Journey to Multifamily Millions

Additional Income from Empty Spaces with Joseph Woodbury, Ep 95

• Tim • Season 1 • Episode 95

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Today's guest is  Joseph Woodbury, he is the Co-Founder and CEO of Neighbor.com. Joseph has pioneered the concept of full-property monetization, helping investors maximize returns by transforming underutilized spaces into profitable storage solutions.

This episode has Joseph Woodbury delving into the expansion and possibilities of the self-storage industry, which is currently the fastest-growing sector of the commercial real estate market in forty years. He clarifies how Neighbor.com increases the value of properties by turning vacant areas into profitable storage options. 

He talks about listing techniques, Neighbor.com's financial strategy, and its effect on property revenue, covering anything from residential garages to multifamily properties. They also discuss the use of technology in pricing optimization and the transformation of bankrupt office buildings into storage units. Value, safety, rules, and flexibility are emphasized as being extremely important factors for both landlords and tenants in this dynamic market.


Episode Topics

[01:15]  Meet our guest, Joseph Woodbury
[03:01] How Neighbor.com Works: A Deep Dive into the Process
[04:41]  Expanding Beyond Residential: The Commercial Storage Revolution
[08:28] The Multifamily Storage Opportunity: Unlocking New Revenue Streams
[11:35] Safety and Customization: Tailoring Storage Solutions for Multifamily Properties
[25:04] Exploring the Future of Storage: Trends and Opportunities
[31:51] What is one red flag every investor should look out for?
[32:45] What is a myth about the real estate business?
[34:20] Connecting to Joseph


Notable Quotes

  • "We started with a simple idea: unused space in every neighborhood could be rented out for storage." - Joseph Woodbury
  • "Neighbor operates like Airbnb for storage, making it easy to list your space and find renters while ensuring security." - Joseph Woodbury
  • "When it's not your primary use, it's much easier to implement without changing the building or permitting." - Joseph Woodbury
  • "Multifamily is the most attractive. You've got two new revenue streams coming to your property." - Joseph Woodbury
  • “You're able to drill down to the local market to ensure you're in line with competitors." - Tim Little
  • Self storage is very sticky because people just buy more stuff. The need doesn't go away once they have it." - Tim Little


 

👉Connect with   Joseph Woodbury

👉 Connect with Tim

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https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/journey-to-multifamily-millions/id1634643497

[00:00:00] Joseph Woodbury: The industry has now built more storage locations in the United States than we have. Starbucks, McDonald's, Dunkin Donuts, Burger Kings, Wendy's, Walmart's, Home Depot's, and Costco's combined. which is just insane to me to think about. You go to a town that doesn't even have a post office and it's going to have multiple self storage facilities. It's the fastest, it's been the fastest growing segment of all commercial real estate for four decades straight. It's outpaced, self storage REITs have outpaced over the last 30 years.

[00:01:09] Tim Little: Hello everyone and welcome to the journey to multifamily millions. I'm your host, founder and CEO of ZANA Investments, Tim Little. And on today's show, we have with us Joseph Woodbury. Joseph is the co-founder and CEO of Neighbor. com. Joseph has pioneered the concept of full property monetization, helping investors maximize returns by transforming underutilized spaces into profitable storage solutions. Joseph, welcome to the show.

[00:01:33] Joseph Woodbury: Thanks so much for having me.

[00:01:35] Tim Little: And it is great to have you and I'm certainly excited to learn how you transform those underutilized spaces into profit generators. But first, please tell me more about your story and how you got to where you are today.

[00:01:47] Joseph Woodbury: Yeah. we got into this space just from having the problems ourselves. My co-founder needed storage and tried to get a storage unit and they were all full close by. So he ended up storing with a friend in his garage and we had the thought, there's gotta be empty space in every neighborhood in the country that's sitting empty and no one's using it. Why couldn't that be rented out for storage? So we actually started out in the residential space. where we were renting people's homes, garages, sheds, driveways. That grew nationwide. We now have people renting out their homes in almost every city in all 50 states. We're the only storage operator in the country now that's in all 50 states. And from there, that's where we branched into more commercial builds. Where you have office buildings that are emptying out. You have retail in some areas that has excess space or parking. Multifamily has turned out to be a massive category for this. And so now we're helping commercial property owners and REITs and smaller portfolios, everything in between. Monetize their properties as well.

[00:02:53] Tim Little: Yeah, and that's really interesting. I don't think I've heard of that before. So let's start off small and help us understand. What that looks like, practically speaking, if, you talked about even garages, being rented out, what does that process look like, say my garage is empty for whatever reason, and I'm like, Hey, it'd be great if I could make a couple of bucks off of this, what did that look like in terms of transactions set up, et cetera.

[00:03:19] Joseph Woodbury: Sure. So if you have a garage that you're not using, you can go on, list your space on neighbor. It's about a 10 minute process to list that we're going to ask you where it's located, what your address is, what amenities does it have? Does it have a separate entrance? Does it have security cameras, things like this. And then we're going to recommend you a price. Ultimately it's up to you to set whatever price that you'd like to earn on that garage. But we have the best self storage pricing data of any company in the country. And so we'll tell you what you should price it at to get rented. You'll list that and we'll find you a renter and bring them to you. We also ID verify you. So every single person that lists on our site. D verifying them. We're also manually reviewing your listing, so it'll get submitted to be reviewed by our team physically, and then you'll be allowed to publish it on the platform for us to get you a renter.

[00:04:11] Tim Little: Okay, and with that, I assume there, how do you guys get paid? Is it a one time fee? Is it a monthly fee? What does that look like?

[00:04:19] Joseph Woodbury: So it's very similar to Airbnb. If you've ever used that before. there's going to be the price you set as a host, and we're going to charge the renter that price plus a service fee on top. And that's how we make money is that service fee. Plus for you as a host, the only thing that, comes out of your earnings as a small processing fee.

[00:04:39] Tim Little: Okay. and that all makes sense. So now let's scale that up, right? You talked about the office and I could see that, there's obviously a lot of offices that's sitting empty right now. And that seems like an amazing opportunity, especially for those owners. To use this space, even if not for its intended use, is there any issue associated with permitting or the way that it's set up by the city, like in how it's being used, for example, it's zoned as office, but they're using it as storage. Is that even a thing or a concern?

[00:05:15] Joseph Woodbury: Yeah, that's a great question. So we actually will work with some buildings, some smaller office buildings to do full property conversions where you're taking the entire property and converting it. To rent it out on our platform is self storage. And in that case, you do need to pay close attention to that zoning. However, the vast majority of the projects that we're working on nationwide, we're just taking a small piece of the space. So if it's an office building, maybe it's a 12 story office building. We're just taking the first floor that they struggled to get tenants in, or we're taking the parking garage that's empty because everyone's working remotely. And we're renting out that parking garage for vehicle storage. And when it's not your primary use, it's much easier to implement it without having to change anything whatsoever about the building or the permitting.

[00:06:00] Tim Little: Okay. No, that's interesting. So yeah, most of the time, obviously you strive to not have to do anything to the property. Can you give us some examples where you have done that? you talked about completely remodeling a building. Is that something you've done before and how heavy of a lift was that?

[00:06:17] Joseph Woodbury: Yeah, it is. It's something we actually actively do ourselves. We've got a. It's aside from our core business, but we actually have a small fund where we go out and buy distressed office space because prices are so depressed right now we can get it at a great price that we can convert it into storage because of our platform. We have all this data. We know exactly where to buy them so that they get leased up very quickly. And then we can sell it at a self storage cap rate. and it's a great opportunity. It's very low lift. There's been a lot of talk over the last couple of years as the office has been in distress about office to resi conversions, converting these buildings into residential. That is, it's a pain in the butt to do that. You got to replumb the whole building. zoning's an issue. Windows are an issue. The floor plate just doesn't work. You can buy a building and it ends up costing more than the cost of the building just to retrofit it. With storage though, you don't have to, typically, especially the buildings that we're looking at, we're looking for buildings where we don't have to change anything structurally. We're just going in and putting units and they don't even go to the ceiling. so it's very simple, very straightforward. Double digit cost per square foot, is all,

[00:07:22] Tim Little: Yeah, and that's a really good point that a lot of people just don't realize, right? It seems logical, hey, the building's empty. We should just convert it into housing because we're short on housing, right? There's always a housing shortage. Unfortunately, like you said, it's not that simple. And even I didn't realize all the complexities. Involved in just because of, like you said, the shape of the building, where bathrooms are located, the piping that would be involved to get it to where it needs to be and to have the required windows and everything else, the things that you mentioned, it's so complicated that it's often cost prohibitive, like you're alluding to. So for a lot of people who are wondering, that's why you don't see more. to commercial residential conversions.

[00:08:10] Joseph Woodbury: and it's only becoming a bigger problem. we're supposed to see double the amount of office buildings come to maturity this year than we did in 2023. something like 14 billion worth of office and you're gonna have interest rate adjustments on those. and it's only getting worse.

[00:08:27] Tim Little: Yeah, for sure. So let's move up to the multifamily space. How did you interject yourself into that? And I imagine it's not too different from what you were doing at the single family level just on scale. Is that about right?

[00:08:42] Joseph Woodbury: Yeah. Multifamily, honestly, of all the categories. is probably the most attractive. It's just a no brainer. If you think about it, we work with several of the largest multifamily REITs in the country. And traditionally you got a lot of your ancillary income as a multifamily owner from things like cable deals. sometimes you had other ancillary services, but typically it's some sort of telecoms deal, which those are actually going away. the communications bureaus, FCC or whatever is looking into those deals and they're actually trying to take them away. And so where we fit in is you've got excess space as a multifamily owner. You've got parking that the city made you build. That's not being used by tenants. That takes zero CapEx and about 24 hours for us to turn that on and start getting renters into that space. Then also the other thing that multifamily has that makes it very interesting is most multifamily buildings, especially larger buildings, 100, 200, 300, 400 door buildings. They built storage lockers into the building as a tenant amenity. And these storage lockers are on average highly underutilized. We've seen multifamily buildings. we onboarded a large multifamily partner in New York city. And in downtown Manhattan, these storage lockers are like 25, 30 percent occupied. You contrast that with the storage industry. That's 95 percent occupied on average. So we'll take all these interior storage lockers. We'll rent them out to not only your tenants, but also to the community. We'll get them to 90 percent occupancy very quickly. So between that interior storage in your storage lockers that you've already built and the excess parking outside, you've now got two new revenue streams coming to your multifamily property. Which in a climate where rents are pretty stagnant makes a huge difference. We're having partners that are experiencing rent growth this year, almost exclusively because of what neighbors doing their rents are flat across their portfolio, but they're adding neighbor and you can earn seven figures. in a year across a large portfolio.

[00:10:56] Tim Little: Yeah, that's interesting. And of course, I find the prospect of additional revenue streams attractive. as owners were. Always looking for ways to add value, but also to, to increase revenue from whatever we have there, whether that's, laundry facilities or, parking spots is one that we have implemented, at some of our units. But I think the way that it's different from what you're talking about is that when we rent out parking spots, it's specifically for the tenants and exclusively for the tenants, right? So that still restricts us. To some extent, and I think obviously the revenue is great. The one concern that I think would be raised is how do you, is safety a concern when you're bringing non tenants into your and onto your properties?

[00:11:47] Joseph Woodbury: Yeah. So we it's very property owner controlled and we've effectively built a program and a software that you can use to monetize and we have all sorts of tools where you can be very prescriptive on what types of vehicles you'd like to allow, if you just want to maximize earnings, you can allow any type of vehicle. RV camper, et cetera. But if you're in a specific downtown area and you want to be really prescriptive, you can say no boats at this property, no, camper trailers at this property. I only want sedan vehicles parked in these spots, and we will vet that for you and we will make sure that those exact types of renters are placed. We can also go through your, we can integrate and go through your same system. So some of our large REIT partners, they have a whole key fob system that they're set up with, and we actually link into that and provide those key fobs to the tenants when they come on. we process all the payments, you'll always get paid. we take care of that and you're right. A lot of. People, they've already started to dabble in parking. And I think quickly many multifamily operators realize that parking's not their core competency. And it's hard to drive that. And so we've even had some of our partners, they've had so much success with us managing their excess. They'll actually come to us and they'll say, Hey, can we just use your tools? To manage all of our tenant parking, including, like the existing stuff, because we integrate so well with your accounting and with everything else that it just makes it very easy to manage all that stuff. That's not unit rent,

[00:13:30] Tim Little: Yeah, I think it streamlines it, as in terms of the additional revenue streams. So that makes sense. You talked about boats, RVs, campers. I would imagine there's a premium, when it comes to your pricing for those spots that there would be a premium on the larger the vehicle is that the case?

[00:13:50] Joseph Woodbury: Yeah. It's all based on the space size, right? So if it's such a size that it can only fit a vehicle, it's going to command one price. If it's long, if you are in the back. You've got longer parking spaces, or if you've got covered parking spaces, those are going to command a premium. And our system is robust enough that it'll actually tell you, it'll say, Oh, if you have an open parking space, charge this much, if you have a covered parking space, Charge this much. And again, ultimately you can decide whatever you'd like to charge. You're in charge of that, but we do have smart pricing features where you can actually hand it over to us and we'll auto rotate the prices, as the year goes on,

[00:14:33] Tim Little: Yeah. And that's nationwide, right? So you're able to drill down to the local market to ensure that you're in line with whatever competitors are charging.

[00:14:40] Joseph Woodbury: That's right. We, and honestly, We used to rely on a lot of market data because we were a smaller company. And so we looked at what other people are charging at kind of the scale we're at today. We honestly have moved away from looking at that competitive data. And we look at our own platform transaction data. Because we get so many transactions and unlike a traditional storage facility that can't do much variable price testing, they may go up 10 percent down 10 percent cause they don't want to risk. They're price level. We have such variability and hosts and these hosts at all sorts of prices. Some people will ignore our recommendations altogether and they'll price 200 percent above and some people will ignore our recommendations and price 50 percent below and our system gets to watch and see all of those different price points in every city in the country and what gets rented and when it gets rented and how it gets rented. And so that all crunches back through. And that's why I don't think there's a storage company in the country that has more high quality pricing data than we do.

[00:15:48] Tim Little: Yeah, and that's a good point. in terms of those other companies that are out there, the ones who are exclusively doing storage spaces, right? And that, and I've talked to a lot of folks who are doing exactly that, whether they're buying up small mom and pop places and adding value to it by adding features and amenities, or, like the big box ones that are just buying up land and building new ones. What I've found is, in some area that's There's still huge demand, but other areas seem to have gotten saturated because too many people moved into the same places. Are you seeing that in any of the markets that you're in?

[00:16:28] Joseph Woodbury: Yeah, definitely market to market. You're going to see variability. If I had to say where it is on the average, it's significantly supply constrained. We have millions and millions of renters that come to our site every year that we're not able to service. There is just an excess of demand for storage. And for us, we can fill supply just about as fast as we can get supply. So supply is, or space, would be the term as fast as we can get good, high quality supply, we can fill that. We have much faster lease up times than I think traditional storage facilities do partly because we can operate at a, we can run a scale operation. is that a mom and pop storage facility is not able to run the same type of operation. That is like public storage, which a 50 billion company can run. Now you look at public storage, they're only in 39 states. we're in all 50, so we can run an aggregated operation across all 50 states, and so you can plug in as a piece of that and take a bit, take advantage of that local demand we'll actually do when we onboard partners. Say, say you have 50. multi family properties nationwide, or in a handful of states. When we onboard you as a partner, we'll take the list of addresses you give us where you have excess space and we'll run a full analysis for you. And we'll say, okay, of the 50 spaces of the 50 properties that you have, we'd recommend starting with these 10. They're in high demand locations. They'll get filled the fastest. They'll command the highest prices. And we can give you a revenue estimate. For every single property. And then you as the owner can decide, okay, now seeing these NOI estimates, I want to turn this one on. I want to turn this one on. I want to hold off on this one. So we make it very easy to make those decisions.

 

[00:19:02] Tim Little: Okay. And what are the minimum times? Are you doing just 30 days? For this, is that a minimum or does it go lower than that?

[00:19:10] Joseph Woodbury: It's all month to month, which is good for two reasons. One, it's great for the renters because they're not locked into a long term contract, but it's also great for the property owner because they're able to You know, if you own a strip mall, a retail space, and you have a suite that hasn't been rented in five years, you want to rent it out on neighbor's platform, you may hope that you rent that out to a retail tenant at some point, and with everything being month to month, you can turn that back into retail in 30 days notice. Now for our purposes, we like it as well because we're fine providing the flexibility because we know that the income is quite sticky. Once you get those renters in there, you're going to love that kind of passive, low churn,stable income. And so it turns out once people start using us, they almost never take that property off of neighbor because they start earning a pretty healthy amount of money.

[00:20:03] Tim Little: Yeah, and so that leads me into my next question. I assume that most multifamily owners are using this for what you were talking about earlier, which is the parking spaces. But has anyone had excessive vacancy and they're like, Hey, I'd rather have those 30 days off, someone's storing stuff in there in a unit, just to get some income or is that, that not a thing? Because obviously you don't want to take that lower amount for someone just storing stuff in a unit when you could be charging a full on rent for it. But at the same time, every empty unit is money you're not getting. So I'm just wondering if that's ever happened. 

[00:20:44] Joseph Woodbury: it certainly has. We've had student housing projects that will take their vacant units in the summer and rent them out as storage. However, by and large, we're just working with either the parking or storage lockers. That was built for the tenants. We are at historically low vacancy rates in multifamily right now, even though rents are starting to soften, the occupancy rate in multifamily is very high. So it just doesn't make sense, it doesn't make sense to take a rentable unit and rent it out for storage. Honestly, where we do better anyway is renting out those storage lockers that are already purpose built or renting out those parking spaces. Because then you don't have to think about any headache. You can just turn on the revenue. It all goes straight to the bottom line. There's no CapEx. It's very easy.

[00:21:36] Tim Little: Yeah, and that makes sense. And so from the customer perspective, if I went on and rented one of those storage lockers, is it a matter of it's there, I check it out, and I just have to provide my own lock for that storage, and then I'm good after I've signed everything and, met the verification requirements and all that?

[00:21:56] Joseph Woodbury: That's right. Yeah. we'll take you through the process online of. things that you need to do. We'll collect your payment information so that you can pay. In most scenarios, you're providing your own lock. Occasionally with maybe a larger multifamily group, they'll have a, some sort of key code system that they like to use. In which case, we provide that to the renter, but in the vast majority of cases, Yeah, the renters bring their own lock and it's very simple.

[00:22:23] Tim Little: Okay. Have you started selling locks on your site too, just to profits that way?

[00:22:28] Joseph Woodbury: Not yet. No. we try to focus on just providing the best SAS tools we can to the hosts so that they can know what money they're earning, when they're earning it, and then providing a kind of a seamless renter experience to the renter. So that's where a lot of our time and effort goes. If you go on our website, you're going to have a very similar search experience that you do on Airbnb, where we try to make it as easy as possible to find the right storage solution for you in the right location. we're called neighbor because we tend to be much closer. You can find storage in your neighborhood. You can find storage at the multifamily complex across the street. You can find storage at a retail place that's near where you work. so it's all about convenience and finding that exact right storage, placement or vehicle storage placement for the renter. And that's like where we spend almost all of our time.

[00:23:24] Tim Little: Yeah. And it sounds like you focus on that convenience aspect for both sides, right? For the owners and for the renters, as an owner, I guess I would be wondering what are my avenues? If I need to talk to a real person, do you guys have customer service? That I would be able to do that if I was having an issue or just wanted to talk through something by trying to figure it out on the website.

[00:23:48] Joseph Woodbury: That's right. Yeah, so if you're a residential user, you're just renting out a small space in your home, we have customer support that can assist you. If you're a large portfolio that has properties in multiple states or a larger portfolio within a state, you'll actually have an account representative that you can reach out to at any time that will help you on board and we can set you up with advanced admin controls as well. If you're, some of the REITs we work with are 20 billion REITs and they have property managers all over the country and their centralized controller wants to be able to view all the reports rolled up, whereas the property managers just want to view how their specific property is doing and all of that can be set up on our platform to where there can be one master account that sees all the properties. And then individual accounts for each property itself. So we can go as big or as small as you want to in that way.

[00:24:46] Tim Little: Yeah, so as I'm thinking about it, we're talking through and I was like, all of this makes a lot of sense and it seems really convenient. I guess the question I have is why have I not heard of this before and why does it not seem as popular as it should be unless I'm just not seeing it, maybe other people are using it. I just haven't been introduced to it before.

[00:25:06] Joseph Woodbury: Yeah. two things I'd say is one, there, I remember when I first heard about, Uber and I just remember the conversation where someone was telling me about it and I was like, you mean you get in the car with, A person that showed up from this app, and I was just in disbelief, and they were like, Yes, like, How have you not taken an uber before? Everyone uses an uber. And now it's gotten to the point where I'm pretty sure my grandparents have taken an uber. it's gotten so ubiquitous. So part of it is just these new technologies. they ripple through the economy. Where you start with early adopters and then you start branching out right now. The individuals using us are the creative property managers. Those that, the, that I think the asset managers that are going to win over the long term are those that focus on this concept of full property monetization, they cease to see their property as Oh, this is office or, Oh, this is retail. And like, all I'm good at is retail. And they start to think. I'm an owner of a property and I want to make as much money as possible on that property. I don't really care how I make money. I just want to make as much money as possible on the property, generate the most return for either myself or for my investors as possible. And so those property owners that are most forward thinking, their portfolios are going to do the best and they're the ones that adopt this earliest. The other thing that I just say is, Storage isn't exactly the most sexy topic in the world. So people use storage, some stats on the storage industry. We have now built, the industry has now built more storage locations in the United States than we have. Starbucks, McDonald's, Dunkin Donuts, Burger Kings, Wendy's, Walmart's, Home Depot's, and Costco's combined. which is just insane to me to think about. You go to a town that doesn't even have a post office and it's going to have multiple self storage facilities. It's the fastest, it's been the fastest growing segment of all commercial real estate for four decades straight. It's outpaced, self storage REITs have outpaced over the last 30 years. all REITs by 50 percent publicly traded self storage REITs of outpaced publicly traded REITs category by 50 percent on a 30 year CAGR. And yet you just don't hear people talk about it, right? It's this massive industry. Storage does 10 times the amount of revenue on an annual basis than the entire taxi and limo industry. That Uber and Lyft disrupted does 10 times the amount of revenue. And it's just not the most like dinner party conversation. Hey, what do you got stored in your storage unit? So that's the other component to this. That's also what makes it an attractive revenue stream. It's boring, right? It's boring. It's non cyclical in 2008. Most real estate categories saw a contraction of anywhere from 30 percent to 80%. Self storage grew by 5%. So it's boring in a good way. It's so stable. It doesn't go through economic cycles. It just performs year after year. 

[00:28:20] Tim Little: Yeah, and like you said,talking about the stickiness earlier, self storage is very sticky because people just buy more stuff. They rarely get rid of stuff. So the need doesn't go away once, once they have it very rarely anyways. and as a property owner, one thing I'm thinking about and that I've explored in the past on some of our, larger properties where we have like extra space where we know, people aren't parking over there or whatever is the possibility of building storage units because there's I don't know, I don't wanna say out of the box, but basically. out of the box storage solutions that you can buy and just,right on the property and use those for storage on the one property we were looking at, it didn't make sense, from our underwriting and all that, but I'm wondering if you've seen that, or recommended that to owners where they have the space and do they get more bang for their buck if they have, storage, set up there with, say, six storage spaces versus those, six, parking spaces that they're taking up with those buildings.

[00:29:33] Joseph Woodbury: There's absolutely no question that you're gonna earn more per square foot by putting in a storage solution there. We, however, always recommend it to our owners that are considering it. We always recommend that they just start with vehicle storage. Some individuals want to invest and we think that's great, but we say, just start with vehicle storage. Let us get it rented. So that you can start to view those as storage spaces and see how comfortable let the revenue start coming in. And then as you start having revenue, then make investment decisions. And it turns out the more revenue people make with us, the more they start to invest in their spaces and say, okay, now I want to put more money into this because I know it's a guaranteed thing. I can have confidence in this, but to start out, we want to make neighbor A no cap X decision where just let's start in a way that it does not cost you any outlay. This is all just positive NOI that you can sell your investors on. And then once you, once it's a meaningful NOI, or ancillary income stream, then let's make decisions like putting down sheds or storage, built out storage units on those spaces and you'll earn a lot more money.

[00:30:50] Tim Little: Yeah, no, that totally makes sense. And I like that approach. It's that phased approach, right? Get the income first, then, basically invest that income. Into a better solution so that you can again increase your income and everything else. all This has been super interesting conversation and I appreciate you entertaining all the questions that I'm selfishly asking as a multifamily owner. It's certainly helpful. And I think it's helpful for anyone listening to who's thinking about passively investing because it makes them more educated investors, right? If they're able to ask these operators, Hey, have you thought about an additional revenue stream from doing this? Then not only will it make them. More money it may make that owner more money and all those investors in that deal So I think this is great info. Right now we're going to switch over to the turbo round though. So i'm going to ask you three questions that I ask every guest I have on the show And I just ask for a quick honest answer. Are you ready?

[00:31:49] Joseph Woodbury: I'm right

[00:31:49] Tim Little: All right. First one. What is one red flag every investor should look out for?

[00:31:55] Joseph Woodbury: in every investor should watch for a model where everything has to go right in the model to make it work where there's no redundancies built in. That's one thing we always tell people is to use us as a redundancy to where when you're presenting your model to investors, you can say, look, we don't need every unit to sell perfectly because we have this ancillary income that can make up for it. And they're on different market cycles. So if something goes wrong here. We're still safe. We're we S we have this baseline IRR that we can't cross underneath

[00:32:27] Tim Little: Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. We're always preaching, to go conservative in your underwriting You And it may be, here's our proforma, what we expect to be making an income. And if this works out the way we expected, this will be, gravy on top. All right. Second question. What is a myth about this business that you would like to set straight?

[00:32:48] Joseph Woodbury: I think a myth, just amongst commercial real estate in general, again, is this idea that you as an asset owner are constrained to that asset type. There's no reason. Why can't you take advantage of other asset types. You own property. It's in good locations for good reasons. So why don't, if you look at an industry and you think, man, I want to invest in that industry, why don't you just invest in that industry through your property?  If you've got friends that are making a ton of money on storage, for example, and you own a lot of multifamily, you own a lot of offices. there's nothing stopping you from getting some of the returns of storage on your property. So this idea of full property monetization, I think is, is, it's just, it's the counter to a big myth in the industry,

[00:33:35] Tim Little: Yeah. and you're diversifying too, essentially, the revenue streams. All right, last question. What does success look like to you?

[00:33:45] Joseph Woodbury: Value, right? People try to measure success in so many ways, but I think if you're providing value to your customers and they are getting a return off of it. If they are making money or saving money, that's the thing you should be looking for is who is deriving value? Because if they're driving value, they will keep coming back for more. If someone is buying your product, but not deriving value, That's the last time they'll buy your product.

[00:34:12] Tim Little: Yeah, absolutely true. All right, Joseph. Hey, this has been awesome. Please tell our listeners how they can get a hold of you. And if there's anything else you'd like to share

[00:34:20] Joseph Woodbury: So you can go straight to our website, neighbor.com. Tried to make it as easy as possible. We're also the top rank self storage app. If you just search boat storage or car storage or self storage on the app store. If you're an owner of a large portfolio of office or retail or multifamily, you can email me directly joseph@neighbor.com and I'll get you in contact with the product. Our asset heads there run our different asset classes to partner with you. So

[00:34:48] Tim Little: All right. we'll definitely have all that information in the show notes again Want to thank you for coming on and I look forward to seeing you do big things on your journey

[00:34:57] Joseph Woodbury: thank you.

[00:34:57] Tim Little: All right. Have a good one

[00:34:58] Joseph Woodbury: You as well.


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TIM LITTLE (FOUNDER/ CEO)

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