374. Winter Is Coming: How to Plan for Self Storage’s “Slow” Season (& Get an Edge)

Seasonality is a real factor in the self storage industry. During the colder months, move-ins may slow down, move-outs may pull back, and rent increases often become harder to push through.

You may be tempted to simply coast through the winter months and ramp back up in the spring. But while things may slow down for your customers, they shouldn’t slow down for you. How you use these quieter months can make all the difference when it comes time to lease up, raise rents, and optimize operations, and being caught off guard during the busy season could set your self storage business back for years.

Today, we’re giving you a clear game plan for this winter. We’ll get into what you should expect when temperatures drop, how to plan rent increases, how to move more customers to autopay, and how to manage delinquencies.

Plus, we’ll explore some of the operational improvements that are worth making before business picks up, from upgrading your tech stack to training employees. Whether you’re buying your first self storage facility or looking to stabilize an existing facility, we’ll help you make each season count and maximize your impact year-round.

What you’ll learn in today’s show:

• How to navigate the seasonal “swings” in self storage
• What to do this “slow” season to prepare for next year’s “busy” season
• Crucial financial documents to ask for during due diligence
• Increasing revenue (and value) through data-driven decisions
• How to fine-tune your business’s rate management strategy

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DealHound is an outreach platform that targets self storage owners with cold email so you can build a steady pipeline of off-market deals. No more hunting for deals manually: the AI handles the outreach while you handle closing the deals.  

DealHound officially launches in December 2026.

- Join the waitlist now: https://dealhound.io/waitlist

- See more information here: https://dealhound.io/ 

Join the Self Storage Income Community to learn how to buy, build, and scale your self storage portfolio: https://www.selfstorageincome.com/learn-yt?el=pc-episode-374 

Get AJ's book, Growing Wealth in Storage 2.0: https://a.co/d/aRSKcSq