YouSaid · the spoken record

Bob Moser

lines on the record: 64
first: 2026-02-06
most recent: 2026-02-06
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I would say it was more about managing people. It took me a long time to learn how to manage people. I didn't have the benefit of working for a company. I started my own business in college. Obviously grew it straight through, never had that experience. It took me a long time to learn how to manage different, I would say, strengths of different people. And I wish the ability to empower people, it took, you know, obviously it took me probably a decade and a half before I really felt comfortable doing that. But yeah, I think that was probably if I had done that earlier, I'd probably be bigger.”
2026-02-06 · Masters in Business · Unconventional Real Estate Investments: Masters in Business with Bob Moser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's in anything. Don't count somebody else's money. I see a lot of younger people wondering what the other person next to him is making and concerned about that. Always do more than what you're paid for. And you have to be enthusiastic. Enthusiasm is probably the biggest driver of success I can think of.”
2026-02-06 · Masters in Business · Unconventional Real Estate Investments: Masters in Business with Bob Moser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Podcast wives yourself, we were all in listening to some of that on the way down. It was just listening to actually your interview with Winlang Sloane's CEO.”
2026-02-06 · Masters in Business · Unconventional Real Estate Investments: Masters in Business with Bob Moser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've been very fortunate to have some great partners along the way from some of my Ken Langone, founder of Home Depot, who is a really close friend and mentor. But along the way, I think you learn from everybody you meet along the way. I think you kind of, and when you look at that, anybody can be a mentor at any given point in time. But I've been fortunate to have some of the largest investors in the world, like the late Ira Harris, who was absolutely amazing and taught me a lot. You know, just life lessons, speaking to them, knowing the long-term look at assets, how to be patient, what to look for. There's a lot I've added up over the years. And hopefully now I'm passing that along to others.”
2026-02-06 · Masters in Business · Unconventional Real Estate Investments: Masters in Business with Bob Moser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Unbelievable number. It's almost like the Warren Buffett way of buying real estate. And that's the way, and I think that was probably the hardest thing for me to get my head around doing the funds, because I know what real estate can do over when you get past that 10-year period, that's when values start to really start escalating and really, really growing. And it's really having the right LPs, understanding the asset classes.”
2026-02-06 · Masters in Business · Unconventional Real Estate Investments: Masters in Business with Bob Moser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Constantly need, and you'll realize when you buy assets like that, there's inflation hedges built in, like storage. I can adjust rents on a 30 day notice. There's a lot of inflation heds built in those type of assets.”
2026-02-06 · Masters in Business · Unconventional Real Estate Investments: Masters in Business with Bob Moser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Profitable, lucrative, then you start really, then it starts to multiply on itself as the rents go up and you stabilize those expenses, things start to grow rapidly. But I think it's the longer-term vision to really create true value in real estate. I think the time horizon needs to be a little bit bigger than three to five years. Because what happens, then people are put in the situation where they have to sell or they have to do something, where instead real estate has to live through those cycles. And it's just the best way to manage them and just buying the right assets, defensive assets. Like when we're buying an asset, one of the biggest things is traffic count, but it's not just traffic count. It's traffic pattern. We want to make sure that on our storage assets, you're driving past that facility every day on the way to work, on the way to school. It's location location location driven. People have to remember the basics at times, and sometimes we get away from that. And we start to look for things that are too sexy or, you know, stay simple, you know, things that people...”
2026-02-06 · Masters in Business · Unconventional Real Estate Investments: Masters in Business with Bob Moser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I really think it's about how to really create value in real estate. Real estate is not a short term investment. And a lot of people look, and I'm not even talking three to five years is short in real estate. I remember years ago, this old timer told me that real estate's boring for the first 30 years. But it's true. It really takes a while, not only did it not be boring, but to be actually”
2026-02-06 · Masters in Business · Unconventional Real Estate Investments: Masters in Business with Bob Moser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Going back, it's need based real estate. People need it no matter what the life cycle is, whatever the macroeconomy is. They need space for their products, goods, inventory, their personal items”
2026-02-06 · Masters in Business · Unconventional Real Estate Investments: Masters in Business with Bob Moser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For fees as well. Yeah, so I look at the five year quite a bit. We'll do 10 year and some, but the length of the fund, really the five year is probably the most conducive in a fund structure. It gives you the flexibility. You can refinance out of it, but you're not locked into a point where at times the debt could be a penalty if it's under leverage. You eliminate a lot of buyers at the end when you do a roll-up or if it's too costly, then you have defeasance and everything else that goes along with your maintenance. But the five-year works well.”
2026-02-06 · Masters in Business · Unconventional Real Estate Investments: Masters in Business with Bob Moser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Question. I was on the phone on the way down here with some of my bankers talking about this. Where does the curve look like in the short term? Obviously, I think SOFA is going to be coming down. Obviously, the rates are being lowered. I'm hoping to see that on the five-year treasury as well.”
2026-02-06 · Masters in Business · Unconventional Real Estate Investments: Masters in Business with Bob Moser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now the electronic key just magically freezes the unit. So it reduces our labor. It gives the consumer a better product and easier product to use. You don't have to worry about losing a key. They have a lock for free on their unit. They get an audit of their unit. It gives them everything they want to know. It's a great win-win”
2026-02-06 · Masters in Business · Unconventional Real Estate Investments: Masters in Business with Bob Moser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The digital safe You know the This wasn't supposed to happen. Now it is. So you think about it, one of our facilities in Nestoria is 3,300 units. It's 156,000 square feet. So first of the month comes, if people haven't paid, that manager has to leave the front desk, go around and double lock those units.”
2026-02-06 · Masters in Business · Unconventional Real Estate Investments: Masters in Business with Bob Moser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No battery. That's the key to this. And it's good that you brought that up because everybody else has done it with a battery in the lock”
2026-02-06 · Masters in Business · Unconventional Real Estate Investments: Masters in Business with Bob Moser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, it's purely off. So your cell phone gives off energy just sitting there. And it was enough to harness to actually flip that solenoid. It's pretty amazing. So we've been working for a couple years to get this perfected.”
2026-02-06 · Masters in Business · Unconventional Real Estate Investments: Masters in Business with Bob Moser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we're bringing this to the self storage business. And we have our first 5,000 being deployed as we speak right now. But what's really nice, it's catering not only to the residential, but the business consumer then can share their key for one-time use or temperate use with an employee. The other thing is if they're late and don't pay their electronic keys turned off, but also the customer gets a full audit at the end of the month when their unit's been opened, what time it was, so they know who's been in and out of their unit. 100%”
2026-02-06 · Masters in Business · Unconventional Real Estate Investments: Masters in Business with Bob Moser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we have actually harnessed the free energy of your cell phone to unlock the lock. So it's pretty interesting. So it's almost like a PayPal, I believe, or Apple Pay uses. So basically, if you look at the lock is what controls this business, the actual lock that's put on. And you have this physical key. You can lose that key. It's hard to share. Let's say you're a small business. How do you give your employee access without giving multiple keys? So we've devised and have built a lock that your cell phone gets an electronic key sent to it. And then you can use that to open up the lock. There's no batteries needed. There's no Wi-Fi needed.”
2026-02-06 · Masters in Business · Unconventional Real Estate Investments: Masters in Business with Bob Moser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, what it was was there was a group of assets in West Chelsea that we ended up buying that one of them actually two of them buy ripe could be self-storage. We're converting one to a high-end storage of the future, we're calling it. And I can go into that more modern, a lot of technology driven self storage. And the other part of the project was a nine-story building that's on the high line that we are going in to have it converted from office to residential”
2026-02-06 · Masters in Business · Unconventional Real Estate Investments: Masters in Business with Bob Moser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Place to put their stuff. They need storage. Storage is almost like a trade off that extra bedroom that might cost you $500 a month or is it a storage for $75 a month? So it's always a trade. Same thing with an office. Is it that bigger office where you can have stuff on site or do you supplement it with a less expensive at the self-storage? So this goes back to self-storage being a need-based real estate. And this is why during tougher times, the aspirational real estate are the ones that take the hit. Like we've seen in office lately.”
2026-02-06 · Masters in Business · Unconventional Real Estate Investments: Masters in Business with Bob Moser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a big demand driver for self storage. So when you think about it, people now are living in apartments more. I think I just heard the average, the first time homebuyers now until like they're 40 now. Yeah, late 40s. It's crazy when it used to be like 28 or 26. So obviously they live in smaller apartments. They need”
2026-02-06 · Masters in Business · Unconventional Real Estate Investments: Masters in Business with Bob Moser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we're very fortunate being in real estate for as long as we have. We have developed really deep relationships with a large institutional lenders from Citibank, the Goldman, the JP, the BMO to Northern Trust. I'm sure I'm missing one. I'll probably get a call after this. But we have very deep-rooted relationships and we're relationship oriented. So we're there. We work with these banks. And it's a flight to quality during this time where lenders are going to the lenders. They have long-term relationship and track records with. But we spend a lot of time making sure that we're hedging our interest rates. We're making sure that we're putting the right debt on the assets at the right time, making sure we're not cross-collateralizing too much. So a lot goes into it.”
2026-02-06 · Masters in Business · Unconventional Real Estate Investments: Masters in Business with Bob Moser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or UK. Yeah, but even in the States, when it comes to the actual implementation of the lien law, it does. There's different timings, there's different fees that can be charged, there's different things that you do with the proceeds from the auction. Let's say you receive more than what the person owed you. Some of it gets donated away. Some of it gets contributed back to that seller. Depending on the state, that extra free proceeds determines on where it goes. So we have a whole legal compliance team that works on this on a daily basis to make sure that each state law is being followed, every municipality in the US, every county or every territory in Canada. And that's the research we're doing right now in Europe and in Australia, trying to find the markets where we know we can go in and consolidate, get economies of scale out of it, but by the ads.”
2026-02-06 · Masters in Business · Unconventional Real Estate Investments: Masters in Business with Bob Moser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To see exactly how the value is going to be created. We have a game plan on every asset, what levers need to be pulled in order to create that value. And one of those is a lot of the optimization of the rent roll, optimization of the actual unit mix, the layout of the facility, and if it's a larger, more professional owner, the chances are those low-hanging fruit might not be there. So we're still trying to find the markets that have that fragmentation where there's still one-offs and two-off owners, because that is really our bread and butter.”
2026-02-06 · Masters in Business · Unconventional Real Estate Investments: Masters in Business with Bob Moser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we've been doing a lot of digging in, figuring out what the different aspects and different cities. You know, it's interesting because some of the owners in Europe, let's say let's look at London, there will be two or three owners that own the majority of that inventory. Our play, again, is going out and buying from that one-off owner. I really haven't go into that much, but it's an important aspect to our business. We identify the institutional asset that's still owned by mom and pop. So we target that person that owns one or two facilities. And the reason for that is that they're not a professional operator. And the chances are that we'll be able to achieve our returns, if not better than what we estimated, based on putting our systems and processes over that family operated asset. So in Europe, they've been consolidated into groups. So it really doesn't provide us that ability to buy assets that we think are highly undermanaged. So we're very risk-adverse.”
2026-02-06 · Masters in Business · Unconventional Real Estate Investments: Masters in Business with Bob Moser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“100%, and actually it carries to Canada as well in parts of Europe that we're looking at. But yeah, and it's basically very similar to a bank loaning money, they're collateral or the lien against any particular asset. And that's the way they look at it. And remember, we take, like I was saying before, no abailment risk. So we have no idea what's being stored, what the value is. So that is the collateral to their lease if they don't pay, that there's an auction process. Obviously, we don't want to auction off anybody's goods. If let's say we send out 50 auction notices, maybe one or two go, because hopefully we can work with that tenant and get them caught up. But it provides a way to collect the rent that's owed. Unlike a multifamily where it might take you a year if you're lucky to evict somebody that's not paying, self-storage is a lot quicker, easier process.”
2026-02-06 · Masters in Business · Unconventional Real Estate Investments: Masters in Business with Bob Moser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A great question. It's probably one of the most overlooked aspects of self storage. Self storage has two demand drivers, which is very unique in real estate in general. You think about residential, you have residential demand. An office has business demand. Self-storage, we have both residential and business demand. A lot of people think of self-storage. They think of storing their grandmother's couch. It's far from it. That might be 1 or 2%. The rest is 30 to 40 percent are small businesses, contractors, landscapers, a lot of pharmaceutical reps. So we are their warehouse. We're the warehouse for that small business that employs the majority of the U.S. population. And what's nice about storage being on a month-to-month basis the terms of the contract, they can expand or contract as needed with their business. They don't have to sign a long-term lease with an industrial or a warehouse. It's a perfect fit for an entrepreneur or a starting business or even a mature business.”
2026-02-06 · Masters in Business · Unconventional Real Estate Investments: Masters in Business with Bob Moser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have over close to 350 assets. We have around seven or eight hundred employees around the country. We have two main, actually three main offices now. We have one in Saratoga Springs where it's our main headquarters. Then we have one in Jupiter, Florida. And we just opened an office here in West Chelsea.”
2026-02-06 · Masters in Business · Unconventional Real Estate Investments: Masters in Business with Bob Moser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's the largest I know of. That might have been one of the largest properties specific funds raised as well. If I've heard that before.”
2026-02-06 · Masters in Business · Unconventional Real Estate Investments: Masters in Business with Bob Moser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But you think about it. If I don't get that asset today, I might get it in a month. If I don't get it in a month, I might get it next year. If I don't get it next year, we're into this for the long run. You know, we're building a, I think, become the best operator of alternative assets.”
2026-02-06 · Masters in Business · Unconventional Real Estate Investments: Masters in Business with Bob Moser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly right. The winner over page. 100%. So we bypass all that and we go directly to the seller and we solve problems for them.”
2026-02-06 · Masters in Business · Unconventional Real Estate Investments: Masters in Business with Bob Moser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the commercial real estate What we have 25 year head start on them. So we have decades of information gathering, decades of conversations with these sellers. Moreover, it's a heavy lift. It's a burdensome. It's expensive what I carry on my deal teams. But the reason we do it is because there's no other way to buy assets the way we do and create the value we do if we were buying them on the open market. You think about it. If we weren't buying it this way, we would be buying it like 99% of every other asset where it gets brokered, beautiful. Pictures are taken. It's presented in this best color. It's shotgunned around to 100 buyers. You go through multiple layers of bidding. And at the end, you overpaid for the asset.”
2026-02-06 · Masters in Business · Unconventional Real Estate Investments: Masters in Business with Bob Moser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would hold their hands federally because we wanted to eliminate any kind of friction. We need the buy assets. We need to buy that asset. Like you said, we're not blindly taking a shotgun and just waiting for something to come to market. We're specifically targeting assets that fit our criteria. So we know which ones make sense until we dive into the actual, you know, initially it's all hypothetical until we get the actual numbers from that seller. That's the only time things would change.”
2026-02-06 · Masters in Business · Unconventional Real Estate Investments: Masters in Business with Bob Moser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But then we visit them on the holidays. We find out when their birthday is, we send them a card. But it's a constantly being in contact with them. And then we try to solve that problem, what they do with the money afterwards. How do they maximize their sale proceeds? And we hold their hand through the process, and they become one of our biggest referrals, our sellers.”
2026-02-06 · Masters in Business · Unconventional Real Estate Investments: Masters in Business with Bob Moser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Receptive of people to this. So it's more than, and I get those same emails and it drives me nuts, or the phone call will you sell your property? I'm like, which property, what area? So when we call, we're referring to an exact asset. We've already been by the asset. We know what the numbers are. We know the size of it. We might have spent already two weeks researching that asset before we called the owner. And instead of somebody just blindly calling you, Barry, but if they called you and they knew a lot about your business and they knew the numbers are estimated, sometimes you're more intrigued to say, hey, this guy spent the time to learn about.”
2026-02-06 · Masters in Business · Unconventional Real Estate Investments: Masters in Business with Bob Moser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Front information is we want to know more about the asset than the seller does in a way because we want to separate ourselves from anybody else calling them. We want to show that we're sincerely interested in buying their asset when we're able to tell them or even educate them about their own asset at times.”
2026-02-06 · Masters in Business · Unconventional Real Estate Investments: Masters in Business with Bob Moser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So this is where it takes the correct personality to be this part of the team. And these are what we call our deal team members. So what we use is our proprietary software we have developed in-house that we load our entire buy box into this software and it projects, it's an AI system, every self-storage that fits that criteria in the country. And it has every data point about that asset. The owner, how big it is, the taxes, the everything you can imagine. Then we allocate that deal to the deal team member that covers that area. Then he or she continues to call that owner every 30 to 45 days until we convert them to a seller. So some of these deals that we're buying today we've been working on for a decade and we finally got the seller to the point to sell. So it's a very thick-skinned, long relationship, but it's a numbers game. So if we have 36 people with good information calling these owners, and the reason why we do so much up for...”
2026-02-06 · Masters in Business · Unconventional Real Estate Investments: Masters in Business with Bob Moser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was basically a scale play. I knew them asset class was going to consolidate quickly once the large institutions understood it better or when the large investors did. And I wanted to have that foothold in the market. And the best way to do it was through the co-mingled fundway. And also by doing that, I think we were able to disrupt things a bit because we pride ourselves on delivering what we call entrepreneurial type returns. We are operators. We are in the field on a daily basis. We're in the office grinding this out. So we try to deliver direct property level returns to our investors.”
2026-02-06 · Masters in Business · Unconventional Real Estate Investments: Masters in Business with Bob Moser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we don't like taking construction risks. So, I like that we buy cash flow. So day one for an asset to make it through our IC committee. We have a very high threshold. And that part of that threshold is cash flow. We pride ourselves on being able to distribute free cash flow to our investors pretty early in the fund's life, even during the investment period, which is pretty rare. But what the fund business started in actually 2015 as a smaller fund. Up until that point, I had only purchased on my own capital. And we did a test fund that did very well. It was a smaller fund. It was only $154 million. And then the second fund, we grew it to $725 million. And then the third fund is the one you're referring to is roughly $2.5 billion fund.”
2026-02-06 · Masters in Business · Unconventional Real Estate Investments: Masters in Business with Bob Moser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“100% It was the fragmentation again, the first fragment assets I was focused on were the mobile home parks and RV parks, which I saw starting to consolidate. And then obviously how well storage did during those tougher times, which really led me to storage being highly fragmented. When I first entered the asset class, even back in around 2015, 2014, it was roughly 80% still owned by mom and pops. Wow. So just the reach and the institutions only owned 20% of the outstanding. And today, it's probably closer to 70, 75%. So there's been a lot of consolidation. But what's interesting about storage is that the new supply coming online is being brought online by what we call merchant builders. So they're regional developers who have an extra piece of land. Their shop and center developers who put a storage up on that corner lot or that key lot they might have. It's not the large institutions building the supply. So it keeps it pretty fragmented. So they're the ones adding.”
2026-02-06 · Masters in Business · Unconventional Real Estate Investments: Masters in Business with Bob Moser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then come collect it later. Correct. So in storage, one of the main benefits is we take no availment risk. So we're never taking possession of the person's goods. Where the pod, you start to cross that line a bit. So on the storage, it's 100% the consumers or the client's possessions. We have no contact with it. They put their lock on it. They're the only one that has access to it. We're 100% hands off.”
2026-02-06 · Masters in Business · Unconventional Real Estate Investments: Masters in Business with Bob Moser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, what we'll do is in the off season when it's slower, we'll hold our rent, create some occupancy, and then come spring when the season's busier, we have room to put the higher payers in, where the REITs are more focused on keeping that occupancy steady at 92, then come spring, they've no room to put those people in. We really focus on driving the value. We've looked at what works over the last 20 years. And now we've just implemented it on scale across the portfolio.”
2026-02-06 · Masters in Business · Unconventional Real Estate Investments: Masters in Business with Bob Moser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You Correct. Most people think of them just as the moving, but obviously they own a substantial amount of self storage, substantial amount. What we do differently is we operate differently. We have a different, I would say, rationale when it comes to operating compared to the REITs, where the REITs are highly focused Occupancy. They want to keep their occupancy above 90-92%. Where I'll trade occupancy for top line revenue.”
2026-02-06 · Masters in Business · Unconventional Real Estate Investments: Masters in Business with Bob Moser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Correct. So there's A group of public companies that you were just mentioning have extra space, you have public storage, you have KubeSmart, U-Haul.”
2026-02-06 · Masters in Business · Unconventional Real Estate Investments: Masters in Business with Bob Moser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I haven't had that look, but it's funny that you bring that up. So prior to those TV shows, we would have the auctions on site. Kind of like you see in the TV shows. What happened though, everybody all of a sudden started showing up to these had a personality. They thought they were on TV. The traffic became overwhelming on the asset. So everything now is virtual. So when we have an auction, it's all done online. And it's not a revenue source for the business. So we put our properties through a five-step value creation process. And one of those steps is diversifying the revenue stream. And it's a great question because there's a substantial amount of value picked up in self-storage through these ancillary revenue streams. One of them is a tenant protection program where the tenants are able to push the liability of a storm or something happening to their goods onto the landlord for paying a certain price. There's obviously prime access. If you need access past the operating hours. So let's say you need access 24 hours a day. You're a small business. You can pay for that. So these items obviously add up when you have 2,000 to 300,000 units like we currently operate.”
2026-02-06 · Masters in Business · Unconventional Real Estate Investments: Masters in Business with Bob Moser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you think about a multifamily. If you're going to turn a unit, it's going to cost you anywhere from, let's say, $1,500 to $5,000, depending on what you're doing. Self-storage is $5. We're sweeping it and replacing a light bulb if there is one. And tenant improvement is what really hurts, especially office, but a lot of real estate assets. You're constantly chasing that capital improvement.”
2026-02-06 · Masters in Business · Unconventional Real Estate Investments: Masters in Business with Bob Moser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a great question. So, self storage has the lowest break-even occupancy of any institutional real estate asset class I can think of. So at 40% occupied, you're breaking even on expenses. So it's very risk-adver. It's a very risk-adverse asset from top to bottom when you're looking at what the tenant signs to become a tenant. These are month-to-month leases. So we can adjust to what's happening in the macro environment at any given time. There's no lease risk whatsoever in the asset class.”
2026-02-06 · Masters in Business · Unconventional Real Estate Investments: Masters in Business with Bob Moser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was a lot of obviously calling on the phone, calling the assessor, feeling the market out, visiting. Now we have built very sophisticated software that helps us pre-identify these areas that we should be buying, not even the area, the exact asset we should be buying, even though it's not for sale. So we built out this program where basically I can put in our buy box and it populates out of the 60,000 self-storage facilities in the country the ones we should go after, even though they're not for sale. And then what we have is our deal teams, which are group of roughly three dozen people internally, that we allocate the deals that fit our criteria to, and then they continue to call and visit those owners until we convert them to sellers. So we truly buy everything off market, and it's 100% organically originated.”
2026-02-06 · Masters in Business · Unconventional Real Estate Investments: Masters in Business with Bob Moser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we truly obviously real estate, and that's uncliche, but it's location, location, location. So if you look at our portfolio, it basically you take the United States and it looks like a U. So we're up and down the coasts. Right now we don't have exposure in Texas. And the reason why is that there's a lot of open zoning in Texas. And one of our major requirements is barriers to entry. And the reason why we're along coastlines and then we're up picking up in the mountain cities out in like Utah and Colorado is that there's a barrier, natural barrier keeping the population tight to a nucleus. So we want to be in predictable downtown retail corridors when we're choosing the asset. So that's the first glance over deciding where we're going to buy. Then it goes down to what is the supply, what's going to constrain the supply in that particular market. Because like any other type of real estate, there's always areas that are oversupplied. And the key is finding these areas that are undersupplied. When I was first doing this with paper,”
2026-02-06 · Masters in Business · Unconventional Real Estate Investments: Masters in Business with Bob Moser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say it was more the defensive nature of it. These other assets were decreasing dramatically. Storage was holding its own. It's need-based real estate. I do not buy aspirational real estate. I think that's where a lot of people get in trouble. I buy real estate that people need for all different economic cycles. And that's what self-storage is. It's upgrades, downgrades, death, divorce. All of those types of life cycles that happens in life creates a need for storage.”
2026-02-06 · Masters in Business · Unconventional Real Estate Investments: Masters in Business with Bob Moser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And from that time forward, I continued just to consolidate self-storage. This was on my own balance sheet at this time, and then I started the co-mingled fund business around 2014. So from basically 2007, 2008 through 2014, I was using my own capital or in-house capital to acquire these assets.”
2026-02-06 · Masters in Business · Unconventional Real Estate Investments: Masters in Business with Bob Moser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source