If you're renaming the facility once you take over, how much are you spending for the new signs? I know it will depend on how many and sizes. In general, how much are you spending? -Tommy

"The best deals never hit the market." That's something I say a lot, and it's the honest truth behind how I've picked up several of my 8 facilities. If you're waiting for a broker to email you a listing everyone else already has, you're already behind. The real edge is cold calling owners directly. Most of these folks have owned their facility for 15, 20, 30 years. They're tired, they've thought about selling, and nobody has ever picked up the phone and asked. After 23 years in sales, I've refined this down to 5 scripts that actually get owners talking instead of hanging up. I broke the whole approach down here, including the exact scripts I use and how to handle the most common objections: https://youtu.be/d1zjg5oXny0 If you want the bigger picture of how cold calling fits into a full deal-flow system alongside brokers, driving for dollars, and Google scraping, the Blueprint walks through all of it: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wkUwltCW9wk7LbsoddYwTfTFn5UgMg2x/view?usp=sharing What's stopping you from making your first 10 owner calls this week? Dave "Dial and Deal" DeMink

self storage folks - anyone dealt with seller pushback lately that didn't respond to the usual approach? curious what's actually worked for people here

Looking at a contract where the seller selected the title company (local to seller) since he had his attorney draft the contract. Should I insist on selecting the title company to ensure they are not bias? I was not concerned about it, but my attorney is.

Most new storage investors do the same thing. They set up alerts on LoopNet and Crexi, refresh Crexi every morning, and wait. When something finally pops up, they're bidding against 40 other people, the numbers are already picked over, and the good deals are long gone before they hit the public market. Here's the better way. The real deals never show up on those sites. I've bought several of my 8 facilities through off-market channels, and the pattern is always the same — a broker calls me first, or I found the owner myself before anyone else did. That means direct mail to owners, cold calls with a real script, driving for dollars in secondary markets, and yes, paying someone on Fiverr fifty bucks to scrape Google for every mom-and-pop facility in a region. Stack those channels together and you stop waiting for deals. They start coming to you. If you want to see how I actually work brokers to get that first call before anyone else, watch this one: https://youtu.be/pdQMvZhvSJA. Twenty-three years in sales taught me that brokers don't send their best deals to strangers — they send them to the buyers they trust. That relationship is worth more than any listing site. If you want the full step-by-step for Phase 1, the Blueprint walks through it: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wkUwltCW9wk7LbsoddYwTfTFn5UgMg2x/view?usp=sharing Which channel are you leaning into first — brokers, direct mail, or cold calls? Dave "First Call Wins" DeMink