SSA San Antonio

THE SELF STORAGE REPORT — EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Episode: SSA San Antonio Guest: Sean — host of the SSA Economic Summit; Robbie — self-storage developer/owner (surnames and companies are not stated on camera) Host: Chris Berg — Abernathey Development Recorded: March 19, 2026 Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jX2ovWR3TVA Key topics: SSA Economic Summit recap in San Antonio; proposed surveillance-rent legislation and customer profiling; the A/B lease concept — a fixed 12-month rate set 10% over the longest-standing tenant versus a promotional move-in rate; Dr. Eisenberg's flat-but-steady read on the economy; Tommy's AI presentation; Warren and Daniel on cost segregation and CSSI; occupancy back to 88-90% after COVID-era 92-95%; Spencer Kirk and Extra Space managing to 88%; 11 transactions and 80-plus quotes on roughly $215 million of product in 90 days; CMBS, debt funds, banks, credit unions and life companies all lending again; the SVB collapse and the construction-money drought; private equity arriving from multifamily, retail and hospitality with $20 billion to place; overbuilding and the need for better industry data; the SSA Foundation awarding $225,000 in scholarships to more than half of 70-75 applicants; Allegiant Stadium and the 50th-anniversary party; the fall SSA venue reveal 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: But are you — you know exactly what's up. I'm going to have you guys get closer together. Robbie: Yeah. Chris Berg: Just have to continue the conversation, but we just got out of this economic summit. Robbie [attribution inferred]: Yeah. Yeah. So what we were talking about is the, you know, the price fixing, surveillance rents and so forth. That's not — that's not directed at consumer. That's called controlling your real estate. You know, the more — if I have a unit, again, if I have 10 10x10s and all of a sudden 7 of them come out and get rented, my 10x10s become more valuable tomorrow, right? It's just the way that it is. And so we have the ability, and I have the obligation and I have the responsibility to myself and to my partners and my leadership group to charge more to the next people. Chris Berg [attribution inferred]: And on that note — is it out of bounds if you're charging more for the unit that's closer to the elevator? Sean [attribution inferred]: Absolutely. They're suggesting that that's surveillance rent, because — Robbie: Does any other industry work that way? Do you pay more to sit closer to the stage when you go to a concert? Do you pay more for a better seat on the airplane? So why would they — my daughter at the law school, you know, rented her apartment and we went through, okay, do you want to be closer to the elevator? You want to be further from the elevator? You want to overlook the park? Do you want to overlook the parking garage? Do you want to be on the higher floor so you have nobody above you? Do you want to be on the lower floors where above you is the dance party area? Right. And every one of those steps costs more money, and they should. Because if I am going to roll a cart into my self-storage facility and I want the best pricing that's available in my unit or my property, then that's going to be okay — you're going to be in that back corner over there. But guess what? You know, Sean, you don't mind pushing that over there for a better price. Sean [attribution inferred]: Because your sensitivity is to price. There's other people that are going to say, "No, I don't want my wife to walk. I'm willing to pay more." Chris Berg: Gentlemen, I want to jump in. So let's talk about the best thing you had this economic summit. Sean, I just met you. Everyone, welcome to The Self Storage Report. I just think you mentioned something really interesting about, hey, you've got two choices potentially because of some of the legislation coming down the pipeline. Walk us through what you just mentioned earlier. Sean: Well, which part? Be more specific, because I've just had a lot of — Chris Berg: The two choices, where you said, "Hey, here's — if you want to pay a standard rate for an entire 12 months, right?" Sean: There's some legislation on the table that is being pushed through in a lot of states related to what's called surveillance rents. So it's basically — you could think of it, if you were thinking of it in a nefarious way, it would be profiling your customer. So the extreme example would be somebody pulls up to your facility in a Porsche. You immediately decide, I'm going to try to charge this guy more because he can obviously afford a Porsche. But in reality, it's a very slippery slope, because the way that they're defining the data that would be used is the same way that every industry identifies data when they're charging for their services. My property is closer to the stadium; the hotel room is going to cost more than the one that you're going to have to walk further to go get. So at some point you're getting into a gray area over what it is. Chris Berg: Right. But the option that you talked about that I think is really interesting — you said, "Hey, you can pay me a standard rate for the next 12 months." Sean: Oh, yes. Chris Berg: Or you can sign here for this introductory rate and we'll see what happens with the rates. That was interesting. Sean: So yeah, that would be the A/B concept on the lease. So when a customer walks — you know, a lot of this regulation, a lot of this legislation is because they're accusing the industry or industry participants of misleading the customer, baiting and switching on the rents. What they're not understanding is that those are promotional rents, and even though we say this is a promotional rent, that somewhere gets lost in the politicians, in the legislation, etc. So would a valuable or viable alternative be to present the customer at the time of leasing the unit with an A/B scenario? Scenario A is: I have a unit available in every size that we have in the facility and there's a fixed price, and that price today is set at 10% over the highest unit that — my longest-standing tenant that's paying the most rent, because over time invariably you're going to pay more rent. So we'll rent you that unit today and we will not change the price for a year. You'll be locked in for a year. Alternative B is, you can see what's behind door number two. We're going to move you in at a promotional rate that's well below what we're charging customers that have been in place with us for a long time. And we're going to flow with the market, and as it is warranted, we're going to increase rents to run our business. Because if we charged everybody the promotional rent on every unit that we have in the facility, we wouldn't be able to afford the building. We wouldn't be able to afford to give you this storage space, this great facility that we just built that has all these modern amenities. Robbie: Right. Absolutely. So the important part about that is what you just talked about — that upfront rent that you're going to get is a massively discounted rent versus what the long-term rent is going to be. And so this bait and switch that you talked about, that the world thinks that we're doing in the industry, is simple: everybody does it, in real estate, in commercial, everywhere. You walk in, you get a discounted price, and then you're going to get a higher price as time goes, or you can move out and we rent it to the — Sean: Well, I'll give you a real — here's a real interesting example that's way farfetched, but I think it articulates the point. You own a boat, right? Robbie: I own. Sean: Okay. So if you walk into a hardware store, they have the marina section and they have the other section. You can go buy rope in the other section. Robbie: Yeah. Sean: And guess what? It costs more in the marina section. You know why? Because if you can afford a boat, you can afford to buy more expensive rope. So is that — are we profiling? Well, I mean, are we profiling the customer? Robbie: In boating, it's called line. Sean: Yeah, I'm an inland waterway boater. You're on the big water. I haven't gotten an invitation to be on the boat yet. Robbie: Come on. Come on. Standing invitation. You'll enjoy it. Trust me. Chris Berg: So let's talk about the economic summit. We just wrapped it up. Robbie, for you, best thing you got out of today was what? Robbie: Oh, best thing I got was from Dr. Eisenberg, who gave us a very level response to the state of the real estate and the state of the economy right now. So the sky's not falling. Everything is not spectacularly good. It's just — we're just kind of flatlining, which is not a bad place to be. We have some things that we have to make sure that we pay attention to, but as a whole, we're still steady as we go. We're still a very, very strong economy. So hearing that, for me, was a big thing. Chris Berg: Sean, how about you? Sean: Well, I, as the host of the summit — we put a concept together, so I don't want to pick any favorites. But what I would say is, I'm hopeful that the attendees found the content to be valuable. We tried to mix it up a little bit this year and get away from some of the kind of standard panels that have been part of the summit and bring some different content. So I thought Tommy did a great job with his AI presentation. There's certainly — that's going to have a huge impact on our business and on all businesses, frankly. I thought Warren and Daniel did an excellent job at the end trying to help owners figure out how they can save on their taxes by really using the tools that the government has given us to do that, right? Free money. It's the best kept secret. Robbie: It's free money. And to that point, anybody who's not doing cost segregation, and you're a developer-owner in commercial real estate space, you are doing yourself a massive disservice. You're leaving money on the table. CSSI has done 8 or 10 of them. There's other people in the industry, but those guys have just squeezed every free dollar that comes out of — and it's free. If you're not doing it, you literally are just throwing money away and you're walking away. You can't get it back later. So I appreciate you. Sean: And then finally, I would say it's very difficult to find an entertaining economist, so I'm hopeful that we hit the ball there. Chris Berg: He was good. So to piggyback on what you mentioned, Robbie, with him — then I want to mention something in a moment. Sean, you said earlier the economy is not horrible, but yet unemployment's not good. At least it's not really rising. Spending's not going up. How do you translate what you heard today into self-storage demand? Because demand right now is abysmal. What say you? Robbie: Well, I think that demand is not abysmal, and I think that demand is steady right now. Demand is what it was, Sean, as you know, 6, 7, 8 years ago. We're back to the norm. What happened in between there was we got this massive spike up during COVID that brought us to unprecedented highs. When I first got into storage in '08, '09, I remember I was talking to Spencer Kirk, former CEO of Extra Space, and I said, "Why are you managing to 88% occupancy? Why don't we manage to — in the retail world, we manage to 95% occupancy. You're leaving money on the table." He says, "Well, you're just not going to get there because you're constantly churning." Then all of a sudden we start going into COVID and that demand starts to spike. And now everybody starts managing to 92, 94, 95%. Now we're back to 88 to 90. So I think that we're back to perhaps a new norm, and I think we're coming off of just a historic high. So I personally do not believe that demand is abysmal. I think we're back to — the economy is what the economy is. We're not in a spike, we're not in the — my personal — Chris Berg [attribution inferred]: Yeah, it's funny how it's all relative, right? So what's considered to be abysmal in one industry — I mean, this is not — if you want to see abysmal — Robbie [attribution inferred]: Own some office buildings. Sean [attribution inferred]: We're at 80-plus percent in a couple of our offices. And I think one of the things that Dr. Eisenberg talked about is — I mean, look, we got ourselves in trouble because we overbuilt. I mean, that's the bottom line, and we as an industry need to do a better job of sharing data, being transparent, so that people aren't making mistakes by putting shovels in the ground when it's not warranted. Because at the end of the day there is only so much demand. And so where we get in trouble is when there's not enough demand — you start stealing demand, or you're creating demand for yourself by offering very low prices, doing things to buy the tenant, which we all understand. But at the end of the day, that's a tough game to play. We would be probably better off as an industry, more sustainable as an industry, if we were working with better data, and we're not. There's certainly a time and a place to build when it's warranted, but people get — you know, prior to COVID we were talking about overbuilding. Then COVID came and saved everybody's butt. Robbie: Absolutely. Robbie [attribution inferred]: And everybody's back up again, and all those people that were like, "Oh my God, I made a mistake building this facility" were like, "I'm going to put another shovel in the ground. That worked out great." Right? I mean, so one of the things everybody gets tired of me saying is that just because you could or can doesn't mean you should. I say it all the time, right? We have had way too many properties that get built because they could get built. There was so much money out here chasing after — as you know, you see it everywhere. Everybody's like, "Hey, I got a storage deal. I can't miss out. I want to be here." Sean [attribution inferred]: Yeah. Let me tell you why my site's so good. Robbie: Right? Let me tell you why. And they take all of the levers and they slam them all the way up. Said, "I'm going to be the closest to the rooftops, I'm going to be the prettiest, the newest, and the fastest." And so I've built this model that — I mean, you should see how good the returns are. Yeah, but the demand is there? It's already saturated. There's already demand — everybody's at 88 to 90%. Yeah, but I'm going to take demand from these other properties because I'm newer, prettier or sexier. Like, that's just bad math. Just bad math. And so what has happened is that this influx of private equity — at these conferences I'll get approached by 10 different groups that say, "We've got $20 billion that we need to place. Can we do deals with you? Can we do deals with you?" And it's like, I struggle. I struggle to find places to put our good money. A good deal will always find good money, but good money doesn't always find good deals, right? And just because you've got that money doesn't mean that you should spend it. But what's happened is these people have to spend it or they lose it and hand it back. That's been, in my humble opinion, the biggest problem that we've had in this industry — this influx and race from the other categories, or the other appetites, or the food groups out there. They came from multifamily, they came from retail, it came from hospitality. They came in here, looked great and sexy, and they literally threw hundreds of billions of dollars at this. Sean: Yeah, and they think storage is easy. They're like, "Well, I mean, I've been developing apartments and I've been developing retail for years, so how hard can it be? This is easy." Chris Berg: So with that being said, Sean, you started the day off with a nice graphic saying, "Hey, capital's flowing in." So what were you showing in that graph, and what are you seeing from a capital standpoint? Sean: Yeah, well, the graph basically demonstrated that we've taken 11 transactions to market in the past 90 days, or closed transactions in the past 90 days. And on those 11 transactions, we've received over 80 quotes. And that's about $215 million worth of product. And so it tells you that the CMBS market is liquid, the debt fund market is liquid, banks and credit unions are lending, life companies are increasingly participating in our space. So it's really just, you know, the question isn't, is there money out there? The question is understanding where is the best place to go to get the capital for your needs. So if you're a low-lever guy that has a different view of the world, maybe there's a product that's better for you than the guy that needs every last dollar, or that's got — his property hasn't leased up and he's looking for some capital to live another day. All that capital is out there. It's just understanding how to differentiate the capital and use it as a tool in your toolbox the right way to get your deals done. And shopping does — I think that one of the intents of the graphic was to show, because at every leverage point it was showing you how many bids there were, and the point is that that clearly demonstrates that shopping matters. Capital — they only print money in one place; it's how you package it up and sell it that makes the difference. Like ice cream, right? I mean, there's a reason they have 31 flavors. At the end of the day it's ice cream. Chris Berg: Right? Excellent. Sean: I mean, so money is a little bit the same way, right? I mean, what's your need? What are you going for? Robbie: I love it. That was a great point that you brought up, because the availability of money — there's always been money available, but it's at the terms that we can work with, and terms that will make a deal pencil. Just three, four years ago when the SVB bank collapse happened, everybody's pencils down. So as a developer, we went literally from Miami to Seattle to Boston, San Diego. Looked everywhere in between. We could not find construction money that would pencil for us. It just went down. Now it's good to see, right, all these people are back into the market now. People have got their head above water, and there's also the opportunity to replace some of that debt that we brought on during that period that is at a much higher rate with some better money. Chris Berg: Show me the love, baby. Exactly. Exactly. So Sean, last thing — you just brought up, when you met us, Rob and I here chatting, you talked about a great SSA scholarship for certain people. Tell us about that. Sean: Oh, absolutely. So one of the themes of the economic summit today was free money, and unfortunately we ran out of time. But I think that for all of the SSA members that are out there watching this, and for people that are not SSA members, one of the reasons to become an SSA member — in addition to them fighting the good fight, leading the charge on all the regulatory and legislative issues that we're having, is obviously these conferences and the content. But one of the best benefits that people don't know about is that the SSA Foundation is a great organization that has been capitalized through the generosity of the membership. And last year we gave away $225,000. We had over — I think it was, I'm going to rough numbers, 70 to 75 applicants. We gave money to more than half of them, in increments of 2,500, 5,000, 10,000. So spreading the love. And it's amazing. I sit on the committee that awards the money, and a lot of these people — I mean, there's all kinds of different applicants, but some of these people are working at the CubeSmart or at the Extra Space and they didn't finish college because they had hardships in their life, and they became a storage manager, and now they're wanting to go back and continue their education so that they can be better at their job. And it's really rewarding to hear about these stories. I mean, the candidates that we've awarded the scholarship money to — somebody was telling a story yesterday in our meeting that the candidate walked up to them crying and basically said, "The $10,000 you gave me last year changed my life. And I didn't apply this year because I want somebody else to get to have an opportunity to win that money this year." Which I thought was like — Robbie [attribution inferred]: You know, that person gets it, right? I mean, they absolutely could have applied again this year, and they chose not to because they want to share. They want to spread the love. $10,000 makes or breaks the opportunity for many, many people across this country to go to school in a year. $5,000 changes their ability. And a lot of people say $5,000 doesn't do anything because the cost of education is so expensive. Well, that's not for you to determine. For that person, that 1,000, that 2,500, 5,000, 10,000 changes their life. Chris Berg [attribution inferred]: And it's just — what a remarkable $220,000. Sean: Yeah. And I will tell you that one of the things that's very neat about the way that we hand out the money — or award the money; shouldn't say hand it out, but award the money — is we will not give a candidate more money than they need, because we want to be able to spread them. That's the reason we have the smaller increments, because a lot of these people, they're going to school part-time, they're not full-time, and their community college is not — Robbie: You know, we're not going to give somebody $10,000 whose tuition is $3,000, right? Sean: Yeah, you get the idea. It makes the difference between them getting their books and being able to get there and do the class. It's life-changing for these young people. Chris Berg: So gentlemen, great stuff. 30 seconds each. Last word is — Robbie: Optimism. Chris Berg: I like it. Let's do it. Sean: I would say I continue to be impressed every day by this industry, the people that are in it. And a little nugget: when you guys hear the announcement for where the fall — last year we did the stadium, Allegiant, for our 50th anniversary, and we resoundingly heard from the membership that they really enjoyed that member benefit and that party. So this year we're taking it up a notch. When you hear the venue that the party's going to be at, I think people are going to be very surprised. Chris Berg: Come on, you can't just drop that. Give us a hint. Sean: It'll be announced tomorrow. Chris Berg: All right, give us a hint. Robbie: Last year I had to fly home that night for a hearing for my — Chris Berg: You missed it. Robbie: I had a self-storage hearing that I had to fly back for. So I was gone for 24 hours. I got back and I heard it was the best party in all the years at the — Sean: SSA. And we heard from the membership that that was resoundingly a success. People wanted that. They don't want to fly all the way to Las Vegas to go to the ballroom. Robbie: Yeah. Sean: You know, and we're not being irresponsible in the way that we're spending the money that the members are paying the dues, right? So we're giving that — Chris Berg: I don't want to start any rumors, but since we were at Raiders Stadium last year, are you suggesting that Tom Brady's going to be there this year, or — Sean: I can assure you 100% that that is not what the big surprise is going to be. I would personally vote for Gisele, but I'm sick. Sean: Fall SSA this year is not one you're going to want to miss. Chris Berg: That's a wrap. Thanks, you guys. Robbie: Love it. Awesome. — END OF TRANSCRIPT —