June activity

Welcome to the self storage blog, our diary of the self storage business.

One of the hidden values we bring to the self storage industry is the analysis we do on phone call and rental activity. It is essential to us to be able to anticipate call volume for staffing purposes. Running a call center is all about right-sizing your staff. We also need to be able to track our results to see how our training and selling approaches are working and how consumers are behaving. Our approaches and consumer behavior influence each other to a very great degree. Since this is the busy season, we need to pay particular attention.

June is off to a very good start compared to last year. The first ten days of June gave us better call volume than last year and the demand wave stayed higher than last year. We also saw good rental demand. Our ratio of credit card reservations for the first part of June was as strong as last year. This is a good sign, as credit card “action” has been slower than last year up until now. Many clients have reported to me that they have found their second quarter of ‘05 to be weaker than ‘04 in net rentals and total move-ins. This indicates that “something is up”.

There were many people being deployed in military actions last year. Home sales were booming and a softness in the economy may have been causing life changing and career changing events for people. This year, home sales continue to stay strong, yet the storage business seems a little soft. So the fact that this June is looking better than last year’s June and the fact that June is looking better than other months of this year, in comparison, has got to be positive.

Of course we are also experiencing the anti-climax of the “middle of the month syndrome”, when we get lots of current tennant calls and fewer rental calls than we had towards the end of May and the beginnning of June. The rush of heavy rental demand at the end of the month in busy season is balanced off by the dissapointment the middle of the month brings. But the end of June is coming along with 4th of July weekend, so don’t fret. The new customers will be flooding your stores and our phone lines again.

bye for now,

Tron

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Disclamer: This entry is intended to promote our partner StorageMart and some or all participants received compensation.

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