How is self-storage doing today? What are the benefits of joining a mastermind? Scott Meyers, founder and CEO of Self Storage Investing , shares his knowledge with us.

Read this entire interview here: https://tinyurl.com/rt4pvac2

You have been doing self-storage for 20 years, how is self-storage doing today?

We're bullish on storage. It doesn't matter what the economy's doing, because our asset classes are largely unaffected by what's happening when things are good, people buy more stuff and there's a need for storage so we do well. When there's a contraction in the economy and people are losing their jobs or businesses, it is going a little slower. They have to put their inventory in storage, or they sublease their office or whatever their business looks like and we benefit from that, as well. We are heading into a time that we've been preparing for years, which is kind of the intersection of all that. Interest rates are a little higher and the cost of capital is higher but we are seeing a contraction in the market, which is causing people to downsize businesses.

I heard this morning that in Austin, Texas 20% of the workforce is unemployed right now. Some of these companies are laying their people off. But there is a pullback right now, and the jobless rate is a little higher than even what the government statistics would show because we're seeing it and feeling it in the marketplace.

Do you think self-storage is being overbuilt in places?

You can't say that the industry is overbuilt. If everybody's rates all across the country, were going down and everybody was at 50% occupancy, maybe, but I don't think that we would ever get to that standpoint. There are lots of safeguards in our industry and we do know what it takes to do our homework and understand as developers, what makes this successful self-storage development project. With today's very difficult capital markets: appraisers, lenders, and private equity partners, they are not just throwing money at us, assuming it's going to win, they are forcing and they want to see our feasibility studies and the demand studies that we're doing in the marketplace to understand what a deal looks like before they're going to grant us a loan or loan us our limited partners that are going to come alongside of us or the hedge funds and invest with us. We shouldn't be coming forward if we didn't have that, and we really wouldn't get it anyway.

What are some things that you have seen happen at your mastermind?

A lot of the things that we've seen are things that we've built in an environment in which all the good things that we see in a mastermind can occur and some of that is true. As we take a step back, we recognize that following the Napoleon Hills model, which is when like-minded people come together and operate at a certain level, good things happen. They share best business practices, they can do business together and so from the beginning, that's the way we designed it. And we see other masterminds out there where they'll just accept anybody into the group, as long as they can write a check. We have an interview process, and it's an exclusive group that we've put into place in the mastermind.

Scott Meyers

www.selfstorageinvesting.com