Transforming Old Retail Spaces into Self-Storage Goldmines

What was going on in the community around there that made you think that was a good area for storage? And then what happened over the next few years?

Eric Hemingway is a self storage investor who specializes in converting old empty buildings into climate controlled self storage.

He's the co founder of Nomad Capital, and today he's sharing his incredible journey from a three year sailing adventure around the Mediterranean to building a successful self storage empire with his son Levi. You get back into the storage business ten years later in North Carolina. What was your next facility?

We're sitting there having a beer and looking at it across the street, and there's this big brick ugly building with no windows in it. I shot that. That would be perfect for storage.

You talk about a lot is that risk is a muscle.

What is passive income? And people get into short term rentals and airbnbs or what have you, or single family rentals. What is truly passive, right?

To me, in my mind, truly passive is if you could do us a.

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Welcome to the truly passive income podcast. I'm Neil.

And I'm click.

Our guest today, as we said, is Mister Eric Hemingway. Eric, welcome to the Truly Passive Income podcast.

Thank you, Neil. Gentlemen, how are we?

Very well.

Morning.

Give us a quick rundown of your background and how you got into the self storage business.

Okay, sure. Yeah. So I've been in construction for a long time. 25 too long, let's just put it that way. Was doing construction in Arizona.

And I'm like, I have no idea anything about the self storage business. Found a piece of property right where I lived. I pass it every day. It was a residential farm on a highway and had to rezone a commercial.

Just did a long due diligence period. Not really sure what I didn't. Kicked around like a football at the county and what it took to rezone it to commercial.

Thankfully I had some very patient sellers who waded through that process with me. But yeah, I had done some commercial construction before that, but this is by far the biggest project I'd done.

So what did that reentitlement look like for converting that from a residential farm property to uh, commercial? How long process?

It was probably six months or so. Six or seven months. Had to have some preliminary drawings, had to go to the county and apply.

And it was even harder than just residential to commercial because storage was, I don't remember all the details, but b two was like general commercial and b one was storage. So it was a little more stringent and they one of the requirements.

I submitted a plot plan with what I was proposing to do and then they came back with revision saying, hey, we don't want to drive down the highway and just look, storage unit. We want you to put a commercial building as a buffer between the highway and the storage unit. So back to the drawing board.

Then I had to go in front of the planning and zoning commission and then the county, let's call it county council, for final approval. And there was just a lot of, I call miracles along the way that just things that should not have happened, happened.

And I was at the final meeting, it was three commissioners that were yes or no. And you had to get a majority. Right. There was another project maybe 15 miles down the road.

But one thing I was really counting on is what they call a deceleration lane. So I had to actually put another lane on the highway. It's a six lane highway and off of the highway to turn into my property. Right.

And so I was counting on that and had to go through Arizona Department of Transportation and all that process, finally get to the county. And I was up for, I gave him my spiel, said America, and I want to do storage. And initially they said no. And all three of them said no.

They said, yeah, we don't think that's a good use.

And I was ready to go back to my seat and the attorney for the county hyped up and said, gentlemen, I urge you to reevaluate because we just gave this hotel 15 miles away the right to do the deceleration lane for his project. And so we've set a precedent. So I don't think you cannot approve this one. And then one of them said, well, I motion we re vote.

And then it was unanimous. That one decision, if that attorney hadn't piped up, would have been game over right there.

But that was my first foray into all that, and it was certainly drowned by fire. Wow.

How'd you choose that location? What was going on in the community around there that made you think that was a good area for storage? And then what happened?

Over the next few years, it was a growing area. It's a suburb, basically. Prescott, Arizona is already a small town, but this is the outskirts, pretty rural area.

But there was one project that was getting going, new residential project. So I thought, okay, great, those houses are going to help fill this storage.

All three went bankrupt. And so we went through an zero eight to probably eleven, three years or so of very slim margins to get through the recession.

Thankfully, we were right at the point where we were about breakeven, but then it fluctuated over those three years. Like I mentioned, Don move in, twelve people move in, eleven people move out, nine in, eleven out, whatever.

So it was just treading water for a while there. And thankfully we were able to hold onto the property. And once eleven happened and twelve, and it just kept getting better year after year.

Still own it today. Just finishing up a 30,000 square foot expansion on two acres next door that we bought a couple of years ago. So the property is doing incredible.

And so that's what we did.

So it was, one of the things I love about storage is the ability to build in phases.

You have this facility, you've figured out the demand, you've built it up, it's leasing up, and you get to a point where, hey, we're filling up and it's a lot easier. It's not like an apartment building where once it's full, pretty much the only levers you can pull is to lower your expenses or increase rents.

Whereas with storage, it's a lot easier if you've got a little extra land around it, you can expand, correct?

Yeah, absolutely. And there was a lot of times where I wish I would have even phased the first part. So the first development was 38,000.

I would kept thinking maybe we should have just done parking in the middle and then put buildings in there later. Would have been a lot slower. Lease up. Had we known how long it was going to take to lease up, then that would have probably been the way to go.

But yeah, to your point, that's the great thing about it is you've got land, hopefully, or you can acquire land adjacent and then maybe do boat and rv parking or a lay down yard for contractors and then you have room to expand into that as the demand calls for it.

Yes, sir.

What was your next facility?

And then I, I said, I can't do this anymore. The fun is worn off. We hung the bags up and I said, by now the storage in Arizona is doing great.

And we thought, hey, let's get back into storage because it's doing well and it doesn't take a lot of our time. Like, let's do a few more of these.

My wife and I were having a beer at a brewery downtown and we had just made the decision maybe a week or two before. Like, let's see, we can find.

And we're sitting there having a beer and looking at across the street and there's this big brick, ugly building with no windows in it. I thought that would be perfect for storage.

So I actually got up and walked around the building in the middle of my phone and looking at him like, there's no windows. It's got a loading dock, it's got an office. So I called the realtor the next day, walked in with him and said, I don't see why this wouldn't work.

We had already known there was a lot of stuff going on downtown Wilmington, and I thought I. This might be a perfect segue to get back into the business. Yeah.

So we ended up putting it under contract, and that was our first storage in North Carolina city. Storage north. Yeah.

What do you think when you look at building a ground up storage facility like you did in Arizona versus doing a conversion with the warehouse? What are some of the pros and cons of the different strategies there?

And how does that play up in terms of the cost to build it out and the timeline and things like that?

Yeah. So ground up. We've got two ground up projects going right now, and we've got several conversions going right now.

And just the time is huge and expense. Right. The buildings that we're finding these days are old warehouses, old retail, a Kmart or a soda bottling facility or what have you.

So much of the work is already done. Now you do run into risks of, are you going to find asbestos or lead paint or buried oil tanks or fuel tank.

We had that with the Kmart, where they used to have an auto center there, and they would recycle oil. So there was a buried oil tank. There's some environmental risks, no question. But you don't ground up development is not free of risks either. Right.

What we've noticed is that the time factor is so much faster with a conversion as opposed to a ground up. Ground up projects typically take six months in planning, engineering, civil engineering, structural engineering, permitting.

I think our two rounded projects were at least four months into permitting each. And then you're starting from scratch, right? You just scraping the lot, digging footings, inspections, and away you go.

A conversion might be a year or just a little bit under, and the ground up is easily 18 months to two years. Could be. Wow.

How are you determining the feasibility of a potential self storage conversion project?

So we have somebody on our team that does underwriting, and he's an acquisitions manager, so we've got a few subscriptions to different softwares. Radius plus costar. We follow demographics, obviously. What's the population? What's the income level? What percentage of the population are renters?

Because renters typically use more storage than homeowners. What is the proximity to other storage facilities? How much climate control is already in the market? How much is non climate controlled?

How full are they? Where are their rates? Are there rate bad market rates? Are they lower?

Are they full because they're low, or they pull because the market's demanding more storage? We do a pretty deep dive into all of that while we're identifying a property.

And then if it starts checking a lot of those boxes that we move ahead with the project, then we hire a third party feasibility study. As soon as we get the project tied up and double checking our numbers, making sure we see what we were seeing. And so far that's proven true.

The stuff that we find the feasibility study is really close to what we've come up with as project cost and lease up and what rental rates and unit makes and all those kind of factors. So it's definitely a science. It's not just a throw a dart at the wall and build it. They will come.

I think those days in the storage business are over. There's so many markets that are teetering on the point of saturation that you really have to do your homework.

And we had a chat with the bank last week and they've done storage in the past and we're thoroughly impressed with our underwriting. And they're like, oh, like we've done storage projects, but nobody has presented us with what you guys just laid out.

We're like, look, we've already done all of our homework. We did this, we did that. The building this, we know it's going to cost this much to convert it.

And so that goes a long way, even from a lending standpoint.

Yeah. So three key metrics you're probably looking at are population within a one, three, five mile radius.

What's the competition and what's their blended, what sort of rates they're getting?

Correct rates and occupancy. Yeah, we want to see even if there's one close or quote unquote close, but they're 100% well, they're really not.

They're not really in competition anymore because they're full unless things radically change. But anybody else that's going to try to rent in that area, they're full. So we're going to be the only other option.

So I don't have a problem going close to another competitor because in my mind it's really not competing. Now, if two sites are starting out both empty, then there's a risk there. Obviously, you can get into a price war of who's going to fill up first.

That's the stuff we check.

Well, nationally, they say the market stability in storage is considered to be about seven and a half square feet of storage per capita. That's what they call market equilibrium. You hear that a lot if you play in the storage circles.

But in our experience, and probably your experience as well is that it's very market dependent. You can have a market that has 10 capita, but everybody's full, right?

Yeah, I think if you follow the trends, you'll see that number. It's been climbing. More people are using storage than ever, basically on a per capita basis.

I know the seven square foot number was used for a long time, but I think the demographics have changed a lot. And the people that are renting storage and why they're renting has all changed a lot in the past five years, certainly through the pandemic.

Interesting fact is that millennials and Gen Z each make up a bigger portion of storage users than Gen X or baby boomers, which is what's pretty surprising when we learned that fact 18 months ago or so. And they're not using it where they just put stuff there and check on it two or three times a year. They're going several times a month.

They're using it really as an extension of their house, of their living space. So climate control is a great reason for that.

And typically they're renting an apartment, so there's no room for sports equipment or all of the kinds of things that people use for storage.

Eric, I got a question for you. So you obviously, it sounds to me like you've got this really dialed in.

There's a lot of science involved, a lot of management, and frankly, it sounds like a very, very active business and business model that you have. Our syndication topic that we discuss a lot of times for the sake of the listeners of the podcast is, podcast is called truly passive income.

So one thing that we focus on is like, youve got this really active business model going on, but how is there a way for other people to be part of this, and how does this work for people that are not active investors like you are?

And youre not getting out of here without a question about what you and your wife did during the years when the market really turned on you in Arizona. And one of the things that you talk about a lot is that risk is a muscle. And you brought that up in a lot of conversations.

And the way that youve taken risk over the years for yourself, some of the developments youve done on your own, some of the adventures that you took with your family when the market dictated that, and just listening to the market and what the markets given you and the way that you built and worked that risk muscle. And I would argue one of the things you bring up is a difference in risk versus calculated risk.

And eventually taking those steps, being willing to tolerate risk, building those muscles, going on the adventure that you did, ending up in Wilmington, getting back into self storage, and then talk about how you took that and moved on from a private business owner taking risks on your own to taking the knowledge that you learned and earned over time and turning that into what is called nomad capital. So briefly, I know that's a lot, but I'd love to hear that quick version of how you get to where you are now.

Sure. Yeah. Passive income is the elusive thing that everybody's chasing, right? What is passive income?

And people get into short term rentals and airbnbs or what have you, or single family rentals. What is really, what is truly passive? Right. To me, in my mind, truly passive is 100% no hands off.

And you still get income from it, literally mailbox money or today's direct deposit money. We certainly don't aren't passive. We're not receiving passive income. There's another thing I like to talk about, which is residual income.

So it's not passive. It's not quite active. Like every ounce of work that we do is not tied to our income.

But we do have set up a good stream of residual income, which is we already did the active part and there is a stream of income coming that is minimal effort. Right. Thats what I would call residual income. And then passive income is something that we wanted to.

So my son and I are partners, so we thought, well, we could keep going like we are and just do the next deal and maybe do one deal a year or one every other year. Theyre bigger deals. But we also realized the value of truly passive income. So as you mentioned, we were able to take it a extended time abroad.

I mean, it was, it involved a few phone calls a month, a few trips over the years, and just talking to my storage manager. I have a fantastic manager there. She basically ran, she did, she ran the property for us while we were gone. And that was passive income.

And so that's where we thought we want to try to be able to help others achieve that, right. So we want to, if they don't want to learn everything there is to know about the storage business. They don't like it, they don't care.

They don't want the risk. They don't want to go sign on a multimillion dollar loan and figure out how to manage it and lease it and build it and hire a code. It's a mess.

So we thought maybe there's a section of people that, a group out there that would love to get involved in storage as really a passive way. And then it allowed us to do more deals because we were finding deals that we couldn't do just for lack of capital.

I thought there's probably an overlap here where they have the capital, but they don't want to do the business. We know the business and we are willing to take the risk and do the project, so maybe we can all win.

And so thats when we started Nomad Capital, a year and a half, I guess, and its been fantastic.

Well, and you bring up, it sounds like youve been sitting in mine and clints meetings. You bring up such a great point about the difference between passive income and residual income.

And that's where we try to really draw a bright line between passive income and residual income.

Yep. Yeah. It is a big difference. Yeah. And residual income, in my mind, is still a disproportionate factor, your activity compared to your income. Right.

You're working 10 hours a week, but you're getting paid as though you had worked 40 hours a week, for example. So that's residual income. Passive income to me, in my mind, is almost, almost no effort on your part.

And you're still getting paid like you're working 40 hours. Right. So that's active is of course you're working 60 hours and paid like you're working 40.

Well, listen, let's make no joke about it. Even in passive income, someone's doing the work.

Right.

The differences with residual income, you've preloaded the work and other people from the outside looking in it. It looks easy, it looks passive. But the reality is you just did.

A lot of ahead of time and.

Laid that groundwork with you in all the deals that you've done on your own, it's a combination of time, experience and money. And the idea with a syndication is it still takes experience and it still takes time.

The idea is somebody can put their money in, and as long as you still have those three things, time, experience and money, you still have opportunity to have success with the right analysis and feasibility study and everything else. So it's still being done, the time is still being spent, the experience is still there, and there's still calculated risk.

But it is truly passive for the.

People that just put their money in and they get to pawn that, the workload off to the person that knows how to do it. And you and Levi certainly do.

Yeah, absolutely. And that's what we like about it.

And to your point about the time, that's another reason we like the conversion so much more than the ground up, because if we are going to syndicate it, we're shaving potentially a year off of that process, from closing the property to renting units. Right. And that year, as we know, at 8% interest or eight and a quarter, whatever it's at, with the latest height, that's a bitter pill to swallow.

You've got a year of interest on a few million bucks at 8%, it makes the deals harder to pencil.

So if you can shave that year off and finally conversion it and be renting in ten months, well, now all of a sudden this market is opened up and how much quicker are you going to be than the competition is going to go find a piece of land, find an architect, find a contractor, were way stealthier and way more nimble to pop into a market that we identify and be like, yeah, lets do it. Well be up and running. And that difference in the long run is huge for investors.

I think it just makes it us able to offer much better returns for them, much more attractive returns. And theyre actually in on the deal. Theyre on the LLC.

Theyre a limited partner, but they have full ownership of their shares of the LLC and were all in this together. I think thats a great blend of everybodys skills and talents and money.

Preston, you answered my next question honestly. I was going to ask what are some of the differences between, between Nomad Capital and what you see with most other syndications?

And I think you just answered a lot of that. A lot of times.

There's only so much you can add there. So I think thats really what the difference is in Nomad capital is the projects themselves, the timeline and how you push it forward.

What does it look like for the investor? When you find a deal, youve got something thats coming down the pipeline and you do all the homework on it.

From the investors standpoint, what does that process look like?

Steven? Yeah, typically we get in front of them with a offering memorandum and show them what the returns look like.

And as I mentioned, because we do heavy, we focus on heavy value add properties. That's the lane we like to stay in. We like storage and we're builders, so that's a good blend of our skills.

So that's we're able to put storage where everybody else has to buy retail. It's the way I put it. And I get those emails every day.

This property, that property's for sale and it's similar to a multifamily project where it's like, yeah, I could probably get insurance for a little ads. I could probably do something with management and save some money, probably push rents up, like you said, 15%.

So those are, as Neil mentioned in the beginning, those are the levers you can pull with an existing facility, whereas with the conversion its essentially as though youre coming into a market as a ground up. But you trim, like, I already talked about months and months off of that process. So, yeah, so were looking for a specific type of investor.

They're comfortable with a certain level of risk. But as we've already talked about, it's calculated risk.

We've done our due diligence, we've done our feasibility, we've getting them environmental on the building. So we know that's squared away. So we want those investors that are willing to partner with us and come along for the ride.

And we like longer term holds. We're not looking to do some quick turns in three years and get everybody out. And we look at it as a relationship and a partnership.

Wherever I look, we're going to try to build, we're doing our very best to build you a stream of income here that is passive, that you don't have to, you don't have to worry about, your money's working. It's doing exactly like we told you it was going to do. You're getting a great return. There will be refinance options along the way.

Every deal is a little bit different, but most of the deals we're looking at now are ten year holds, and so it's a longer track. And we like that because we've seen what happens to these assets over ten years, especially from the one in Arizona.

We've discovered that, and so that's what we want to share with investors.

Got it.

Can you speak about any unique or creative solutions that you've implemented in storage conversion projects that were facing a difficult situation, such as a property with a unique shape or limited access?

Let's see.

It looks like you're trying to think, well, we've had some situations where we had a dirty environmental on one and just had to get creative with how to mitigate that. Do we do the phase two and what did that look like?

If you get to the phase two stage, you're spending real money and you want to be pretty sure that it's going to move forward before putting that much money at risk. And it's still our money that we're risking. Right.

It's won't be on the investors until we get to the finish line, but, yeah, every project's a little bit different layouts as we use these old buildings. There's. They've been, I think, two or three of our projects right now. They've been added onto over the years. One.

One building is 80 years old, so it's had multiple additions, so that we just have to be very creative with how we lay out unit makes and always, and thankfully, we've got some great architects that help. They're used to that and used to thinking creatively. And how can we maximize the square footage within this footprint?

So does that answer your question? Yes, I got a little tangent there. Sorry.

All good.

How do the traditional view that people have of self storage is of a building that's sitting in an industrial area, it may have a little office there, and it's got a manager sitting behind the desk from nine to five, Monday through Friday, and they maybe have an apartment on. They may have apartment on site where the manager lives.

How have you seen that model change with the integration of technology such as keyless entry and online rental options, things like that?

Oh, ton. When we did the one in Arizona 15 years ago, it was. That was the only way to do it right. You had to have a manager.

That's just a number you have to put into the project that you're going to have to have someone sit there and hand sign every lease and walk the tenant to their unit, show them how to go through the gate or whatever. We've all seen the storage sites with the golf cart, and that's what you do. You drive around and show them which unit do you want and all that.

So that's changed tremendously over the past ten years, and especially since the pandemic, because so much has gone, technology has gone to online. We use a QR code on our doors, so if our manager is out or weekend, they can easily scan the QR code. Covid trained everybody how to use QR codes.

So they scan it. They rent, takes them right to our website. They can rent online.

Online rentals were not a thing when we first got in this business, and slowly it was like, somebody's going to be the first ones to do online rentals because it was still a legal thing where you had to have their wet signature on the lease. And those kind of things have all evolved into email, docusign, what have you, and it's seamless. So I think it's going to keep going that way.

There's a lot of companies out there doing third party management, contactless or whatever you want to call remote management. It's all. And we're experimenting with all those different options and seeing what works for us.

We have one site that has no manager on site, and then we're towing around with third party management and they don't use an on site manager. So there's all. It's really, however you want to design it is available today? Yeah, plenty of options.

Gotcha. So can you lost my train of thought here for a second? Let me pause for just a second. Okay.

Can you discuss any measures that you've taken to improve the energy efficiency of a converted self storage facility and how that's impacted the net operating income and then ultimately the value?

Yeah, it depends on the state or where it's located, but there might be local, state or federal tax incentives or credits to, for example, upgrade lighting from high pressure sodium, or I forgot the other one. But not energy efficient lighting. Right. So up to led lighting. And even if it's.

Even if there's not incentives, it's still worth the money to upgrade lighting.

Typically, we do all new h vac systems, which are, I don't know how nerdy you want to get, but 14 tier and up, way more efficient than the old, old h vac system. So we've been able to cut even utility costs in half or more in a lot of cases, which, you know, all adds to the bottom line.

So there's definitely efficiencies that we've been able to come up with that, that help the whole project, so.

All right, well, so I'm trying to get you to tell one particular story.

No. You want me to do the city storage south?

Yeah, yeah. Let's just get right to it, Eric. Come on, let's get a storage salt. I don't love this story.

Oh, yeah. Gosh, I have to. I hope I get the numbers right.

That's all right.

We won't hold. We were.

But because theyre the kind of lights like an old gymnasium, when you turn them on, they take. You hear this huge clunk, and then, like 30 minutes before you actually get light from them, they have to heat up the ballast and all this stuff.

So when we bought the building, the first thing we did is change all the lighting to Led. And that was a situation where we were able to get a credit from Duke Energy, the power company in North Carolina.

And they paid for, I think, 80%, 90% of the upgrade cost through a federal tax program. So we changed all the light into LEd, and then we added 40 tons of h Vac, air conditioning and heating to the building.

And now, even with adding all of that air conditioning and doing the led, our bills are $800. So the bill went to about a third, and we got brand new lighting, and now it's climate controlled.

So we were able to take the rents from, I think they were $79 for a ten by ten, non climate controlled. And I think now we're at 159 somewhere in that neighborhood.

Yeah, those are just, that was really a fantastic win on both sides, cutting expenses, raising rents, and being able to justify the raised rents.

Because even after we raised rents, we were having our tenants, we were expecting them to come in with pitchforks and torches, angry about the rent increase. And all we got was compliments like, oh, my gosh, I have to come here and organize my stuff. And now it's air conditioned and now it's heated.

Like, I don't dread coming here. Like, they used to just bake in the summer in there.

And so they're grateful for them to pay another 40, $50 and actually get productivity done there was huge for them. So they were really happy with that. And of course, that just helped the bottom line explode. So that was a great win.

So that's what we do routinely now we first check an old building, we're like, well, we know we're going to save a ton on the lighting right off the bat, and depending on which state, which qualify, which programs we can qualify for. But, yeah, we definitely like to explore every option there because we set, we're trying to set them up for long, long holds. Right.

We want new equipment, we want trouble free lighting. We want motion sensors on lighting, so they're not on all the time. And all those kind of things all help.

Well, again, I'll come back to you, Clint. Again, it comes down to, it's another one of those levers that you can pull.

And when you lower, you lowered that NoI or you increased your NoI by, what, $1,200? Now, you divide that by a cap rate, and you've not only increased the cash flow on that property, but you've also substantially increased the value.

Right? Yeah, absolutely.

Go for it, George.

Joe?

Oh, great. Yeah. So last year was our first year officially syndicating the whole year. So we were able to do five deals.

Two Kmarts, one Kmart in North Carolina, one in Virginia. The first Kmart is open. We opened about right at 60 days ago.

So we're leasing up there, bought an existing facility, which is not something we normally do, but it was an opportunity that came to us off market and we couldn't pass it up.

So we did that one working on a grocery store in Georgia as a conversion and a soda bottling facility in Charlotte, just outside of Charlotte as well. So five deals and yeah, looking to do more of the same. We've got, just got another project under contract, got a full pipeline ahead.

It seems like we keep finding deals and just having fun exploring.

So our, the state that we're focusing on right now in north and South Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee and Georgia for now, we feel like there's plenty of ore to be mined in those states. And yeah, interest rates are making it more challenging. Another reason we like conversions.

Like we've already talked about with the timeframe of what it takes from closing to leasing up. And we're just trying to keep our eye on the market and the future.

But we really feel like because we're in the heavy value add niche, that we're able to force a lot of appreciation and add a lot of value. That gives us a built in safety margin across the portfolio. So we feel good. We're ready to go.

Yeah, well, that's such a great point you bring up.

Is that forced appreciation that you're creating gives you that margin of safety that a lot of other, a lot of other asset classes have a harder time generating?

Yeah, absolutely.

All right, Eric, it is time to manifest it into existence. Where is Nomad headed over the next five years?

Fantastic question. I wish I knew. No, we, it's hard to put five years. That's a long time. I never dreamed we'd be doing this five years ago.

We just want to keep putting 1ft in front of the other, making smart choices, finding great deals. I don't know. We'd love to tackle bigger projects. I'm a dreamer, so I always have big ideas.

We'd love to look at a portfolio, a fund to give us more flexibility and not be so tied to deal by deal. But for now, that's what we're doing. We're happy to do it. And yeah, we love the self storage space.

So I can't imagine we won't be in it in some capacity, but we'll see, see where it goes.

So I have one more question before we let you go. How do you like to give back? What's your favorite, what's your favorite way to give back?

Well, what we, my wife has started a nonprofit theater company several years ago. And so that's something that actually we all do together as a family. I'm in the plays my son's in the plays all my kids are in at some point.

My wife directs, and we have anywhere from 40 to 60 other kids, teenagers, adults that are in theater productions. We love it. It's a great thing that we do.

And a lot of people are like, well, theater, that's kind of weird or whatever, but we've been able to see kids come out of their shells. It's really a public speaking class, and it builds confidence in kids.

We've seen kids that couldn't even stand in front of a group and say their name, become stars on the stage, and the pride that they feel going through that, and it's fantastic. So that's what we do. We're both involved in that. And a lot of income that we generate, we put back into that, and it's really a cool thing.

Well, eric, thank you so much for sharing with us today. If any of our audience wants to reach out to you and find out more about you, what would be the best way for them to do that?

100%? Yeah, email is great. Eric.

All right. Love it, man. Thank you.

Absolutely. Thanks, guys.

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