Self-Storage Success Secrets with Tony Ardizzone

THE SELF STORAGE REPORT — EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Episode: Self-Storage Success Secrets with Tony Ardizzone Guest: Tony Ardizzone — Legacy Built Investments, Scottsdale, Arizona Host: Chris Berg — Abernathey Development Recorded: September 19, 2025 Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8-GhxUPilM Key topics: 45 years around self-storage as the son of Italian and Venezuelan immigrant parents; his father's partnership with a first-generation developer that amassed 18 properties later sold to Shurgard; leaving 12 years of brokerage after the 2001 Twin Towers collapse killed a portfolio deal with $1 million of non-refundable money; mid-20s facilities built to date; Bill Hoben of William Warren Group calling this the hardest development market of his 31 years; the flood of already-entitled sites from retail, office, multifamily and hospitality developers, with one in seven or eight weekly deals worth pursuing; underwriting 10% below market rents (an $18 per foot example) and 36-month underwriting horizons; the 70/70 rule of $70,000 median household income and population on a three-mile radius; Main and Main locations, freeway versus arterial trade-offs; 80% to 85% ground-up versus conversions of grocery stores and big boxes and their gremlins; a 2015 facility built for a little over $5 million, sold on a $9.1 million REIT offer, appraised at $29 to $32 million less than 24 months later; the pivot from institutional joint ventures to a January 2025 friends-and-family fund; a 506(c) offering with a $25,000 minimum at 8% preferred and 10% at $100,000, plus 2.5x historical multiples; a plan to build 25 class A properties over the next 36 to 60 months with Extra Space and CubeSmart third-party management Note: Speaker attribution reconstructed from raw captions. Light cleanup of transcription errors only; wording preserved. Timestamps and YouTube chapter markers removed. Turns marked [attribution inferred] could not be attributed with certainty. ————————————————————————————— Chris Berg: Welcome to the CRE Report. I'm your host, Chris Berg. Very special guest today. Been involved in self-storage for 45 years. I think he started when he was like five, so he's been through some cycles. He's seen it all. He's with Legacy Built Investments, Tony Ardizzone. And I just love the name. Welcome to the show, Tony. It's great to have you, and thanks for the time. Tony Ardizzone: Thanks, Chris. I'm honored to be with you. And you know, even though our relationship and our friendship has been very short in timing, I feel like we've just, we've synced at a higher level really fast. So I appreciate that, and it's always good having that network of people around you that you could just feel that right away and you have the same synergy. So thank you for having me on. Chris Berg: Hey man, I appreciate you saying that, because it was like we met, it was just like brothers. So everyone knows, you played football, that's going to ASU, you know, which obviously made it pretty easy for us to connect as well. But a man of faith, and as you might as well just say it, fear the tree. That's all I got to say. So I love it. I love it. Let's jump in and talk some stories. I think number one, you know, just share the story. 45 years obviously is just incredible. And then if you wouldn't mind, well, let's just start with your story, then I want to get into some of the cycles that you've seen and where you see where we're at today. So I'll let you take the floor. Tony Ardizzone: Yeah, man. I appreciate that. And I appreciate the two of the three comment, because my pillars of what I stand for, and it's in this order, and I call it the four Fs of my pillar, which is faith, family, fitness, and finance. Believe it or not, finance is last, right? If you don't have health, you're not going to be able to enjoy your finances, right? Chris Berg: So can I interrupt you for a second, man? So just, I had no idea this conversation was going to go there. I am literally leading a men's group right now at my church called the Kingdom Warrior Way, and I've created what I call the seven Fs. It's faith, family, friends, fitness, finance, fun, and then the philanthropy is number seven, which obviously is PH. Tony Ardizzone: Oh, okay. Okay. Chris Berg: I just, I had no idea you were going to go there. I'm like, "Oh, this is my man." Like, no wonder we connected. Awesome. Keep going. I love it. Tony Ardizzone: Yeah. No, I think I need to add to my pillars, actually. Well, you know, I think a lot of the industry's heard a lot of the story, so I won't bore most people with it. I'll just tell you that I'm the son of an immigrant family, mother and father. Mother is from Venezuela, father from Italy. They came to the United States, you know, in the 60s. They eloped, believe it or not. So it's kind of a crazy love story that I'm writing a book on at some point here, to kind of not so much for the public, but really for my children. I've got four children, and so really it's one of those things where I want them to understand what our roots are, right? So it's so important to leave a, and that's why our company is called Legacy Built, right? Because it truly was. So immigrant parents, I mean, they came from nothing and they saw war and the whole thing, right? And there's a lot of this talk about immigration now and what the president ran on and so forth. But truly I can tell you and attest to the fact that, you know, I've seen my father in the heart of Manhattan in New York City get on his knees in front of me as a young kid and kiss the ground where people have just walked on completely. And I'm looking at this man, going, that I admire and respect, going, "Dad, get off the ground." Right? He's like, "No, I kiss the ground that I walk on because this is an opportunity. It's that America is that to us." So he got his citizenship right away. My father spoke six languages, you know, and that's not uncommon in the European world. My mother, she was just a hardworking, just God-loving individual. She's still alive today. My father's not. But at the end of the day, she got her citizenship after my father passed away at the age of 50. And so, you know, that was just an accomplishment, and it was always, I think that's really the truth of what immigration and immigrants are today, to contribute to the world. And they handed that torch down to my brother and I. So very, very grateful for that, showing us that side of the love of country, but also the love of God and family at the end of the day, and perseverance. You know, my old man used to say, as I was young and I'd see a really nice car drive by in the city or we'd drive by a really nice house, and he'd always ask us, "You like that car? You like that house?" "Oh man, that is so nice. I would like to have one one day." He's like, "You can. You just got to work for it." Right? So those are the principles at the end of the day. I reside in Arizona, in Scottsdale, Arizona, but was born and raised in Queens, New York. And it wasn't until the age of 14, 15, right in that category, where my father, you know, they were working two jobs, my mother and my father both. My brother and I were running the streets. And when I mean running the streets, I don't mean like, you know, getting into a lot of trouble, but we were playing stickball. We were playing stoop ball. We were playing hockey, street hockey. I mean, we just did everything we could in sports, and it was always sports. And I think that's where my brother and myself got really good at sports. My brother went on to play collegiately and pitched at Texas Tech, and then he also pitched at Arizona State. So yeah, he's a stud. Better athlete than I am. And at the end of the day, you know, we were there, and my father would come home at night and he'd say, "Rosie, where are the kids? Where are they? Where are the boys?" And just like, "I don't know, Carlos. You know, I think they're out in the street." So he'd peek his head out the window and he'd look over at the schoolyard where we usually hung out, and he saw us, you know, doing all the wrong things, just being around it. Not doing it, but being around it, you know, where the kids were smoking and that kind of deal. And he just said, "You know what? I'll be damned if I'm coming to the United States of America to start a new legacy and I'm going to have my boys turn into hoodlums or they're going to turn into mafioso or whatever." Right? So he kept ranting and raving. The story goes, that to my mother as she tells it, that he keep threatening to move. And so one day he showed up with a U-Haul, of all things. Packed up and we moved to, we were moving to California, your neck of the woods. And we stopped in Arizona, and my mother had these really bad allergies, and long story short, they dried up because there was not a whole lot here in Arizona at the time. And he said, "That's it. We're here. We're not going any further." So that's when he started looking. He was an architect. He graduated from NYU, so he had his architectural degree. He knew what he was doing. And he ran into an old-timer, first generation, 19, boy, that would be 1979, right in that area, '78, '79, somewhere in there, where this guy was a crazy Marine. You know, he had the Rollie Fingers mustache. I don't know, most people don't know who Rollie Fingers is, the handlebar mustache. And at the end of the day, he teamed up with this crazy kook. He was this Marine, and he's like, "Look," he goes, "I want you to draw these." And right, CAD wasn't around back then, so everything was by hand. And he drew these sets of plans for a self-storage facility. And he said to my father, "What else can you do?" He says, "I come from a long line of master tradesmen. I could do anything. You want me to build it for you? You want me to manage it for you? What do you want me to do?" Right? Construction manage it. And yeah, he did it soup to nuts. So they went on to amass, the two of them went on to amass 18 properties together that later sold to Shurgard. So, you know, when I say 45 years, I'm really in the mix of the 45 years as a young adult, as a young teenager, watching what was happening under my nose. And I was very attentive to it because I had to be. You know, my father used to wake me up at 2:00 in the morning for a concrete pour, of all things, when I had football practice or baseball practice the next morning. And that was kind of the story, you know. It was hard knocks. And I used to ask him all the time, it's like, you know, "Dad, why are you pushing my brother and I so hard? Like, you're drilling it so much that you're making us hate it, and, you know, not liking where you're pushing us," right? And he sat us down on that moment in time and he said, "Let me tell you boys something." He said, "I want you to hate manual labor so much that I want you to work with a computer." At the time it was a pen, a pen, right? But a pen, computer, and your brain. He goes, "That's what I want you to do. I want to see you go down the aisle with your cap and gown, you know, so you could throw the tassel over in college. I want to see you walk down the aisle and get married. And if you can do those two things for me, you'll complete me. That's all I want." And that was a story, and that's how, you know, it kind of got into that side of things. I didn't follow his steps right away. After college, I went into brokerage, believe it or not. And, you know, I did that for about 12 years. I put deals together. I watched what happened. I watched two people, you know, make a decision so I can eat. And, you know, my father used to say to me, "You know, what are you doing? Like, why are you still in the brokerage?" It's like, "Man, it's a boy's club. Things are great. You know, I take two-hour lunches. I'm making a good living. What do you mean?" Right? He's like, "You're making a mistake. Like, you need to build another one across the street from where I built the last one, and it'll fill up. I guarantee you." And so that's kind of the progression that happened. And it really was 2001. Had a really big portfolio deal as a broker, expecting to be the number one broker in the country and this, that and the other. And the Twin Towers came down and the deal blew up. You know, a million dollars of non-refundable money. It's never happened to me in 12 years. And I sat in my chair while all this chaos was going on. And I said, "You know what? Time to make a move." And so that's when I entrenched myself and started moving towards the world that my father and family grew up in, and just kind of continued, picked up the torch and ran it from there. Chris Berg: So I got to ask, now that I know Dad's... Tony Ardizzone [attribution inferred]: Without being so long-winded. Chris Berg: No, it's great to get the context. And I got to ask, knowing that Pops now is from Italy, what's your favorite Godfather? Tony Ardizzone: One, of course. Number one. Chris Berg: I was hoping you were going to say that, man, but I had to ask. So in all seriousness, how many sites, because I was going through, you sent me over an OM. We'll talk about more of that in a moment. But you, how many sites have you built so far in your career? Tony Ardizzone: In my career, I'm into the mid-20s now, 20, 25, 26, somewhere in there. And my, like I said, the early ones, it's part of the family side of the storage legacy, but you know, that was a lot of my father at the end of the day, getting that early on. So, but I was there watching it. I worked on a lot of them. So, you know, I kind of consider myself part of that legacy as well. Chris Berg: Yeah. I want to get into sort of how you underwrite stuff when you start going into development deals. First though, just because starting in 2001, really into the business, you've seen a lot of different cycles. I think one of the headlines from SSA for me, Tony, was when Bill Hoben from William Warren Group said, "Hey, I've been in this business for 31 years," so somewhat comparable to you, and he goes, "This is the hardest I've ever seen development in my 31 years." So based on other cycles, where do you see where we're at today? What would you compare today to with your history? Tony Ardizzone: Yeah, great question. So I will tell you this, because we are synergistic in our company profile, work profile, and what we do together, right? So you could probably attest to the fact of what I'm about to say, and that is that in my entire career, so this is my starting 20, so this is my 25th year, I have never seen as many entitled opportunities where people who have come into our world who thought, you know, they could do it. Retail developers, office developers, you know, multifamily developers, hospitality even I've seen. So these guys have come in and finally they've realized that, holy cow, and the market shifted. It wasn't as easy on the financing side. So the last, you know, since probably COVID, I would think last four years or so, I have been, you know, looking at properties that are already entitled, ready to go. And I've never seen that in my entire career. But I'll tell you also, out of let's say seven or eight that we see a week, I'd be lucky to get one that I would even attempt to even say, "Okay, this one's got some wheels behind it." A lot of these were just, I don't know what people were thinking, and it obviously shows that, you know, it would have been a loser. It would have been a tough, tough carry. You know, storage is not a loser. It's never been a loser. You just got to ride out that storm. But with the storm comes a lot of capital behind it, especially for the kind of storage that we build, and you know, the class A stuff that the institutional lenders like. So that's where that kind of sits. So has in the underwriting perspective, part of that, we are super conservative. Like I want to sleep at night, for myself, for my investors, and, you know, the partnerships that we establish. So we always write, if today's rents are at 18 bucks a foot in a certain trade, you know, area, we're right in that 10% behind what the existing market is. Because you know what my biggest fear is, Chris? I don't know if you've ever had it, but I've had a couple, I've gone through a couple cycles here. So my biggest fear is, you know, the 900 pound gorilla in our industry, right? Whoever that may be at the time. We know who it is. I never like to say who it is. But just decide one day, "You know what? Let's just slash rates. Let's just beat everybody and take all the competition, right? Let's fill up ours and then we'll worry about everything else on their side." That could happen and it has happened, right? Not to the extreme that I'm talking about, but it could get worse. So for me, it's really important. I'm not of the theory in our underwriting or in our acquisition side of things to find property that is behind a shopping center or hidden behind here or there. I want to be Main and Main. I still believe that location, location, location is the key to success. Because God forbid something were to go down, I guarantee my property on the corner or the off corner is going to sell a whole heck of a lot faster than someone behind a grocery store, right, at the end of the day, with a sign moving that way. So our underwriting is very critical, and how we approach it, and we take into account, you know, the increasing monthly revenue that we can get, lease-up rates, revenue management that the big houses use. It's a lot more sophisticated than it ever has been, right? And if you don't know what you're doing, and you're somebody that says, "You know what, I just came into this whirlwind with cash," or whatever the case is, "and I know storage is a great, great deal," well, you better understand the dynamics and the metrics behind it, because, you know, they're 36-month type of underwriting that you need to look at. Chris Berg: So let's dive into that. And I share that because I agree with you. I think a lot of people like, "Come on man, it's steel and some boxes. Like, how hard can this be?" Right? There's a lot more to it than I think what meets the eye, number one. Secondly, because of your football background, I wish I had this clip, man. I saw a great clip from Tom Brady recently that I'll probably use at some point in another show. But what I've really enjoyed, Tony, especially as a quarterback, is coming into these assets and underwriting them and creating like almost an offensive game plan, but then also going, "Hey, what's my defensive game plan?" Right? Like, like you said, just in case, what am I doing to defend this asset to ensure that it's got the best opportunity for success? Sort of a risk management thing. So I want to know if that's kind of your approach as well with your football background. And if so, walk us through, like, what are the metrics? Like you said, "Hey, I'm getting maybe seven, eight deals thrown at me each week, Chris. I'm lucky if there's one that's even got any meat on the bone." Walk me through kind of how you're processing this and what are the most important metrics you're focused on. Tony Ardizzone: Wow. You were asking for my secret sauce. I should ask you. I guess. No, no, no. I'm happy to share. You know, there's a first blush, right? There's a first hurdle. It's almost like watching someone walk in the door. You're looking at how, are his shoes scuffed up or not, or how tailored is his suit, or you know, the whole thing. It's what we look at. So our first blush, right out of the gate, right? And it's not because there aren't other secret sauces, there aren't other approaches to this. It's just been our approach, and we've batted a thousand. I say we, we should be in the MVP of storage, right? We batted a thousand. We've never had a loser in all these years. And it's because of the metrics that we use. Could we change the metrics and still be successful? And I've seen the metrics that, you know, the publicly traded companies and the larger companies have, and they go into, absolutely we could, and those are successful. We just happen to like stay in the higher demographic area, right, which is a lot harder to find properties that way. So my first blush, my first broadstroke brush, is real simple. It's, I work everything off a three mile. Everybody likes to talk about the five and the 10. I'm still in the three mile. If I had the choice to be on a freeway for property, or I had a choice to be on the arterial, that's tossup, because I've been successful on both of those acquisitions. But I think I would probably shoot for the freeway location, because I'd be able to draw from a lot further. You know, maybe now that that five to 10 really starts coming into play. But from a lease-up standpoint and being able to get that synergy of the lease-up, a storage facility that's more community-based on the arterial road, where people see it daily going home or going to work, those will lease up faster for you at the end of the day. So kind of contradictory on that side, but that's exactly what we look for. And then we look at income levels, right? So population, income levels, population being a big one, right? I mean, you could have a $100,000 median income of a neighborhood, but yet you only have 50,000 people there, right? And if you've got your saturation with other competition, how do you evaluate that? So for us, there's a lot that goes into it, but our first, you know, population and income is a real big one for us. And we try and, you know, again, anything north of $70,000 per median household income, not average, right? I hope a lot of people understand that at the end of the day, what the difference is. And then the other side of it is, you know, population. So it's kind of like my 70/70 rule, just to start out. Chris Berg: Love that. You mentioned the income piece also then, so that's kind of the offensive. Obviously you're looking at rates as well, hey, does this thing even have an opportunity to underwrite. Right from a defensive perspective, are you also looking at, okay, what other parcels of land potentially could be zoned for self-storage? What do I see, maybe some additional conversions? Are you taking that kind of strategy as well, or not so much? Tony Ardizzone: Yeah, no, that's a great question. Appreciate you asking. Yeah, I mean, I'd say that 80%, 85% of our business is ground-up development. You know, we have kind of pivoted since COVID, right, since '21 a little bit, where we're really attacking more of the repositioning of assets, right? Even repurposing on some of them, such as grocery stores or big boxes. The challenge with those are, and we love that too, right? We've been very successful with that too. But the challenge with that is you got gremlins that come out, right? Even though you think you can underwrite it for a certain dollar amount, you got your expertise in it, all of a sudden an electrical panel blows, or you know, you've got asbestos, or you've got, you know, some kind of environmental issue, or something you were not looking forward to or not expecting. Or maybe you dig up some skeletons in the back. It used to be a mortuary, right? I mean, we've had those. So those are the things that I think are a little bit, you have to be a little bit more precautionary when you're dealing with the reconversions of assets. But yes, we do them. We love them. They're faster to market at the end of the day. And so they're a great asset to go after. Problem is that they're so highly sought after, and they are very highly priced, that a lot of times it's a lot cheaper just to build it from the ground up. We may lose eight months on it, but you know what? We can get there a lot more cost-effectively. Chris Berg: Yeah, it's so good to hear you say that. We've got a great JV partner, and we've had some really incredible conversion opportunities come our way, and he's like, "Nope, I want to know my HVAC. I want to know, like, hey, my electricity." Like he's like, "Hey, I just want to do ground up. I know what I got, and I can actually make a much better, you know, underwriting decision," because, like you said, then I know there's not as many gremlins. So very, very well said. So let's talk about your business, right? Like, what are you up to right now? I know that you've got some assets that you're saying, "Hey, Chris, I want to go out there and potentially integrate some more retail investors with myself." So talk about your pivot there and what you're looking to fund. Tony Ardizzone: Yeah, thank you for asking. Yeah, you know, we've had the model, and the reason we've been able to scale like we have, we've had some fantastic and amazing joint venture partners on the institutional side of things. And you know, there's a lot of work and effort, as you know, that goes into it, years of it, between the entitlements, through the zoning process and so forth, all the way to the risk that it takes in construction and so forth. So we've pivoted away from the institutions at this point, and we started going to friends and family and started raising money with a fund. We started that this year, January of 2025, and we're taking in investors, you know, in our website portal. And, you know, it's basically at this point in time we're giving some pretty hefty preferred returns to investors. We've got a track record. We can show our proof of track record, our historical side of things and what we've done. I don't think we, in our entire career, we've ever sold anything during any cycle or whatsoever for probably less than 2.5x multiple from when we got into it. I anticipate on this next portfolio that we're assembling, we're going to assemble 25 of these class A properties. Doesn't have to be ground up, could be the retrofit and the repurposing as well. But we're going to build 25 of these over the next 36 to 60 months, hold on to them for a little while, cash flow them, provide distributions back to our investors, and then at some point package the whole thing up and put it on the market for sale. So that's the game plan, to be able to get the multiple that we're looking for. Chris Berg: So with your experience, why the pivot from institutional to retail? Tony Ardizzone: Great question. Control. I'm not going to say I'm a control freak, but control from a standpoint of, not so much control when you think of it that way. Control from a standpoint of, I could give you case study after case study. I've got a half a dozen case studies, if not close to a dozen, to where you've got this trajectory where you've got a pent-up demand on these properties that we're putting out on the market, and we're with institutional buyers. And you know, you get a call, the game plan and the offer, the operating agreement always talks about a seven-year hold, you know, is what, approximate seven-year hold. Well, I've never gotten past three years of a hold because it's done so well. We did really good on the acquisition side, that we get a call from our institutional guys and they're like, "Hey, this is the best property we have in our entire portfolio. I think we should sell today." Chris Berg: Wow. Tony Ardizzone: "Oh, what do you mean, sell? No, we're at 40% occupancy." "Yeah, but we got there like within the first, you know, eight months. Like this is like amazing." So leaving money on the table, just taking the bricks and mortar and kind of getting the at-market price, right, and not really getting that meat on the bone at the end of the day, is a huge mistake. And I could tell you, like I said, the case studies, there's one case study that still hits me. Actually, I met with a gentleman yesterday, after 10 years actually. He was an investment partner, and he said, "How come you haven't done any more deals with me?" And I said, "You know why?" I said, "I love you, you're a good man. You stand for all the right things, but from a business perspective, we just didn't align." And he said, "Explain to me," you know, because he's more of a land owner kind of a thing, and he said, "Explain to me more." I said, "Well, the property you made, you made a decision that you wanted to sell on, right, before we were even done with it." I said, "Do you remember what that price was?" And he says, "I don't remember." No. I said, "Well, we built it for a little over $5 million, land including, that means everything involved." And we had one of the REITs come to us. This is 2015. We had one of the REITs come to us before it was even done and said, "We love this location. We'll buy it from you." I said, "It's not for sale." And they said, "Well, do you have a partner or partners?" I said, "I do." They said, "Well, then you have a fiduciary, and here's our offer, and you got to present it." So that $9.1 million offer was where the comment back was, "Hey Tony, you're not going to go broke making a profit." True, but you're also going to not sleep, you know, well, like I haven't over the last 10 years, on just that deal. Fast forward less than 24 months, I get a call from the REIT saying, "Hey, you built this building. You're one of our partners. Would you be kind enough to walk our appraiser through? We're doing an appraisal for all of our properties that we have to get audited on with REIT rules and so forth." So I did. By the time I was done, spent an hour, hour and a half with the guy. And I said, "So, you know, I'm assuming, and I've got to bet that you're going to be doing this on an income level approach, right, as opposed to a cost basis and so forth." And he said, "Yeah, absolutely." I said, "So based on the rents, and I've seen what the rents are right now that you're charging, what do you value this property at?" And he said, "Oh, I'm probably anywhere between 29 to 32 million." Right now, that's less than 24 months from when we sold. All you needed to do is just stay the course, stay in it. And that's happened to me over and over and over again, to where I'm not doing ourselves any justice. I'm not doing our investors any justice. And like I said, you know how hard it is to get these things done. So ride out the storm, if there is a storm. A lot of times there's not. If you do all your homework, there won't be a storm. Chris Berg: Well, I love that you open, because do you ever read any or listen to Sam Zell? You remember Sam Zell? Tony Ardizzone: I do. Yeah. Chris Berg: Yeah. He always talked about, yeah, thank you. And one of the things he always talked about was, "Hey man, leave meat on the bone." Like, I don't want to do just one deal with you. I want to do deals for the rest of our lives. Imagine if I leave meat on the bone for everybody, everyone's going to want to come back into my sandbox and play. And so I just thought, very, very well said how you open that conversation up. So give us an idea. I'm going to bring up your website here, but give us an idea for people that are like, "You know what, I like storage, don't know a lot about it. Tony's got great experience. Might be somebody I want to team up with as an LP." Like, how do they get involved with you? What kind of returns you talking about? Walk us through that. Tony Ardizzone: Yeah, thank you, Chris. Thanks for even doing this. I didn't expect you to do that. Yeah, you know, look, if you want to do a little bit more deeper dive into us, you know, you can see our historical performances, what we are, the current investments in the current projects that we have right now going. You'd have to become an investor or sign up with us to become an investor, and that's that yellow button there on the right, front and center. You can see a lot of the class A stuff that we have on our website, and that's what we build. We always have third-party management at the end of the day with us, whether it's Extra Space or CubeSmart, or, you know, we're looking at others right now very closely at the end of the day. But this is an opportunity for friends and family. If you're accredited, you have to be an accredited investor. This is a 506(c) regulated investment. Which, accreditation, you could Google it, ChatGPT it, whatever it is. But from a nutshell, it's you got to make $200,000 a year for three years straight, or as a couple, married couple, $300,000 a year, or you have to have a million dollars worth of net worth, not including your primary home. So that makes you an accredited investor and be able to invest into our projects. We do take a very low minimum. A lot of people have criticized me for taking such a low minimum, but I want everybody to get involved if they want to and have the opportunity. And you know, there's a lot of risk-averse people out there, and I respect that. So we're at a $25,000 minimum. And for that, you get 8% on your money. So anywhere from 25,000 to 99,999 is 8% on your money. That's preferred annual return. And then whatever the upside is on the back end. So if we split it for, let's say, it's a 3x, right? So if you put in a 100,000, you get 10% return on your money annually. Preferred return. You get that back first. You get your 100 grand back. And then if it's a 3x, you get 300,000 on top of that. So you would get $450,000 back on a $100,000 investment. You get your 100 grand back plus 350. So that's the model. We've got obviously a lot of people putting in larger dollar amounts than that, but breaking it down to that. We do also IRAs, 401ks, you know, we help people at the end of the day get a custodian that can circumvent, you know, putting that into our fund, if they want to have it tax deferred. So there's ways for that to happen as well. So yeah, we're kind of venturing into something that, you know, is a little out of our wheelhouse, but you know what? I'm going to find a lot more satisfaction out of it when we all sit back and we have all the investors together in one room, and what we've accomplished, because I know it'll happen. I know what we do is the right thing at the end of the day. We're professionals. We're experts at what we do. And I don't say that boastingly. I just say that from experience, and I know you're professional, and that's why you and your group is, and that's why we're here talking, right? Because this elevates us to another level. Chris Berg: Just because the attorneys are probably going to want to hear this. This is not investment advice. The example that Tony just gave was a simple theoretical example. Past performance does not equal future performance. So just want to get all the sort of nuggets out there to cover ourselves and any attorney. So we're coming up on our time. I want to give you the last words. So anything else you want to add or share? Tony Ardizzone: You know, I think I just, you know, to anybody out there looking to get into this business, you know, you're going to say, "What? I could just do it myself, right, at the end of the day." And the only advice, in closing, I think would be find somebody, sit down with them, have coffee, have lunch, whatever it takes. Really understand the dynamics before you go out and do a self-storage facility. You know, I say that because it affects not only you as an investor or someone who wants to be in this business, but it also affects guys like you, Chris, and me at the end of the day. Because I see guys that are just doing nothing but going forward, spending, you know, buying land, entitling it for self-storage, and then not doing it. Well, guys like us have to take that into account, because eventually those barriers to entry have been penetrated, and those are things that, you know, we now look at it and go, "Wow, we really can't put this facility there, because eventually this guy can, you know, change the numbers on us," right? So that's a real big one. And the other one I think, is God and country, right? I mean, for what we got going on in our world today, and a lot of the political demise that we have, I just think that, you know, having conversation, continuing conversation, listening, you know, just like we do in business, to do it the same way when we're out there in the real world. And, you know, I think that's my parting words at the end of the day, of an immigrant son who is doing nothing but trying to do all the right things and live those pillars that we talked about. Chris Berg: Yeah, I really appreciate you wrapping it up that way. You know, you and I spoke. You obviously had, being in Scottsdale, some proximity to Charlie Kirk, and just being a man of faith and sharing your story. So it's great to have you here, Tony. Appreciate it. Again, if you want to find out more, you can always go check them out. Legacybuiltus.com. Legacybuiltus.com. This is Chris Berg with the CRE Report. Building generational wealth with real estate. — END OF TRANSCRIPT —