Storage Moguls
What does it take to go from knowing absolutely nothing about self-storage investing to owning your first storage facility?Turns out, less than you think. And Storage Moguls is going to show you exactly how.Storage Moguls is hosted by entrepreneur and storage investing expert Joe Downs. Each week, Joe sits down with seasoned storage operators, real estate investors, SBA lenders, acquisition specialists, and students who've already done the deals, breaking down every piece of the self-storage and Boat & RV storage investment process so that anyone can understand it, act on it, and succeed with it.Whether you're a first-time...
How Do I Get The Money?
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 storage herself, Anne explains why projections-based lease-up deals are still in play, which debt service coverage targets to hit by month 13 and year three, and how the new gu...
The 5% Management Fee Myth in Storage Investing
Send us Fan Mail
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 Property Management.
Following a merger with The Storage Manager, Adam's top 50 firm now runs more than 90 facilities 100% remotely, including three of Joe's boat and RV storage properties.
Ada...
Why a Lost Deal Became This Investor's First Storage Facility
Send us Fan Mail
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 seconds, why a lower offer backed by proof of funds and a clear underwriting story can beat the highest bid, and which offering memorandum details, from flood zones to p...
Storage Investing in the AI Search Era
Send us Fan Mail
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 locations during his nearly seven years there.
Together they pull back the curtain on why 63 to 67 percent of storage rentals now hap...
Can AI Tell You If a Storage Deal Is Actually Good?
Send us Fan Mail
Storage Moguls Live. Friday, October 16 in White Marsh, Maryland. One day with self storage owners. Walk through a real facility and learn how they find, finance, and close deals. Only 15 tickets. Register at https://go.storagemoguls.ai/white-marsh-md before Thursday.
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 p...
The Liability Litmus Test: How to Evaluate Storage Deals
Send us Fan Mail
Storage Moguls Live. Friday, October 16 in White Marsh, Maryland. One day with self storage owners. Walk through a real facility and learn how they find, finance, and close deals. Only 15 tickets. Register at https://go.storagemoguls.ai/white-marsh-md before Thursday.
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...
Four Problems, One Closing: How First-Time Investors Still Won
Send us Fan Mail
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, who closed on Murrayville Self-Storage, a 110-unit facility in Wilmington, North Carolina, just one month before recording.
They walk through the real-time decisions, the legal battles wi...
The Drive-for-Dollars Playbook for Self-Storage Investors
Send us Fan Mail
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 first phone call nine months later, to illustrate why physically canvassing a market transforms cold calls into what he calls "power calls."
...
What Every Self-Storage Owner Needs to Know About Truck Parking Revenue
Send us Fan Mail
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, the platform now operating across more than 6,500 locations nationwide.
With nearly a decade of self-storage experience spanning onsite management, operations, and ownership, Wilda breaks do...
The Self-Storage Data Gap That's Costing Investors Money
Send us Fan Mail
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 Space.
Before building the data infrastructure the industry was missing, Noah personally acquired eleven self-storage facilities across four states through his company Star Equity, underwriting deals that gave him a fr...
Is Your Storage Facility Properly Insured? Probably Not.
Send us Fan Mail
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 as CEO of Copper Storage Management, and personally owns eleven self-storage locations across the Southeast.
Terry brings a perspective almost no insurance professional can: he sees coverage gaps t...
Catching Underwriting Mistakes Self-Storage Investors Miss
Send us Fan Mail
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 unknowingly turn an asset into a liability. The conversation explores common underwriting mistakes, the danger of being either too aggressive or too conservative with assumptions, and why un...
No Experience? No Excuse. Self-Storage Beginner's Blueprint
Send us Fan Mail
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 company after just two months and took full control of their facility from Miami, Florida.
In seven months of self-managing, they drove physical occupancy from 70% to 84% and ex...
A Self-Storage Broker's Warning to First-Time Buyers
Send us Fan Mail
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 10,000–15,000 active prospects and is currently on the front lines of a wave of COVID-era vintage loans from 2019–2022 coming due into a dramatically higher-rate environment.
He and Joe dismantle the fear-based myths h...
Build the Systems, Scale the Storage Business
Send us Fan Mail
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 from three guys fixing gate codes at night to a multi-vertical platform spanning self-storage, Pro Storage, and industrial outdoor storage (iOS).
From def...
Why Self-Storage Success Starts With Better Systems
Send us Fan Mail
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 across 30 states.
Magen shares how accounting, operations, marketing, development, and technology all intersect to create exceptional storage businesses, why great management is far more than co...
Why Storage Investing Deals Die During Due Diligence
Send us Fan Mail
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 $900,000 mistake an ALTA survey prevented on a $1.5M self-storage acquisition, why signed LOIs are never fully non-binding, how to stop the due diligence clock from running before you...
The 3 Fears Keeping You From Your First Storage Deal
Send us Fan Mail
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 facilities worth more than $75 million across multiple states and verticals, Downs dismantles each fear with real numbers, DSCR targets of 1.20–1.25, SBA financing, and the 70–75% of US se...
Too Young, Too Inexperienced? This Storage Deal Says Otherwise
Send us Fan Mail
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 an $800,000 ask down to an effective $680,000 then navigated a landlocked easement nightmare when the neighboring property owner died mid-deal.
This episode pulls back the curtain on SBA financing, underwriting, delinquency cleanup, and self-management for...
What Banks Really Want From First-Time Storage Investors
Send us Fan Mail
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 curtain on what banks really evaluate in self-storage financing: the sponsor, the story behind the numbers, and a credible business plan.
He explains why complex borrowers get...
The Real Cost of Self-Storage Management
Send us Fan Mail
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 internal KPI and operations system through Erbs Management Group before watching it merge with The Storage Mall, now one of the country's leading third-party management platforms.
Alex has...
Data Points That Actually Matter When Closing Storage Deals
Send us Fan Mail
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 self-storage and boat and RV storage facilities across the United States, brings 18 years of storage industry experience to the table.
Bre...
What Brokers Are Really Thinking When Your LOI Comes In
Send us Fan Mail
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 sellers and connecting buyers across the self-storage market, Matt reveals exactly what separates buyers who get to the closing table from those who never ge...
Are You the Right Person to Buy a Storage Facility?
Send us Fan Mail
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-time storage investors from zero to one.
With Belrose Storage Group's portfolio exceeding $50 million across 20 self-storage facilities, Jack has a front-row seat to who succeeds…and why.
...
The Storage Facility Nobody Wanted. The Deal Everybody Missed.
Send us Fan Mail
Is the gap between what your storage facility is and what it should be worth more than the facility itself?
Joe Downs sits down with Sydnie Wilda, operations and property management expert at Anytime Storage, a hands-on operator who has managed both boat and RV facilities and self-storage, including facilities within Joe's own portfolio.
The conversation delivers a field-level breakdown of the two most overlooked opportunities in storage investing right now: underperforming mom-and-pop self-storage facilities sitting 30% below market rents, and boat and RV storage operations being run like oversized 10x1...
The Seller Stopped Operating. The Data Made Them Stay.
Send us Fan Mail
What do you do when the seller of your first self-storage facility simply stops showing up? Phones go dark, the website dies, and occupancy craters to 40%...while you're still under contract and $25,000 deep in non-recoverable costs?
That's the crisis at the center of this episode.
Joe Downs sits down with Adam and Kirby Leiby, a sales professional and homeschooling mom with zero prior storage experience, who purchased Lemon Springs Self Storage in Sanford, North Carolina for $625,000 in August 2025.
Less than a year later, the 96-unit facility is at...
Cancer Threatened Their Income. Storage Made It Bulletproof.
Send us Fan Mail
What would happen to your household income if you couldn't work tomorrow?
That single question is at the heart of this episode and for guest Christin Blunk, it wasn't hypothetical. When her husband Rod was diagnosed with stage four cancer three days before Christmas, their income stopped cold.
What followed transformed their life with 20 years of residential real estate experience into self-storage investors generating $12,000 per month in passive cash flow…on less than 15 hours of management per month.
Joe Downs sits down with Christin to unpack how she a...
Storage Moguls Trailer
Send us Fan Mail
Storage Moguls, hosted by entrepreneur and storage investing expert Joe Downs, is the go-to podcast for real estate investors, entrepreneurs, and self storage operators serious about building wealth through self storage and Boat & RV storage. Each week, Joe sits down with industry experts, seasoned storage operators, and students who've done the deals, delivering deep-dive conversations on underwriting, SBA loans, SBA financing, deal analysis, storage acquisitions, facility valuation, cap rates, NOI, and everything in between. Whether you're a first-time real estate investor evaluating your first storage facility or an experienced entrepreneur scaling your commercial...
