Storage Moguls

Send us Fan Mail Is house flipping quietly turning into the hardest way to build wealth in real estate, while self-storage investing hands back the time and equity flippers keep chasing?  Joe Downs sits down with Christin Blunk, a former insurance company VP who, with her husband Rod, closed more than 450 residential deals across flips, rentals, wholesaling, and private lending.  Today she owns an...

Send us Fan Mail Did the SBA just lock first-time buyers out of storage investing? Not according to the lender who finances storage deals every day.  Joe Downs sits down with Anne Mino, a senior loan officer on the self-storage lending team at Live Oak Bank, one of the country's largest SBA lenders.  Financing storage acquisitions, expansions, and new builds since 2019, and an owner of storag...

Is the 5% management fee in your broker's offering memorandum wrecking your underwriting? On a facility doing $100,000 a year, that line item works out to about $400 a month, and no credible operator will run your phones, pricing, collections, and marketing for that.  Joe Downs pulls back the curtain on third-party management with Adam Wagner, President and Managing Partner of Anytime Storage...

What if the deal you lost to another buyer becomes your very first storage facility? Joe Downs sits down with Austin McLeod, who launched the self-storage division at Matthews in 2018, closed the firm's first storage deal, and has since closed roughly $850 million in self-storage transactions across 26 states.  Austin pulls back the curtain on how brokers size up first-time buyers within seco...

What if the worst website in town is attached to the best deal you'll see all year?  Two Storage Moguls students bought a self-storage facility with no website and a phone nobody answered, then pushed it past 70% occupancy in under a year.  Joe Downs sits down with Alex Keller, who leads the sales team at StoragePug, the self-storage website platform that has grown from roughly 250 to 2,500 l...

Drop an offering memorandum into ChatGPT, ask "Is this a good deal?" and AI will almost always say yes. It never saw the rent roll, and it has no idea the facility down the street just cut rates.  Live at Funnel Hacking Live in Las Vegas, host Joe Downs pulls back the curtain on StorageMoguls.ai with Peter Swain, CEO of Peter Swain Inc. and a 25-year digital veteran behind more than 1,40...

Are first-time self-storage investors killing deals they worked hard to get under contract… over things that don't actually matter? Joe Downs sits down with Rod Blunk, retired U.S. Navy nuclear engineer, lead mentor at StorageMoguls.ai, and founder of Warriors to Wealth.  Rod spent his career as a quality assurance officer on nuclear submarines, trained to find the valve that mattered before...

Four problems. One deal. One closing. What does it actually take for a first-time self-storage buyer to push through a due diligence report that surfaces a setback encroachment, a title defect, a survey parcel issue, and an environmental flag. All on the same deal.  Joe Downs sits down with Mike and Stephanie Vostenak, retired corporate HR executive turned self-storage owner-operator and his wife,...

Is the next storage deal hiding in plain sight…one you'll only find if you leave your desk and drive?  Joe Downs makes the case for what he calls one of the most under-utilized acquisition strategies in self-storage investing: driving for dollars.  Joe draws on firsthand field experience, including a story about being gestured out of a seller's office and becoming that seller's firs...

What if the most profitable square footage on your self-storage property is the part you're not charging for? Truck parking is emerging as one of the fastest-growing ancillary revenue plays in storage real estate and most facility owners are standing on top of it without knowing it.  Joe Downs sits down with returning guest Sydnie Wilda, VP of Properties Self Storage at Truck Parking Club, th...

What if the data separating a profitable self-storage acquisition from a costly mistake has been sitting inside public CMBS filings all along…and almost nobody in the industry was using it?  Joe Downs sits down with Noah Starr, CEO and co-founder of TractIQ, the market intelligence platform tracking over 72,000 self-storage facilities nationwide and trusted by Brookfield, Public Storage, and Extra...

Most self-storage investors have never actually verified they're properly insured... and the ones who find out they weren't usually discover it at the worst possible moment. Joe Downs sits down with Terry Campbell; commercial insurance specialist at Johnson Insurance and a storage industry veteran who has built facilities, underwritten SBA loans at Live Oak Bank for seven years, served a...

What if the biggest mistake in your first storage deal is believing the appraisal?   Joe Downs and Jack Pezzino reveal how one student nearly overpaid millions for a self storage facility after relying on the wrong appraisal method.  They explain why income, not replacement cost, should drive valuation, why commercial appraisals differ from residential ones, and how inexperienced investors can unk...

What does it actually take to run a self-storage facility you've never set foot inside, from fifteen hundred miles away, without a single day of real estate experience between you?  Joe Downs sits down with John Gaspar and Robert Figueiredo, co-owners of CubedUp Self Storage in Morganton, North Carolina. The duo are IBM veterans originally from Brazil who fired their third-party management co...

Is the self-storage brokerage relationship the most misunderstood edge in storage investing? And are first-time buyers quietly destroying their own deal flow without knowing it?  Joe Downs sits down with David Perlleshi, Managing Director of Self-Storage at Franklin Street, one of the nation's leading self-storage brokerage firms.  David leads a national team with a buyer list of 10,000–15,00...

What actually separates storage investors who scale from the ones who burn out? The deals, or the systems behind them?  Joe Downs sits down with his own business partner, Tim Kane, co-founder of Belrose Storage Group and Storage Moguls and head of acquisitions for a platform with 20+ facilities and over $70 million in storage assets.  Tim pulls back the curtain on the systems that took Belrose fro...

What if the fastest way to grow your self-storage portfolio is to stop trying to do everything yourself?   Joe Downs sits down with Magen Smith, CPA, CEO and co-founder of Atomic Storage Group, to unpack her remarkable journey from managing a single self-storage facility fresh out of college to leading one of the nation's largest third-party management companies with more than 180 locations a...

What's the one clause in your storage deal that could cost you six figures…and would your attorney even catch it?  Joe Downs pulls back the curtain on the legal side of storage investing with Jason Mandel, the commercial real estate transaction attorney at Royer Cooper Cohen Braunfeld who quarterbacks every deal for Downs' 20-plus facility, $70M+ storage portfolio.  Mandel reveals the $9...

What's really standing between a smart, employed, motivated person and their first storage facility… and why isn't it money?  Joe Downs makes the listener the guest and pulls back the curtain on the three quiet fears that keep would-be buyers stuck: no one will lend me money, no seller will take me seriously, no broker will take me seriously.  Drawing on a portfolio of 20+ storage facili...

Is self-storage investing quietly within reach for buyers everyone assumes are "too young" or "too inexperienced”? Joe Downs sits down with brothers Aidan and Liam Brennan, the youngest buyers he's ever mentored, who just closed on Highway 119 North, a 136-unit, 12,800-square-foot self-storage facility in Pembroke, Georgia.  With no prior real estate experience, they negotiated...

Is a first-time storage buyer actually in a stronger position with lenders than an investor who already owns fifty properties?  Joe Downs sits down with David Merkin, senior managing director at Eastern Union Funding, one of the country's largest commercial mortgage brokerages, who has placed debt on hundreds of storage deals across a network of 200-plus lenders.  Merkin pulls back the curtai...

What's the one cost that quietly kills first-time self-storage deals... before the new owner ever collects a dollar?  This episode pulls back the curtain on the management question that's holding too many qualified investors back from their first acquisition.  Host Joe Downs sits down with Alex Erbs, Director at EquiCap Commercial and co-founder of Gateway Storage, who built a full inter...

Are you still piecing together self-storage market data from six browser tabs, census pages, Google Maps, and a legal pad full of math while a motivated seller waits?  The institutional buyers cracked the code long ago, and in this episode, Joe Downs pulls back the curtain on the exact platform they use to do it.   Guest James Breunig, Head of Sales at StorTrack, the platform tracking over 74,000...

What does a self-storage broker actually think when your offer lands in his inbox and why does the broker's decision happen long before you ever submit an LOI?  Joe Downs sits down with Matt Rosendale, a broker with the Lindsey Self-Storage Group and a first-time storage facility owner himself, to pull back the curtain on how listed deals actually work.  With over a decade representing seller...

What actually separates the investors who close their first self-storage deal from everyone else watching from the sidelines and why does it have almost nothing to do with money, intelligence, or market timing?  Joe Downs sits down with Jack Pezzino, Vice President of Education at Belrose Storage Group, the man who runs the mentorship program, leads weekly live calls, and personally guides first-t...