Sometimes they don't even know the questions to ask. So we built this framework for doing due diligence that allows you to score the acquisition target and really understand their organizational maturity nuances around a broad range I think some 180 different aspects of a company's operations before you do the deal.
Mark Perlberg:The thought was we could head off that 80% failure rate or it might be 70. But regardless it's too much. People throw their money away buying companies that they don't fully understand. So three years out they go under and everybody's not happy about having done it in the first place. And we offered our strong opinion that if you better understood the company up front then you could adjust your prices appropriately and you could do a better job of running the company long term. And if you already own a company and you're trying to do a true merger, then you better understand what that integration process looks like because it always costs more money and takes much longer than you anticipate going in. So that's what Isaac slash merger match was all about was trying to improve that process.
Alese Johnson:Do you have a similar process when you're evaluating self storage deals?
Mark Perlberg:No, we boiled that down to something much more simple.
Alese Johnson:Nice, nice, we're some.
Mark Perlberg:Yeah, storage is a very simple business, and that's what is so not sexy about it. There just are not a lot of moving parts, and so it doesn't require such an intense due diligence. If I could look at a storage facility, you want to see occupancy, you want to see what the rent rates are, you want to see how that compares to the market, you want to understand market saturation. And then you run some numbers and from my personal work I've been boiled down to a spreadsheet that we can plug in a few numbers and provide a price to you in a matter of, you know, 15 minutes or less. So it's just not Not that complicated.
Alese Johnson:So that's probably something that is appealing to limited investors, in that when you're investing in the stock market and you're never going to know all the company's operations, but when you're investing in self-storage units, you're able to review the prospectus and make sense of the information relatively quickly in a much more simplistic type of investment vehicle. Here.
Mark Perlberg:Yes, I mean. There's just not a lot to operations in a storage facility. You rent units, you move people out of units, you rent the unit over again, you sweep them out, you clean them up, you maintain the buildings and you collect money. I know I'm leaving something out, but it's just not complicated as a business model.
Alese Johnson:Do you see a decent amount of renovations in any of these self-storage facilities? I do, okay.
Mark Perlberg:Especially out in the tertiary markets. You're seeing buildings that were built 20 or 30 years ago and they're to the point where the doors need to be upgraded and redone. The springs are not working the way they should, they've gotten a little dangerous or the paint has faded due to sitting out in the sun. They just don't look as pretty as they once did. Street appeal is an important thing. You see a lot of concrete buildings which people used to like but have fallen out of favor. You see people redoing those, putting metal cladding on the outside of it to make it look more current.
Mark Perlberg:Mostly, I see people adding a lot of cameras and lighting and technology Bluetooth door locks. That's my favorite new tech personally because it increases operational efficiency so dramatically. I see there's still a lot of old facilities out there where there's a house on the property where the office manager lived. That's just not done anymore. People buy those facilities and then either tear down the house or convert it to some other kind of income generating business. But people don't have onsite live in storage managers anymore. We have websites and tech that do that work for us.
Alese Johnson:What are some of the most exciting things that you find in what you're doing with self-storage right now, or just in general, with your investing career?
Mark Perlberg:The most exciting thing I see in storage right now is all the technology that's coming on board that allows us to rent storage units 24 hours a day. You can be sitting in your bedroom at 3 o'clock in the morning and decide you need storage and rent it right there. It's on all the contracts. I love e-signatures. There's the software we looked at last year that did government level identity verification Like. It forced you to scan your driver's license and then do a selfie and it matched it up and it ran you through all the security databases. I like that a lot because that cuts down on some of the fraud that we see in the industry. That kind of thing I get real excited about.
Alese Johnson:So it's like you find these older storage facilities rent by some people who maybe have not taken the initiative to keep up with the new technological advantages. You give it a facelift.
Alese Johnson:You create automations, reduce the amount of man hours needed to oversee the place and then you can increase prices, drive a fish disease and profits. You've done this a lot of times. You likely have a reliable model and you know how many people will stay and what you can charge and pretty soon you're pretty confident that you can drive up the value of this place and have a healthy exit. Sounds like.
Mark Perlberg:Spot on, mark. Yes, we are very confident, we know how to do that and, amazingly enough, very few people will leave. Remember, they don't know what to do with their stuff. They will put up with a lot. Now I say that and I saw somebody acquire a facility recently and they jacked up rates like they raised rates, I'm going to say 30%, and they were already pretty high, so they had some moveouts. I've been watching that case study for a bit, but I think I suspect that case was more about their failure to communicate effectively with their newly acquired customers. So I don't know, but in my personal experience I have only had maybe one customer leave because of tech changes or rate increases over the years. They'll bitch about it, they'll call you up and talk to your office manager and complain, but they don't actually move out.
Alese Johnson:Okay, good to know. Yeah Well, we get the same complaints when we have to raise prices too. So this Well, everybody does right.
Mark Perlberg:Nobody likes price increases.
Alese Johnson:Yeah, I guess, as a business owner, it's just part of the business yet.
Mark Perlberg:It is, you just have to do it though.
Alese Johnson:Yeah, and so with the technology now, and that's probably one of your biggest initiatives- by chance, are you also seeing an advantage of artificial intelligence in your business?
Mark Perlberg:I am looking for ways to do that. I can't say I've implemented anything yet. Well, except for in our marketing, we use AI to write content for us, to write articles, and that's helpful, and we recently tested out an AI platform that would generate PowerPoint video for us so we could create. We could take a blog post and create a YouTube to match it really quick, like a couple of minutes, and that was a pretty amazing thing. But in the actual day-to-day operations I haven't actually implemented anything. I know there's a product out on the market called Swivel that is a chatbot for self-storage websites and it's AI-powered, and I think that's really interesting. I'm looking forward to trying that out at some point.
Alese Johnson:Very cool. What I just did right now is I was at a conference, a tax conference, and they said some of our limitations is we just don't know when and how to use it. So what I did is you ask the AI how you can use AI.
Mark Perlberg:That's brilliant. I like it.
Alese Johnson:Because it's a really good idea maker. So here I just plugged in here some things that they're saying chatbots, personalized recommendations, inventory management, dynamic pricing management, maintenance predictions, facial recognition we talked about anomaly detection, trend analysis, cost segmentation, not segregation, but segmentation, identifying different customer segments and tailor marketing strategies, target marketing campaigns, customer retention models, smart contracts, environmental efficiencies, integration with other services, virtual tours, mobile apps and automated compliance checks. That's kind of interesting. What do you think about that? It is interesting.
Mark Perlberg:It is really interesting the virtual tours. I kind of like that. I'm glad you're recording this so I'll have that list later I can go play with it and see what I can use.
Alese Johnson:Yeah, I just asked chat GPT, but I'll email you the results. I mean, I have so much fun with this thing too.
Mark Perlberg:Yeah, I have a GPT account. I love it and I've been using their companion artist that goes along with chat GPT to generate some images for presentations lately. That's an entertaining thing to work with.
Alese Johnson:Yes, so much cool stuff. And well, chat GPT. There's a lag of two years on whether it's gathering information. So if we want to do tax research, what we're exploring is you paste the legislation into chat GPT and then you have read the legislation and answer your questions about the legislation based on the terminology.
Mark Perlberg:Oh well, that's interesting, so you can use it to expedite your own analysis in an article.
Alese Johnson:Same with Excel docs. There's a way that it'll read Excel to give you evaluations, come up with ratios and all sorts of fun stuff.
Mark Perlberg:That's fun. I might have to go play with that. Thanks, mark, yeah, anytime. Well, you know you were asking about trends. This is profoundly not sexy, but I've been looking into how climate control is changing and I think we're going to. Well. I know for sure that as people develop storage facilities, you're going to see a heavier concentration of climate control units. With the weather being so hot and so undependable, people need to put their stuff in a climate controlled unit and, from a profit margin perspective, as long as you can control your utility costs, a climate control unit can bring in a lot more revenue.
Alese Johnson:Wow, okay, and I imagine you had to do moisture control and all those as well.
Mark Perlberg:In order to be climate controlled, it has to be both humidity and temperature, Otherwise you can't use the term. You get into legal trouble.
Alese Johnson:Gotcha Cool, so some other things. So what I'm wondering now is what do you do outside of self storage?
Mark Perlberg:What do you?
Alese Johnson:do for fun outside your work.
Mark Perlberg:For fun. Well, I do angel investing. I'm a member of the Arkansas Angel Alliance and that's fun because we get to hear pitches from a lot of interesting startup companies and I'm endlessly curious about businesses that are starting up here in Arkansas. That fascinates me, and I also have been learning to do ballroom dancing, so that's a lot of fun and challenging. I've learned that my feet don't move fast enough, but we're working on that.
Alese Johnson:All right, and if you could go back to your former self, let's say 20 years ago, what would you tell yourself to best have helped you succeed in your business endeavors?
Mark Perlberg:I would have told myself not to be scared to go out and leverage up heavily and by every last storage facility I could get my hands on. I was way too cautious about that.
Alese Johnson:What would you tell yourself from one year ago?
Mark Perlberg:From one year ago. Oh gosh, I would have told myself to go ahead and cash out when we were seeing three and four caps, because I missed that curve by about six months.
Alese Johnson:But it's like you never know. Like when, the month in 2008, everybody's like, oh, I should have bought in 2008. No one knew when it was going to stop. Prices were going to stop, yeah.
Mark Perlberg:It's that cracked crystal ball. You just never know. So I still came out pretty good. I'm not sure I really wanted to sell, but you know why. I got divorced and had to liquidate everything. So otherwise I would never have sold my storage facilities, top of market or not. But that's just me personally, that your average person and yeah, I don't know I would. I don't have any advice for a year ago. That's generally applicable.
Alese Johnson:Yeah, no problem. Well, thank you so much. Can you tell the audience and listeners where they can learn more about what you do and where they can go to potentially invest in self storage through? I believe it was called storage trader?
Mark Perlberg:Absolutely. Come follow us on storage tradercom. We have a blog section that has a lot of articles. One or two of them are written by AI. Yeah, that will give you a lot of information that you need to know before you invest in storage facility, so that's a really great resource or messages. There's a contact form on the website or you can reach out to me at Elise ALSC at storage tradercom, and I'm happy to answer questions. I mean keeping in mind that I'm not a broker attorney and can't give investment advice, and we all know I'm not good at numbers, so you know but we're happy to have a conversation and be helpful to people who are wanting to look at either investing in storage or they have a project they're wanting to do that. They need some capital raising assistance.
Alese Johnson:Wonderful.
Mark Perlberg:I'd love to talk to you Awesome.
Alese Johnson:Thank you so much for your time, Elise.
Mark Perlberg:You're very welcome, Mark.
Alese Johnson:It was a delight, absolutely, and for all the listeners. You will put all this information in the show notes and if you're interested in any of the joining our team, or you or someone you know might be interested in being a client email info at markprobertscpacom. Subscribe for more Awesome. Well, thank you so much.